Who Owns Agca? Plots to Kill the Pope

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] with the cooperation/protection of the Bulgarian state. It is an unexceptional picture. Intelligence services all over the world are plugged into the drugs/guns business. Even our own MI6 tried it, as the Howard Marks story revealed some time ago. (3) That the Bulgarians should be so engaged should surprise only the innocent, and shock […]

Stalin’s granny, Christopher Andrew and the Cold War

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] we can all study it — they gave it to a tame historian, hoping to bask in lots of favourable publicity while helping Mitrokhin to supplement his MI6 pension. The spooks’ chosen ghost-writer, Christopher Andrew, is a disingenuous creep who has sold out his academic integrity to slavishly toe the secret state’s party line […]

The view from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

[…] the other hand, maybe he didn’t trust Mr Blair and went to the meetings wired. In Lobster 9, in 1985, Ashdown was named as having been in MI6 by Steve Dorril, in the first batch of what eventually became the Who’s Who of the British Secret State. Though I cannot remember why Dorril thought […]

Wallace on Pincher on Wallace

Lobster Issue 21 (1991)

[…] but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic wars between MI5 and MI6, Maurice Oldfield, Chief of MI6, used Pincher to denigrate MI5, notably via a couple of stories supporting Harold Wilson’s claims that he was the victim of […]

Miscellaneous: Gemstone. Workers’ Revolutionary Party, MI5 and Libya

Lobster Issue 20 (1990)

[…] to disguise operations. Brierley retains his connections through his Charter Corp’s holding in Teltherm. Keston College In Lobster 19 we referred to Keston College as a probable MI6 operation. One of our readers had the wit to send our reference to Keston to the BBC, asking for comments. The editor of the Radio 4 […]

Policing Politics: Security Intelligence and the Liberal Democratic State

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] of bureaucratic and organisational models of the modern state, concluding that inter-agency rivalry is to be expected — or you can have an overview of the MI5/ MI6 turf wars. You can’t, yet, have both. Which is not to say this book is ‘Parapolitics for Beginners (with sociology degrees)’. Some of Gill’s academic digressions […]

Cold War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation 1946-1989

Book cover
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] then the reputations of such featured icons as the ‘golf balls’ at Fylingdales and Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, the Greenham Common airfield in Berkshire, and the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross in central London. Many English landscapes – particularly but not exclusively at airfields east of the Pennines, closest to our expected foes […]

Confessions of a Crawler

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] (Mason had threatened Ashdown with a knife in Yeovil in November 1995 and apparently alleged the quarrel was over a massage parlour). Ashdown, a former SBS and MI6 officer, described the episode as ‘absolutely horrifying’: The Ashdown Diaries, Vol. 1, (London 2000): pp. 279, 380, 392. 4 Peter Goodwin, Television Under the Tories, (London […]

Spooks – U.K.

Lobster Issue 1 (1983)

[…] Face M.P.’s Questions. (Peter Hennessy T. April 21 1983) The new Select Committees attempted to monitor the intelligence services and question the criteria for classification of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ documents. John Biffen, Leader of the House of Commons, said: “It is by no means clear that the intelligence services should come within the […]

Directory of British Political Organisations, 1994

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] like the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee or Labour’s Tribune Group are also described and there is even an entry for MI5 (but not for Special Branch or MI6). Another useful feature of the volume is its listings of overseas groups or parties who have either a formal or informal input into British politics. The […]

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