Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] Telegraph Coughlin falsely attributed a story about the son of Colonel Gadaffi to a ‘British banking official’ when it had been given to him by officers of MI6. In the course of losing the subsequent libel battle, it transpired MI6 had been supplying Coughlin with material for years. So who in September raised this […]

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 […]

Fifth Column: Plots, smoke and mirrors – managing our Muslim brothers

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] as the ‘enemy within’. We can reverse engineer the briefings to see MI5 and France as sharing a common ideology with US homeland security. (The exclusion of MI6 may be an oversight or meaningful.) This is the agenda of the international ‘war on terror’ lobby in a nutshell but it may have overplayed its […]

The influence of intelligence services on the British left

Lobster Issue

[…] Chair of British Youth Council. The British Youth Council began as the British section of the World Assembly of Youth, which was set up and financed by MI6 and then taken over by the CIA in the 1950s, created to combat the Soviet Union’s youth fronts. By Mandelson’s time in the mid1970s under a […]

Trust no one: the secret world of Sidney Reilly

Book cover
Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] in revolutionary politics. 3 Conspicuous by his absence from the author’s list is Arthur Ransome, recently revelealed to have been been working in the Soviet Union for MI6. 4 See Wilde’s Last Stand by Philip Hoare (1997), reviewed in Lobster 38. 5 Yes, seeds. This seems odd but this is what the author says. […]

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 […]

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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