Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[…] newspaper stories on Zinoviev appeared in August: ‘Red Letter Day’ by Patrick French, in the Sunday Times 10 August 1997, and ‘The forgery, the election and the MI6 spy’ by Michael Smith in the Daily Telegraph 13 August 1997. Both articles were based on the release of certain documents from SIS’s archives which purport […]

Miscellaneous: Cold war. Disinformation. Elite. Unclassified. G.K. Young, Unison

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] figures the poor Nancy Astor-afflicted David Astor was attracted to. (Many of the others were employed at the Observer.) Crockett tells us that Astor was rejected by MI6. Even if this is true the Observer’s staff list since the war under Astor contains a number people suspected of serving secretly in Her Majesty’s Secret […]

Web update

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] intended to ask four MI5 witnesses, screened from the public and press. The jury were therefore unable to be told about important allegations including the involvement of MI6 in a plot to assassinate General Gadaffi; that MI5 had prior knowledge of a plan to bomb the Israeli Embassy in London in 1994 (information that […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] the best extended put-downs in recent years. This exquisite hatchet-job is on fellow Lonrho board member, Nicholas Elliot. ‘Yet another dissident was Nicholas Elliot, a director of MI6, the man who botched Commander Crabb’s underwater investigation of the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze at the time of Kruschev’s visit to the UK in 1956. A former […]

Rebranding SIS

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] as internally. For this reason, the public is told: ‘…..fraud investigators from the Benefit Agency are being taught how to use surveillance techniques by former SAS and MI6 officers. The company, AMA Associates, a security agency, has coached nearly 1000 government fraud officers on a Professionalism in Security (PINS) course accredited by Portsmouth university…….’ […]

Downing Street Diary: With Harold Wilson in No. 10

Book cover
Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] Lord Wigg, the former George Wigg MP, who, for the first couple of years of the Labour government of 1964/5, had been Wilson’s advisor on MI5 and MI6. This relationship came to grief when Wilson followed Wigg’s advice in the D-Notice Affair and came off worst in a pissing contest with MI5. After which, […]

The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro

Book review
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] example, to show their methods – the deaths of the British journalist Jonathan Moyle in Chile, Ian Spiro, said to be working either for the CIA or MI6 – or both – and Abbie Hoffman. Moyle’s in there because he was interested, apparently, in some of the same people as Casolaro; and Spiro’s in […]

Ken Livingstone’s questions

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] in the Information Research Department in each year since 1971.”And got an answer. IRD is the one bit of the secret state, not officially a part of MI6, which the state can’t refuse to answer questions on. The figures are: 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 117 99 91 91 88 85 85 […]

Spinning the European Union: pro-European propaganda campaigns in the British media

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] the Information Research Department (IRD). This covert unit, established by the Labour Government in 1948, was financed from the Secret Intelligence Services budget, with close links to MI6. The government’s campaign had three stages. The first involved the dissemination of information to the press and public; the second, from the announcement of the terms […]

Shorts

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] should be said that IFF Director, Marc Gordon, denies this. David Owen’s memoir, Time To Declare (Michael Joseph, London, 1991) will be remembered for chapter 15, ‘ MI6, GCHQ and the Falklands’. For the first time a senior British politician acknowledges the existence of these agencies and talks (a little) about their work. Owen’s […]

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