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 […]

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 […]

Wilson, MI5 and the rise of Thatcher

Lobster Issue 11 (April 1986) £££

[PDF file]: […] Army began expanding its psychological operations training facilities – for the first time including civil servants on its courses. (8) In London the former no. 2 at MI6 and Monday Club activist, George Kennedy Young, began setting up the Unison Committee for Action with Ross McWhirter. In short, by the end of 1973 an […]

David Shayler, ‘Tunworth’ and the LIFG

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Terrorism,1 T. J. Coles mentions that ex-MI5 officer David Shayler has recently claimed that Ramadan Abedi (the father of Manchester Arena suicide bomber, Salman Abedi) was the MI6 asset who had previous been identified solely with the cypher ‘Tunworth’. Shayler first mentioned Tunworth in the late 1990s, when he and Annie Machon (his then […]

LSD-IRA? David Solomon, James Joseph McCann and Operation Julie

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] if he persisted in the claim. That was last time Radcliffe heard from McCann and it was also the end of his collaboration with Marks.19 6 – MI6 The writers for Friends/Frendz magazine, as well as James McCann and Howard Marks, were all on the radar of the security services. A retired police Special […]

Her Majesty’s secret servants

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: […] been better illustrated than by this country’s foreign policy towards Libya in the past 20 years or so. Former MI5 officer David Shayler reported that in 1996 MI6 had paid £100,000 to a Libyan Islamist group for the assassination of Colonel Gadaffi; and, although denied by the British formal foreign policy apparatus, a great […]

MANUFACTURING TERRORISM: When Governments Use Fear to Justify Foreign Wars and Control Society by T. J. Coles

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] there was ‘an “open door” policy for jihadis’. Coles states that Ramadan Abedi – the father of Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi – was ‘a paid MI6 operative’ (p. 62) but offers no citation for the claim. Mark Curtis, working the same material, writes: ‘Ramadan Abedi is believed to have been a prominent […]

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