Using the UK FOIA

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] or relating to, bodies dealing with security matters’) but, instead, Provision 27 (which covers ‘International Relations’). The argument from the FCO – and, by direct association, from MI6 – is that the release of the additional names would harm current or future relations with other nations and that: ‘The FCO has argued that the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] is free All issues of Lobster are now available without charge on this site. *new* SIS obit On 24 November The Times published an obituary of the MI6 officer Paul Ritchie.1 It had the clunky subhead ‘Senior agent at the forefront of transforming an agency focused on espionage into a global organisation capable of […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] agencies and the impact upon people’s privacy as the agencies seek to find the needles in the haystacks that might be crucial to safeguarding national security.’15 Former MI6 officer, Alan Petty, who writes as Alan Judd: ‘Realistically, however, we’ve no alternative but to go on as before. We have enemies, as Andrew Parker reminds […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] the covert forum, the Cercle Pinay and its complex of groups. Amongst Cercle intelligence contacts are former operatives from the American CIA, DIA and INR, Britain’s MI5, MI6 and IRD, France’s SDECE, Germany’s BND, BfV and MAD, Holland’s BVD, Belgium’s Sûreté de l’Etat, SDRA and PIO, apartheid South Africa’s BOSS, and the Swiss and […]

Armed and Dangerous: the corporate origins of war with Iran

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] Co-operation Council (linking Iraq to Jordan, Egypt and Yemen) despite the fact that this was very obviously an arms procurement conduit for weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, MI6 colluded in the provision of components for the Iraqi ‘Babylon’ Supergun, disavowing its murdered agent Jonathon Moyle in Chile, and allowed British businessmen at Matrix-Churchill, who […]

A key for a Clockwork Orange

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] our collection which support the claim that Burgess worked for MI5.’ Note that careful ‘not yet’. And note also the reference is only to MI5 and not MI6. But by the same token, there is absolutely nothing inherently improbable about a British novelist having a second job in intelligence: think of Graham Greene, Frederick […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] someone abolish proper nouns while I wasn’t watching? 35 reportedly at the centre of the piece. The story was a complete invention. In the great MI5 vs MI6 battle of the period, the Sunday Times, then edited by Andrew Neil, was on MI5’s side. The lobby In this column below I noted that there […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] at the time, it is even more important that the insistent objections of DIS analysts were circumvented through a deception apparently perpetrated on their own colleagues by MI6 and senior Cabinet Office intelligence officials. They claimed to have new intelligence that overcame our reservations, but were not prepared to disclose it to us. Almost […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] at the time, it is even more important that the insistent objections of DIS analysts were circumvented through a deception apparently perpetrated on their own colleagues by MI6 and senior Cabinet Office intelligence officials. They claimed to have new intelligence that overcame our reservations, but were not prepared to disclose it to us. Almost […]

The Killing of Thomas Niedermayer by David Blake Knox

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), former SAS Warrant Officer Ken Connor, who was involved in the creation of what later became known as ‘14 Int’, noted: ‘MI5 and MI6 had only one thing in common: a shared contempt for the RUC Special Branch, which they regarded as staffed by incompetents.’ He also reported that MI5 […]

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