Taylor Operation Chiffon

Lobster Issue

Operation Chiffon: The Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and the Road to Peace in Ireland Peter Taylor London: Bloomsbury, 2023 Hardback, £17 Nick Must This, the most recent in a long line of Peter Taylor’s works on the conflict in Northern Ireland, has been described in other reviews as ‘compelling’,1 ‘a gripping exploration’2 […]

Some agent protection issues and more comment on SIS PR

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: […] not always seem to understand, let alone know how to communicate, its own DNA. This was exemplified when, speaking to the Daily Telegraph about the history of MI6 he had commissioned while still SIS Chief, Sir John Scarlett explained: ‘In the language of those times, it was a profession that was respectable for gentlemen……Clearly, […]

Taylor Operation Chiffon

Lobster Issue

Operation Chiffon: The Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and the Road to Peace in Ireland Peter Taylor London: Bloomsbury, 2023 Hardback, £17 Nick Must This, the most recent in a long line of Peter Taylor’s works on the conflict in Northern Ireland, has been described in other reviews as ‘compelling’,1 ‘a gripping exploration’2 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 91 (2025) FREE

[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 […]

Sir John Sawer’s speech and some aspects of SIS PR

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] T op down language is always a give-away and can be a pleasing indication of progress. So, for example, in Professor 123 Winter 2010 Jeffery’s reference work, MI6, the history of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909 – 1949, there is an example of the huge lobbying pressure that the educator – a crucial spook […]

Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments by Ulf Schmidt

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] work back in the US. Schmidt then goes on to discuss LSD experiments with service personnel at Porton Down in the 1950s done at the behest of MI6 who were much vexed by questions of mind control, truth drugs and brain washing, and that’s it. End of the discussion of ‘truth drugs’, LSD, mind […]

Spookaroonie!

Lobster Issue

Contents Lobster 58 Spookaroonie! Inside British Intelligence 100 years of MI5 and MI6 Gordon Thomas London: JR books, 2009, £20 Page 132 Winter 2009/10 Lobster 58 Spooks The Unofficial History of MI5 Thomas Hennessy and Claire Thomas Stroud (Glos.): Amberley, 2009, £30 I haven’t properly read either of these books and cannot really review […]

View from Lob 73

Lobster Issue

[…] context of the alleged Russian hacking of the presidential election, the American website Politico ran a story about the large operation run in the United States by MI6 during WW2. Under the light cover of British Security Coordination, with the permission of the then President Roosevelt, they attacked the isolationist opposition to American’s entry […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] 10 Attlee, too, went full term in 1950, and almost lost. In 1963 the US (specifically the CIA) lost patience with the British old boy network running MI6, following the imprisonment of John Vassall, Philby’s defection and the news that John Profumo MP had, possibly, shared a girl friend with the Soviet naval attaché […]

Using the UK FOIA, part III

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] one of whom was a representative on the Committee and two of whom were members of the Committee’s Jeffery’s book contains a total of 196 names of MI6 officers, 10 MI6 staff (administration), 57 agents of MI6 and 30 officers of foreign intelligence organisations. 2 secretariat, the FCO sought to rely on section 23(1) […]

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