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 […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[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)

[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) […]

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 […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018)

[PDF file]: […] it uses techniques that are so close to those of state espionage, it should come as no surprise that Palantir Technologies has Sir Mark Allen (the ex- MI6 officer who is a suspect in rendition cases) as ‘a senior adviser’.34 Sir Mark is an honorary fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, specialising in Arabic […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] was conducted by the father of Labour Shadow 1 2 3 Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander and attended by, among others, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, the former senior MI6 figure who advised John Smith. Smith’s widow was for a time on the board of Hakluyt, run by several ex-MI6 people (Lobsters passim).4 When I read […]

Secrecy in Britain

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] security services accountable as totally lacking in substance, Ministers and the Government have total unaccountable power in this area. This has meant that the security services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have effectively been exempt from the provisions of the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts which were brought in the 1980s and 2005 […]

Kelly Bond 007 essay

Lobster Issue

[…] But being sympathetic with communists fighting fascism was not the same as being a spy. During the war Ian Fleming knew Philby when he served as the MI6 man in the Iberian peninsula (that included Spain and Portugal), and Fleming was the Assistant to the Chief of British Naval Intelligence Admiral Godfrey. Fleming had […]

My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] readers. Only after Chilcot in 2010 did he at last realise ‘how we were all misled on the existence of WMDs’. It was all the fault of MI6 who ‘reported chapter and verse the evidence against Saddam and impressed upon me that it was well-founded’. He was actually told the precise location of the […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] government’s Institute for Statecraft (and the Integrity Initiative which it created) as an attempt ‘to try and combat Russian disinformation’. ‘Nonsense’, wrote Klarenberg. ‘IFS/II was a NATO/ MI6 front organisation concerned with starting war with Russia.’ Well no, actually, it wasn’t. Begun in 2015, apparently as a response to the Russian annexing of the […]

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