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 […]

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 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 […]

Apocryphilia

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] weak.’1 8 Given the diminishment in the UK’s fortunes caused by what happened after 1939 this seems a not unreasonable conclusion. After the war Klop switched to MI6, dealing frequently with Kim Philby. He worked through to his retirement in 1957 but the account of his life seems to indicate that he did little […]

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 […]

Thatcher’s Secret War Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90

Lobster Issue

[…] Wallace and Fred Holroyd are discussed. ‘Holroyd after he MI5 and Ireland’. was apparently confined to a mental hospital made public the turf war that raged between MI6 over who ran operations in Northern (p. 23) ‘Apparently’? Fred was briefly sent to the Army mental hospital at Netley while he was still serving and […]

In the Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] as Foreign Secretary Johnson switching Carrie Symonds, now his wife, from Conservative Party HQ employment to become his FCO special adviser. His social arrangements – seeing ex- MI6 chief Sir John Scarlett dining with former US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff – point to a world most of us rarely glimpse but whose actions […]

The Mossad Spy It’s not what you’ve done it’s who you are… the transgender spy

Lobster Issue

[…] met the second love of her live, Jim. The third section of this extraordinary tale begins in 1993 when she was recruited into an illegal joint MI5/ MI6 operation against Asil Nadir. A TurkishCypriot businessman, Nadir had built up a large business empire, Polly Peck International, in the UK before being charged with fraud. […]

The Defence of the Realm

Lobster Issue

[…] he was paranoid. Yes, Wilson attributed too much to MI5 when some of the briefings and smear stories were coming from other sources – for example former MI6 deputy chief G. K. Young (though from whom did Young get his information?). Some of those who came along a decade after Wilson had tried to […]

Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany by Will Wainewright

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019)

[PDF file]: When Freedom Shrieked and the Daily Mail cheered Reporting on Hitler: Rothay Reynolds and the British Press in Nazi Germany Will Wainewright London: Biteback Publishing, 2017, £20.00, h/b John Newsinger In 1939, the leftwing publisher Victor Gollancz issued a powerful indictment of the Nazis, When Freedom Shrieked. It quickly sold out, going into a second […]

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