The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government by David Talbot

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] government to such an extent that the arms industry and the government had become symbiotic. Eisenhower, incidentally, emerges from this 1 For my money, Stephen Dorril’s 1998 MI6: 50 Years of Special Operations was rendered nearly unreadable by the denseness of its prose and the distraction of all the little sidelines that kept opening […]

Angles Morts

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] invasion of Lebanon killed her lover. The Sunday Times and two other Fleet Street newspapers turned down the story of a transgender Mossad spy who had double-crossed MI6. See ‘Olivia Jayne Frank, 1956-2023’ in this issue at or . 1 2 Script by James Warner Bellah and Lewis Goldbeck for the 1962 John Ford […]

Case Closed: The Identification of Rudolf Hess

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] a point which then seemed trivial. ‘Paris is well worth a mass’ – Henri IV This is the complaint from Thomas concerning contacting David Irving: ‘An ex- MI6 officer friend of mine was staggered to hear that despite the historian David Irving having been sent to prison in Austria in 2006 for denying the […]

View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] it more carefully, I was struck by the omission from this account of the role played by Oleg Penkovsky, the GRU colonel who was providing SIS ( MI6) – and thus the Americans – with detailed information on Soviet nuclear weaponry. Crucially, Penkovsky told SIS how few missiles the Soviets actually had and that […]

View from Bridge 86 copy

Lobster Issue

[…] children wept bitter tears on camera and no-one mentioned UK military aid to radical Islamists fighting Gaddafi. There are no references in the official report to SIS, MI6 or the Secret Intelligence Service.102 On the other hand, Nick Must noted that the report contains 76 references to ‘MI5’ and 213 to ‘Security Service’ – […]

Suddenly in September?

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] the Middle East was reflected in the contribution of Lady Manningham-Buller, the former MI5 deputy chief. She told the Lords that when she and the head of MI6 met the Bush team in Washington shortly after 9/11, ‘the decision was about al-Qaeda, its base in Afghanistan and its close relationship with the Taliban. I […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] question and no-one on the committee asks him what he means. And no wonder he evaded it: for it was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that MI6 (SIS) had been dickering with since the 1990s and which was the subject of some of the most disgusting real politik in which the British state […]

A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] Robin Ramsay This is only the second novel I have reviewed in Lobster.1 The cover and the author blurb tells us that author Beaumont is a ‘former MI6 operative’. ‘Operative’? Why not ‘officer’? The author tells me the word was chosen by the publisher. It is set in post–2020 UK, with a recognizable Boris […]

MI5 speaks to the nation!

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: MI5 speaks to the nation! Nick Must ‘How MI5 is adapting to fight coronavirus’1 was the headline on a BBC news online piece by Gordon Corera. In relation to that potential change in working practices, it quoted soon-to-depart MI5 chief, Sir Andrew Parker, thus: ‘You’ll understand if I don’t go into exactly the ways in […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] students.5 Among the luminaries are the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin, who is a Senior Visiting Fellow.6 His profile is light on any detail, especially his relationship with MI6. Enter ‘Coughlin’ into the search engine on Lobster’s home page and you’ll get the fuller drift. Many of the ex-spooks are quite open about their past […]

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