A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE

[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 […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[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 […]

Classified: Secrecy and the state in modern Britain by Christopher Moran

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] subsequent modifications. Before WW2, in practice the state was willing to clobber little people – e.g. the novelist Compton MacKenzie who revealed a handful of secrets about MI6 in a book in the 1930s – but unwilling to do anything when prime minister Lloyd George took van loads of official (and thus secret) papers […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] controversy in October1 9 showed Campbell among many New Labour pals. Those linked to bid backer Morgan Stanley included current Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, ex-head of MI6 John Scarlett and ex-Blair chief of staff Jonathan Powell. Portland figures in addition to Campbell and Allan were Powell’s brother Chris; Martin Sheehan, a Gordon Brown […]

And in 5th Place? The long march to Freeport UK

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] – getting as far as meeting Sir John Smith MP, Chair of the Trust. (In Douglas’s account of this meeting, Smith was ‘accompanied by two operatives from MI6’). It all ended in disarray, with it being made very clear that the Douglas/Webber offer was not being entertained. Subsequent to the meeting in the presence […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] lobby encouraged war with Japan with increasingly impossible diplomatic demands on Japan and then by suppressing intelligence about the pending attack on Pearl Harbour.5 It then allowed MI6 to assemble a 1000 strong 3 www.ianfraser.org/dear-david-cameron-entrusting-economic-policyto-ex-investment-bankers-is-no-solution/ 4 The text is at 5 I haven’t read the vast literature on this but was reminded of this […]

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

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[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 […]

Case Closed: The Identification of Rudolf Hess

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[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 […]

Romeo Spy by John Alexander Symonds

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Mitrokhin’s files, or had it been added by Dr Andrew?’ (p. 313) Symonds does not tell the reader that Andrew’s sources could only have been MI5 or MI6: perhaps he thinks it too obvious to state. ‘Another bizarre assertion was that I had “made the dramatic claim that Denis Healey, the Secretary of State […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[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 […]

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