Beaumont novel copy

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

lob86View from Bridge

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.73 70 or 71 I wrote about this in Lobster 74 at under subhead Manchester. 72 28 73 On the other hand, […]

Angles Morts

Lobster Issue 91 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Mirror, if he thought that Bonnett could possibly have been inserted into Belfast in the crisis of 1972 at the request or even command of MI5 or MI6. News gathering in Ireland was traditionally handled from the Manchester offices of the nationals. I put it to Leo that a reporter sometimes needs trade in […]

Chaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East by Patrick Cockburn

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] book there are two comments about Cockburn. At a British Journalism Awards ceremony in 2015 someone said that ‘the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead’. The second is a quote from one of Sydney Blumenthal’s e-mails to Hilary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, that […]

More Hess

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] regard to the Soviet Union). But by whom, and why, was this required? And why choose Loftus? Couldn’t Major Foley or Lt. Malone, both of whom were MI6 officers, have done just as much? A clue as to Pierse Loftus’s political alignment can be found in Hansard. He showed significant interest in the cases […]

Murder in Cairo

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Chase, (Little Brown, New York, 2009) 1 ‘controversial topics on which verifiable evidence was scarce’.3 A former telex operator related how he had been grilled by an MI6 officer about Holden’s last telexes. Later, McCormick told him some telexes relating to Holden were missing. ‘Christ! Is there a spy in the department?’ the operator […]

View from Bridge copo

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.59 On the other hand, Nick Must noted that the report contains 76 references to ‘MI5’ and 213 to ‘Security Service’ – […]

On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll’ served as a distraction from political struggle and party discipline. To flesh out the theory, extra villains have been thrown in: Satanists, MI6, shrinks of the Tavistock Institute, the Grateful Dead, and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (whose Marxist musicologist, Theodor Adorno, is said to have secretly tutored […]

Misleading Parliament – a case to answer

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE

See also: Misleading Parliament – Appendices

[PDF file]: […] file. 19 19 undisclosed allegations. It is also significant that Field Marshal Sir John Stanier and Sir Maurice Oldfield, former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ( MI6), contacted Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, expressing their view that I had been badly treated by the MoD.20 At my disciplinary hearing at the MoD in 1975, […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

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