Curried Knight: Maxwell Knight and the MI5 in-house history

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] make this abundantly clear. MI5’s First World War offshoot PMS2 is given only a cursory mention by Curry. There is no reference to its employment of the agent provocateur William Rickard, who in 1917 framed a family of socialists (the Wheeldons) on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Lloyd George. The Zinoviev Letter is […]

British Spooks “Who’s Who” part 2

Lobster Issue 10 (1986)

[…] STOCKHOLM 1945 CONTROLLER NORTHERN AREA 1955 1ST SEC (VISA) COPENHAGEN 1956 JEDDAH 1958 FO 1961 RETIRED CARR, JOHN DICKSON WELL KNOWN THRILLER WRITER CP WORKER – MI5 AGENT 1930-40’s CARREL, IAN MI5 (W) SECURITY LIAISON OFFICER HONG KONG HEAD OF REGISTRY MID 60’s. K7 COUNTERING SOVIET PENETRATION. RETIRED LATE 70’s CARTER, PETER ANTHONY CMG […]

Still hazy after all these years

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] leading up to the publication of the book Farewell America about the Kennedy assassination.(2) This may be marginalia but it is interesting marginalia nonetheless. Notably, former FBI agent Turner tells us: that the book may have resulted from contact between the Garrison inquiry and the KGB. Working for New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, Turner […]

Ratlines: how the Vatican’s Nazi networks betrayed Western intelligence to the Soviets

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] criminals were printed at the Franciscan printing press in Rome. Both the US Counter Intelligence Corps CIC) and Britain’s military intelligence knew what was happening. Indeed, CIC agent Robert Mudd had a spy within Dragonovic’s organisation. The CIC arranged a burglary of Dragonovic’s office and photographed his records. Mudd concluded that “all this activity […]

Intercepting Number Stations

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

Langley Pierce Interproducts, Perth, Scotland, 1994, £9.95 Strange little book, 90 pages listing and, it claims, identifying the shortwave radio stations used by the world’s intelligence services to broadcast coded messages – groups of numbers – to field agents and stations. Want to eavesdrop on Mossad’s numbers? SIS’s? The KGB’s? etc etc. Is any of … Read more

Pissing in or pissing out? The ‘big tent’ of Green Alliance

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] profits, £9bn and £9.8bn respectively. (2) This was followed by curious press reports that both Shell and BP had hired ex-MI6 staff and a former German intelligence agent to infiltrate Greenpeace (3) and that Tesco had asked MI5 to investigate the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. In an obscure spat about salmon […]

Splinter Factor

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

In the collection, Contemporary British History 1931-61, reviewed in this issue, there is an essay by Richard Aldrich of Salford University, one of the small but growing numbers of British academics trying to incorporate the activities of the intelligence and security services into post-war British history. In his essay on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) … Read more

Training other people’s police forces

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

This is the text of a paper read by Jonathan Bloch at a meeting of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London in June 1985. The purpose of this paper is to examine selected aspects of British involvement in the training of foreign police personnel both here and abroad. Not much research has been … Read more

Baghdad’s Spy: A Personal Memoir of Espionage and Intrigue from Iraq to London

Book cover
Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] an important and interesting book but rather hard to describe because it contains so much. At its heart is Souza’s father, an Iraqi Anglophile, who became SIS’s agent in Iraq, and later in London. Using her firsthand knowledge supplemented by her father’s papers, Souza has created a classic of the espionage genre: I know […]

Loose cuts and short ends

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] It is improbable that MI5 (presumably) would have chosen someone like Wright for the job, presumably, of penetrating the KAU. And if this ‘Peter Wright’ was an agent for MI5, say, why would the Kenyan authorities have expelled him? ‘Wright’, surely, on being harassed, would simply have said, ‘Call the office.’ It might be […]

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