The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] concerned. Page 104 Winter 2009/10 Lobster 58 of his trips to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War Wilson did talk to someone who was a Soviet intelligence officer with some kind of cover – as a trade official, say. Perhaps Wilson had a few vodkas and talked about British politics. Our Soviet intelligence […]

Secret Justice: Public Interest Immunity Certificates (PIICs) and their use in the Asil Nadir trials

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] PIIs were issued to prevent an officer of Special Branch, DS Wilkinson, from verifying that Paul Grecian had been acting with official backing in order to gather intelligence on Iraq. The Public Interest Immunity certificates were signed by Kenneth Baker and Peter Lilley, relying on an assessment by the prosecuting council that the documents […]

Team mercenary GB: Part 1 – the early years

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] operation into motion. Each time, however, it seemed as if the usual unofficial sanction was not entirely forthcoming. From impounded arms shipments to stern warnings from the Intelligence community, the plot seemed doomed. Indeed, 2 See Christopher Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers and International Security: The Rise of Private Military Companies, (London: Routledge, 2006) pp. 46-49. […]

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The diaries 1938-1943 Edited by Simon Heffer

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] of Hamilton, Lord Steward of the Household: ‘ . . . it was not until nearly the end of February that Hamilton received a letter from Air Intelligence inviting him to a meeting in London; not until mid-March that the meeting took place and the Duke was asked if he would like to go […]

America’s Nazi Secret by John Loftus

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] that hundreds of Belorussian (or Byelorussian) collaborators with the occupying Nazi forces during WW2, many of whom were guilty of war crimes, were recruited by the US intelligence services of the period and/or were allowed into the United States following the end of WW2. This is the secret. This edition has a new introduction […]

The Colonel and I: My Life With Gaddafi by Daad Sharab

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] a constant jockeying for power and favour, like a medieval court. At the centre of all this, as I increasingly found to my cost, was Abdullah Senussi’s intelligence service.’ (p. 50) She was also an interpreter of the world outside Libya – and outside the Middle East – to Gaddafi. Like most of those […]

Did the Mossad steal John le Carré’s cunning plan?

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] le Carré’s cunning plan? Andrew Rosthorn In the July 1982 foreword to his 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl,1 John le Carré 2 thanked the Israeli ‘ intelligence fraternity’ for their ‘advice and co-operation’. The author (whose 25th spy thriller, Agent Running in the Field,3 was published by Penguin in October) offered ‘sincere thanks’ […]

Gone but not forgotten… (Donald Trump book reviews)

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] NATO. Moreover, Trump was on numerous occasions openly sympathetic to Russia and admiring of Putin, even to the extent of ‘siding with Russia’s dictator over his own intelligence agencies’. (p. 58) Hitherto this would have been completely unthinkable, completely unacceptable to Republicans who would, without any doubt, have denounced such a president as a […]

Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy From Truman to Trump by Jonathan Marshall

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] As a result, 120 of So that is one ‘invisible government’. Six years later David Wise and Thomas Ross published their ground-breaking book about the world of intelligence and also called it The Invisible Government. The text is online at or . 1 I write ‘allegedly’ here because not everyone thinks there was a […]

Six Moments of Crisis: inside British foreign policy by Gill Bennett

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013)

[PDF file]: […] levels, and though a ceiling was imposed on the size of the embassy in 1968 the Russians had side-stepped it by filling the Soviet Trade Delegation with intelligence officers and by making use of “working wives”.’ By 1971, MI5 estimated that of the near-1,000 Soviet officials (and wives) in the UK, a quarter were […]

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