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 […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] dots . . . I received an email from Kit Klarenberg, who is mentioned below in the column. Klarenberg is a prolific writer on British and US intelligence operations and politics. He took exception to my describing the British government’s Institute for Statecraft (and the Integrity Initiative which it created) as an attempt ‘to […]

Unredacted: Russia, Trump and the Fight for Democracy by Christopher Steele

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] one of the factors that pushed ‘me away from government service’ (p. 91). After more than twenty years in MI6, Steele retired and set up a private intelligence agency, Orbis. What Steele wants us to believe is that somehow Orbis was a force for good. In fact, the outfit seems to have started out […]

Who really killed Chris Hani? by Chris Nicholson

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] Research (SAIMR), but it is so incompetently done I abandoned it after reading/skimming a third of its 450 pages. It begins badly when the LaRouche magazine Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) is quoted at length on pages 6 and 7. EIR claims that SAIMR was a front for MI6 but offers no evidence for that; […]

Chris Hani book

Lobster Issue

[…] Research (SAIMR), but it is so incompetently done I abandoned it after reading/skimming a third of its 450 pages. It begins badly when the LaRouche magazine Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) is quoted at length on pages 6 and 7. EIR claims that SAIMR was a front for MI6 but offers no evidence for that; […]

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 […]

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 […]

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’ […]

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 […]

TO CATCH A SPY: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold by Tim Tate

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] of Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery. It gets pretty complicated here because another senior retired MI5 officer, Arthur Martin, and James Angleton, former head of CIA counter- intelligence, were also talking to people — notably Jonathan Aitken MP — about Soviet moles in MI5. At this point the British state, in the shape of […]

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