South of the border

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must *new* From the dim and distant past Reading British spy Greville Wynne’s The Man From Moscow,1 I noticed that MI6 had set him up as a potential traitor. This was presumably done to ensure there was a fall-back position if it were deemed necessary that […]

Beaumont novel copy

Lobster Issue

A Spy Alone Charles Beaumont London: Canelo, 2023, £9.99 (p/b) 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. […]

Her Majesty’s secret servants

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the names of the agency and had Nighy as MI5. And nobody in the editorial process noticed. (To most viewers it would make no difference, of course.) Spy versus Spy W e have had a lot of tribunals recently. One that has received little attention in the UK is the Smithwick Tribunal in the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] not hesitate to obliterate us if they could. If we want to protect ourselves – and who seriously would argue that we shouldn’t? – we have to spy on them. In electronic terms that means looking for needles in haystacks and you can’t do that 16 without having access to the whole hayfield.’ GCHQ […]

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

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] by other historians, he eventually conceded, ‘I made some claims about facts which have turned out to be unwarranted’. Of his claim that Bruno was the embassy spy, code-named ‘Henry Fagot’, Bossy wrote, ‘I thought so at the time, but have turned out to be mistaken’. Bossy, however, had dragged a lot of fascinating […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Robin Ramsay Even Wikipedia….. In August much of the major media, including the BBC, ran a story about the late Cedric Belfrage, claiming he was a Soviet spy, ‘the sixth man’. Christopher Andrew was among those prominently quoted supporting this thesis. The estimable John Simkins published a devastating rebuttal of this, pointing out that […]

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