The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[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 […]

Her Majesty’s secret servants

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[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 […]

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. […]

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

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[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 […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] Europe was straightforward: the War on Terror you are just embarking on is one we have been fighting since our birth. Let our high-tech firms and privatized spy companies show you how it’s done.’ ‘It’s not an exaggeration to say that the War on Terror industry saved Israel’s faltering economy, much as the disaster […]

The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] for pushing this policy, handing the country over to Nuri al-Maliki. Her hostility was reciprocated with one of Hill’s staff describing her as a ‘goddam fucking British spy’. For the US military, ‘the greatest threat to the mission had become the US embassy’. Her identification with the US military was complete. They had success […]

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