The Defence of the Realm

Lobster Issue

[…] least refer to the dissenters named in the preceding paragraph. This is a thousand pages long and will be of major interest to academic students of British intelligence and political history for years to come. Discounted from sellers like Amazon, this is a seriously good buy. But I’m not an academic and my interests […]

Tittle-Tattle

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] and lobbying firm.43 Spooks and hacks W ill the time ever come when a British editor comes clean and tells us of his paper’s association with foreign intelligence services – or even British ones, come to that? Richard Keeble has surveyed some of what is known about such British links4 4 but nothing has […]

Newsinger on Strarmer

Lobster Issue

[…] being ‘woven together with some thin threads into a left-wing conspiracy theory in which Starmer is presented as an agent of the security state or even AngloAmerican intelligence organisations’. These are, he insists, ‘insidiously effective smears’. (p. 163) On the contrary, the argument that Starmer’s so-called ‘pragmatism’ lead to him wholeheartedly embracing the interests […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

The Russian Laundromat and Blackpool Football Club

Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Men Who Stole the World, 5 he has this towards the end of the prologue: ‘Offshore connects the criminal underworld with the financial elite, the diplomatic and intelligence establishments with multinational corporations. Offshore drives conflict, shapes our perceptions, creates financial instability and delivers staggering rewards to les grands — to the people who matter. […]

JFK’s assassination: two stories about fingerprints

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] in Washington DC. The missing DIS documents comprised a standard background check performed on Wallace, who was applying for a job with a defence contractor, which two intelligence officers told The News had been present in his file in 1961 but were apparently removed later. The file also contains a letter to the FBI […]

The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government by David Talbot

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the limelight but Richard Nixon can be observed hovering in the wings throughout this section, clearly taking notes. There is a delightful vignette in which a military intelligence officer was called before McCarthy’s subcommittee and testified that he had a conversation with a CIA officer who stated (‘flatly’) that it might become necessary to […]

British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930-1960 by James Smith

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Orwell: Smothered Under Journalism, London 1998, pp 154-155. The Lovestoneites were, of course, supporters of Nikolai Bukharin and followers of Jay Lovestone, expelled from the American Communist Party in 1928. In the post-war period they were to become US Intelligence assets in the effort to combat Communist influence in the British and European labour movements.

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