Ismael Hossein-Zadeh New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 $75.00 (US), £37.99 (UK), h/b This is an interesting and timely book and it is a great pity it is so expensive. Put out as a paperback and maybe with a less academic-sounding title, this would sell. Little of it is intellectually taxing and any … Read more
[…] One journalist working on the story has heard variations of the “Wallace as Walter Mitty” theme from 5 different sources, only one of them definitely a British spook. How far this campaign has penetrated the Palace of Westminster I just don’t know. The major sub-theme in these whispers is about the Ulster Citizens’ Army. […]
A Wapping mystery I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain … Read more
By Robin Ramsay See also: Lobster (magazine) at Wikipedia. Updated June 2022 The first issue of Lobster appeared in 1983. It was written by Stephen Dorril and myself. We met through the late Harry Irwin, who lived in Northern Ireland and was what Americans call a book scout: he bought and sold rare books. But … Read more
[…] Norton, London and New York, 1986) . This current CAIB also includes more from the splendid Herman and Brodhead on disinformation surrounding the “Bulgarian connection” and the best biographical essay I know of a super- spook, Frank Carlucci. CAIB – $5 (US) with $2.50 (US) for foreign airmail, from PO Box 50272, Washington DC 20004.
‘They’re blanks!’ Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin? Barry Chamish Brookline Books, PO Box 1046, Cambridge, MA 02238, USA, $15.95 This is an interesting and important book. To its content I will return. But who is the author? Chamish is one of those names you cannot avoid if you potter around in the American conspiracy sections […]
[…] be called ‘right-wingers’, with Wall, Knight, Biggs-Davison, Churchill, Soref and Amery (and possibly others) being members of the Monday Club. (And Onslow, of course, was/still is a spook, having worked for MI6/IRD.) Other fragments of interest in these notes include: the story about Marcia Falkender refusing to be positively vetted; the story of the […]
[…] is the first detailed account of SIS recruitment, training and operations in the modern world. (Tomlinson conveys rather well what terrific fun it can be being a spook.). And it is indeed a big, big breach of the Official Secrets Act.(1) Notes But not the biggest, currently. That title must go to the on-going […]
[…] Service. My gut feeling is that there exists almost a taboo against pressing home the need for continued Special Branch scrutiny or accountability. BOSS and our own spook services dropped a real clanger that truly rebounded at least on the Criminal Injustice System when Peter Hain was fingered for a bank snatch at his […]
Letters From JIM HOUGAN, Washington, USA. (NB this letter was written between the reviews of Hougan’s book Secret Agenda which appeared in Lobsters 8 and 9) After reading No 8 I thought I’d share the following with you in re: Secret Agenda and, on another topic, Frank Terpil. Throat Secret Agenda is deliberately ambiguous on … Read more
