Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££
[…] Sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for illegal surveillance of private citizens, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) settled out of court. LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division were accused of ‘organising a massive spying operation providing right-wing organisations with a sophisticated computer and handing on extensive files on suspects.’ Here is the […]
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 Cees Wiebes Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, Studies in Intelligence History, 2003 ISBN 3-8258-6347-6 p/b, 34.9 euros, $39.95 from Amazon. The publisher declined to send me a review copy but I read one chapter sent by e-mail from the author. This isn’t my field but it seems […]
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££
[…] of Reinhard Gehlen, long-since dead founder of the BND, the German Security Service. Reinhard Gehlen, to over-simplify a very complex tale, bought his way into the Western intelligence fraternity by handing over extensive files on anti-Soviet intelligence networks behind enemy lines in 1945/6. () What brought Gehlen to mind was a mischievous little article […]
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££
[…] to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/ intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess affair. Some of the material will be familiar […]
Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££
[…] in some ‘lesser publication’ later in the day.(1) And it wasn’t MI6. This assumes that, as former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove would have us believe, Secret Intelligence Service service personnel follow the rules. A less trusting Michael Mansfield QC, for Mr Al Fayed, suggested ‘there are things countenanced within the service that do […]
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££
[…] should be subject to some sort of investigation, if not a truth and reconciliation commission. The larger issues, involving the systematic bending of the tasks of the intelligence community to create enough of an excuse for war, but also concerning both the morality and legality of such aggressive war, lie dormant behind the sexier […]
Lobster Issue 12 (1986) £££
[…] that both killings have escaped adjudication because of their proximity to current intelligence-Mafia collaborations. We know now that by January 1943, when Tresca was killed, two U.S. intelligence services, OSS and ONI (Naval Intelligence) were in direct negotiation with Meyer Lansky for the provision of Mafia collaboration with the Allied invasion of Sicily. In […]
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££
[…] Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up there with Stephen Dorril’s MI6 book, Paul Lashmar and James Oliver’s book on IRD and Richard Aldrich’s The Hidden Hand. Rereading it, I was […]
Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££
[…] timing of this is not fortuitous: ….the Conservative Victories in 1979 and 1983, the defeat of the miners in 1985 (in which the security services played an intelligence gathering role)….. the collapse of cherished beliefs….. led inescapably to the conclusion that there was a right-wing conspiracy which had hoodwinked the entire nation….’ There has […]
Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££
[…] He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of so much of the work of the intelligence services everywhere.’ The result is an entertaining but very sharp analysis of that peculiar mixture of ruthless patriotism and utter incompetence which characterises so much of […]
