An interesting piece by Mark Hollingsworth appeared in Punch of 23 May-5 June 2001, ‘Spooks in the House’, on intelligence and security personnel who become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a […]
It is a difficult time for Britain’s security and intelligence agencies. Not only have the old certainties collapsed with the Berlin Wall, Britain’s economy is in increasingly dire shape, and current levels of government funding for the agencies can no longer be taken for granted. (1) As a result, both the major agencies, MI5 […]
[…] had become the new Conservative leader, Goldsmith met Wilson. Latching on to Wilson’s concerns that his office and home were being bugged, Goldsmith volunteered his own private security company to sweep both premises, apparently finding and removing a number of listening devices.(4) Wilson awarded Goldsmith a knighthood in his 1976 resignation honours list, ostensibly […]
[…] the possible threats after 9/11’. Or take Stephen Holmes, a regular contributor to The London Review of Books and research director at the Center for Law and Security at New York University School of Law, who wrote: ‘….we can safely say that the following jumble of motives, seizing different actors at different times, contributed […]
[…] They were the first company to envisage the possibility of business computers as early as the late forties. Computers at this stage were still matters of national security and much of the early research work was done by the Rand Corporation, the world’s first think tank, and originally a Cold-War front for USAF intelligence. […]
[…] that “Bishop” met Oswald. In recent years other leads on “Bishop”/Phillips have appeared: Louis Arguelles, who teaches at the Arizona State University, states in “The US National Security State: the CIA and the Cuban Emigre Terrorism ” (in Race and Class, XVIII 4 1982) that she had a personal interview (in August 1980) with […]
Welcome to Lobster, the journal that looks at the impact of the intelligence and security services on history and politics. From espionage to dirty tricks to conspiracy theories. What else is in Lobster? Check out the keywords in the box in the sidebar, right. Lobster issues 58 and onwards are free. Earlier issues of […]
[…] and/or real estate, which is one reason why the dollar is being kept artificially low. In America’s case, this went wrong because of the introduction of extra security measures which meant hours of queuing/discourtesy at US airports, a good example of a well-known PR pitfall: the inability to align the strategies and policies of […]
[…] his transformation into peacemaker? The key, one suspects, is the realisation by the end of the 1980s that the Provisional IRA had been effectively contained by the security forces and were coming under increasingly effective pressure from the loyalist paramilitaries. These two factors led to the Provisionals’ readiness to abandon the armed struggle on […]
[…] industrialists had helped Hitler into office they had become one of the props to his regime. So given that the pacification of Germany was central to international security after the war it was not implausible to argue that expropriating the capitalists, forcibly deindustrialising large swathes of the country, and creating an economy based on […]
