The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott instead. The second significant snippet was the news that Jonathan Aitken had been hand-carrying messages from James Angleton, CIA’s head of counter- intelligence, to Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the opposition. What these said we don’t know but I think we may presume, as the programme did, that they […]

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Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and, The Haunted Wood

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] thought their codes unbreakable and chatted way in great detail about their agents. But by 1950 enough of the Soviet material had been decoded for the US intelligence community to begin piecing together the Soviet networks in the US. These intercepts – code named Venona – many of which remain unbroken to this day, […]

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Sources: Journals

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] and ‘weeded’ — being doled out to the handfuls of people who are interested in this country’s history. Top Secret: An Interim Guide to Recent Releases of Intelligence Records at the Public Record Office, by Louise Atherton, is rather a large drib — practically a torrent by UK standards. This has 17 sections, 31 […]

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Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

[…] on Transport; LFI veteran Mike Gapes stays on as chair of Foreign Affairs, and who is that old radical lefty who is now chairing the Security and Intelligence Committee? Step forward one-time Hornsey College of Art rebel and comrade of the striking miners, Dr Kim Howells. Described by The Jewish Chronicle as ‘a staunch […]

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The New Spies: Exploring the Frontiers of Espionage

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] sources. In fact this is more interesting than I expected. In this instance Adams has persuaded some of the big cheeses from the CIA and the Russian intelligence service to talk to him, as well as SIS and MI5, and the result is a kind of survey of the new world disorder. I’m not […]

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Clippings Digest to May 31st. 1984

Lobster Issue 5 (1984) £££

[…] similar but not identical. Jurors for Bettaney trial vetted by MI5 Sunday Times 4th March “All post to and from the Eastern Bloc monitored by the UK intelligence services. Incoming mail from the USSR is … opened, sanitised (?) and the recipient’s name and address taken and passed on to MI5”. Computer Talk 5th […]

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Hess – the Fuhrer’s Disciple

Lobster Issue 25 (1993) £££

[…] and banal letters back to his family in Gemany. (3) Yet the KGB and State Department reports, based respectively on the testimony of Kim Philby, the Czech intelligence chief Colonel Moravetz, and Churchill’s personal link to the security and intelligence services, Sir Desmond Morton, all point to one fact: Hess came with Hitler’s backing […]

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Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] without blushing and putting it in scare quotes. (Shayler’s complaints about MI5 can be seen in his submission to the Cabinet Office Review of the security and intelligence services, printed here as appendix 2: they are almost entirely bureaucratic and technical.) In a recent column of his in Punch – issue 93 in the […]

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Secrecy and Power in the British State: A History of the Official Secrets Act

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] pp. 8-9: ‘The interplay between policy-making, political power and its expression in the different institutional frameworks of the British state — the Cabinet, Whitehall, the security and intelligence services and so on — gives rise to national security policies that exhibit identifiable characteristics based on social class and political beliefs …..British policy-makers have entrenched […]

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MI5 and the threat from the left in the 1970s

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

[…] ‘MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain’ Jimmy Burns reported in The Financial Times 29 December 2006 on a contingency paper by MI5, presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee on April 9 1976. That paper included this: `Throughout the seventies there has been a growth in the general public uneasiness about the current aims […]

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