Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)
[…] Bush to make a decision.’ Afghanistan In Afghanistan too, there are mutterings – and not only about resources and the Americans. The populist story about the UK Embassy in Afghanistan being given a swimming pool for staff to relax in while the soldiery faces water shortages in Helmand Province may be exaggerated, but it […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)
[…] tells us that by 1953 the various US information services – what we would now call psy-ops – had 93 (!) people working out of the London Embassy. Doing what? There are new accounts here of some of the major landmarks of British post-war decolonisation, Malaya and Cyprus; but, oddly, nothing on Kenya. The […]
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)
[…] the men arrested in Gambia and subsequently released said that when he was questioned by his American interrogator and demanded to contact a lawyer and the British Embassy he received an illuminating response: ‘Who do you think asked us to arrest you? Where do you think this information came from, the questions we are […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)
[…] Hakluyt’s career hinged on patronage motivated by interest in his geographical research. His biographers, Parks and Taylor, are both convinced that when Hakluyt served in the Paris embassy as Sir Edward Stafford’s secretary he was really there as the client and agent of Walsingham to gather geographical information; that is he was an Elizabethan […]
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)
[…] of Reuben Falber appeared in the The Independent 31 May 2006. Falber had been the contact between the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Soviet Embassy in London. Falber collected and disbursed the Soviet government’s secret subsidies to the CPGB from 1958 onwards. The obituary included the misleading statement that ‘The fact […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)
[…] ‘ethnics’ is non-white ones. That is because SIS have always employed the others. For example, SIS diplomat Alexis Forter, who, prior to becoming Counsellor at the British Embassy in Paris was my father’s case officer, was all ‘white ethnic’ – although he preferred the expression ‘White Russian’. He repeated it so often that eventually […]