The Searchlight saga continued

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] either to be put into the hands of a special police unit attached to the Police National Intelligence Bureau, or to be turned over to MI5 and MI6…. this proposal might astonish some of our readers. But it is clear that Special Branch’s head office in London had failed to comprehend the dangerous nature […]

Islamic Imperialism: a history

Book cover
Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

Efraim Karsh Yale University Press, 2006; 276 pp.   For anyone who believes that ‘imperialism’ is an exclusively Western phenomenon, that Islam has only been the victim of it, and that 9/11 was simply a reaction to that (‘blowback’), this book will come as a bit of a shock. Karsh argues that aggressive imperialism was […]

Training other people’s police forces

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

This is the text of a paper read by Jonathan Bloch at a meeting of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade in London in June 1985. The purpose of this paper is to examine selected aspects of British involvement in the training of foreign police personnel both here and abroad. Not much research has been […]

Demos

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] Bruce Jackson of the Project for the New American Century, Antonio Borges (Atlantic Council), Nick Butler (BP), Lord Dahrendorf (St. Antony’s College and Ditchley with ties to MI6 and CCF), Lord Hannay (Ambassador to UN and EU), Lord Haskins (Northern Foods, Demos), Catherine Kelleher (US Naval War College), John Monks (TUC), Dame Pauline Neville-Jones […]

The Faber book of Espionage

Book cover
Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] Faber, London, 1993 The title isn’t to be taken seriously. This is 610 pages of short extracts from some of the books written by British MI5 and MI6 personnel, with short biographical sections by ‘West’. Some of this is quite interesting — lots of it was new to me — but as ‘West’ approaches […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

The British American Project and the war on Iraq The war on Iraq proved a busy time for members of the British American Project (Lobster 33 et seq) on this side of the pond. To cover the American countdown to war, long-time UK advisory board member Jim Naughtie returned to the New York home of […]

The Great Betrayal

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] is just a poor effort on Bethel’s part. One can’t deny that it is useful – after all, it is the first book written solely about an MI6 operation – but one is disappointed by its thinness and its viewpoint. Bethel’s (partly legitimate) excuse is that documentation is unavailable because of Kim Philby’s involvement […]

Web update

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] intended to ask four MI5 witnesses, screened from the public and press. The jury were therefore unable to be told about important allegations including the involvement of MI6 in a plot to assassinate General Gadaffi; that MI5 had prior knowledge of a plan to bomb the Israeli Embassy in London in 1994 (information that […]

Obituaries

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] what the British Left assumed Catholic Action in Britain was up to (but for which it never produced the evidence). Frank Steele (obit Guardian 5 January 1998) MI6 officer sent into Northern Ireland in 1971. Involved in 1972/3 attempts to resolve the conflict. C. Gordon Tether (obit Financial Times 3 December 1997) FT writer […]

Hess, ‘Hess’ and the ‘peace Party’ (Book review)

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] in this area are adequately documented – perhaps just to keep other researchers off his sources. Higham says, for example: ‘In the summer of 1937, according to MI6 files in the Ministry of Defence, London, Bedaux met with the Duke of Windsor, Bedaux’s close friend Errol Flynn, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann … At […]

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