Following in Uncle Sam’s dirty footsteps: chemical and biological warfare testing in the UK

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] reference in Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. He notes that ‘the whole area of chemical research was an active field in the 1950s’, and refers to a joint MI5/ MI6 ‘program to investigate how far the hallucinatory drug lysergic acid diethyalmine (LSD) could be used in interrogation, and extensive trials took place at Porton.'(21) Wright gives […]

Downing Street Diary: With Harold Wilson in No. 10

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Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] Lord Wigg, the former George Wigg MP, who, for the first couple of years of the Labour government of 1964/5, had been Wilson’s advisor on MI5 and MI6. This relationship came to grief when Wilson followed Wigg’s advice in the D-Notice Affair and came off worst in a pissing contest with MI5. After which, […]

Truth Twisting: notes on disinformation

Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££

[…] Foreign Affairs Publishing Company of Geoffrey Stewart-Smith. Keston College, the British centre of the study of religion in the Soviet Union, certainly, but not yet provably, an MI6 operation. Soviet suspicion of Keston led to the collapse of a planned visit to Moscow by a British human rights mission in October 1989 when one […]

Spinning the European Union: pro-European propaganda campaigns in the British media

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] the Information Research Department (IRD). This covert unit, established by the Labour Government in 1948, was financed from the Secret Intelligence Services budget, with close links to MI6. The government’s campaign had three stages. The first involved the dissemination of information to the press and public; the second, from the announcement of the terms […]

Books forthcoming

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] own man in the White House. It may be interesting to read C. M. Woodhouse’s The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels (Granada). Woodhouse worked for MI6 after the war in Greece and Iran, then became a Tory MP. William Keegan’s column in the Observer is the most informative economic view of Britain […]

Joseph K and the spooky launderette

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] forms of academic ID I had shown him – only about my name. I later learned that Marks had often used various fictitious names and had serious MI6 connections. I had given the man who took us to the club no personal details about myself, not even in the conversation in the Half-Way House. […]

Scenes From an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell

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Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] along the lines of sympathy to the Soviet Union or Red China. Those most hostile to Stalinism have tended to embrace Orwell, while those least hostile have tended to parrot Communist slanders from his believing the working class smelled to working for MI6. Scenes From An Afterlife is essential reading for anyone interested in Orwell.

The Blairs and their Court

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Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] They present a devastating picture of Blair and his court that brims over with telling detail. Of particular interest to readers of Lobster is the revelation that MI6 head-hunted Charles Clarke when he was Neil Kinnock’s political adviser. It is good to know that the Home Office is in a safe pair of hands. […]

The Malcolm Kennedy Case – Update

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] ban on access to personal files have been signed by Jack Straw, Home Secretary, and Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary, on behalf of the three intelligence agencies, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, ‘for the purpose of safeguarding national security’. The validity of such a certificate can be challenged, and all three are being challenged; any person […]

Spy Wars

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

Spy Wars: Moles, mysteries and deadly games Tennent H. Begley London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, h/b, £18.99   Begley was one of James Angleton’s allies in CIA counterintelligence and this book is the Angletonian view of the Nosenko case, one of the touchstones or causes célèbres of the CIA in the post-war […]

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