Coach into pumpkin: some problems with Paget

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

Operation Paget, the investigation by the team led by Sir John Stevens into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, briefly tried to investigate a collision between a white Fiat Uno and Princess Diana’s BMW. The head-on collision happened on 22 March 1996, on Cromwell Road, Kensington, when a casino employee lost control of a … Read more

…MI5 goes on forever

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team […]

The Strength of the Wolf

Book cover
Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs Douglas Valentine London/New York: Verso, 2004, h/back, £20   This comes garlanded with praise from Jim Hougan and Anthony Summers. The praise is justified: this is, as Hougan says, ‘a ground-breaking work of investigative reporting’; and it is, as Summers says, ‘a … Read more

The Valkyrie Operation

Book cover
Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] I thought he would be likely to express them.”‘ In fact there is a quite an interesting account here, not only of the business of being an agent for SIS – presumably it is SIS, though other agencies are possible; and the author never quite resolves this – but also of the University of […]

French vendetta: from Rainbow Warrior to the Iranian hostages deal

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] No I’, Georges Abdallah, and who served as a communications channel between the imprisoned FARL leader and his lieutenants, revealed that he had been a salaried DGSE agent since 1984 and had been regularly informing the DGSE of FARL’s exchanges. As if this were not all, Mazurier revealed that in the secret service war […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] and the South Africans. Harold Wilson’s Cabinet Office is infiltrated. Rhodesian agents murder one of their own operatives who has turned against them in London, and another agent is killed by British intelligence after they and Special Branch monitor his activities. The agent, Geoff Dominy ….’ (emphasis added) Typical of Searchlight to make a […]

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Book cover
Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] Subtle arguments can become telescoped into punchy summaries that are sometimes oversimplified. Webb is most controversial when implicating the CIA, relying heavily on slippery phrases like ‘CIA agent’. To him it is important that in December 1981 a ‘CIA agent’, Contra commander Enrique Bermudez, ‘had given the goddamned order’ to Meneses and Blandon to […]

Splinter Factor

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

In the collection, Contemporary British History 1931-61, reviewed in this issue, there is an essay by Richard Aldrich of Salford University, one of the small but growing numbers of British academics trying to incorporate the activities of the intelligence and security services into post-war British history. In his essay on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) … Read more

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 … Read more

The CIA: A history of torture

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] guerrillas and killed the following month. At the time of his death, both Uruguayan policemen and their victims testified to his role as a torturer. Another CIA agent, the Cuban Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, was later to reveal that Mitrione had once tortured four homeless men to death as a demonstration for his Uruguayan students. […]

Accessibility Toolbar