Briefly: Ideas. Blitz to Blair. Covert Network. etc

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] easily persuaded to surrender their independence and their critical judgement by the red scare of the early Cold War. I SPY: The Secret Life of a British Agent Geoffrey Elliott St Ermin’s Press/Little, Brown, London, 1998, £18.99 The agent in question was Elliott’s father, Kavan, about whom Elliott knew very little until he began […]

Fifth Column: Plots, smoke and mirrors – managing our Muslim brothers

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] own judgement before being inflected with ‘spin’. The reliability and accountability of information is going to be very different if it is from an accredited British intelligence agent, a Home Office civil servant, the Met, the Sussex Police Authority, someone from Number Ten (all theoretically ultimately answerable to the Commons at some stage) or […]

SISies: MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations and A Life: A. J. Ayer

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Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] unimportant points and issues. For example, with only the word of an unnamed ex-MI6 officer (Tomlinson?) as evidence, he claims that Nelson Mandela was once an MI6 agent. If true, this is important. It not only changes our perception of Mandela, the most important African politician of this generation, but also of the scope […]

I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels

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Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] perspectives, for example, on Will Owen, the Labour MP who was ripping-off the Czechs and got done (but acquitted) for espionage; the attempting framing of Peter Hain; agent provocateurs in the labour movement; the ‘Angry Brigade’; Searchlight magazine, and the role of state agents here, there and everywhere. (I know nothing about Spanish history […]

Geheim – CIA in England

Lobster Issue 17 (1988) £££

This is from No 3 volume 7, 1988 of Geheim, the German member of the international brotherhood of parapolitics mags (of which Lobster is apparently the smallest, poorest and least frequent). The good news for those of us too lazy to learn anything but English is that Geheim is going to produce an English- language … Read more

How to Fix an Election

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] votes’ meant that ‘no details had been checked’.(10) In local elections in 1990, a Labour councillor in Chorley, a Conservative councillor in West Lancashire, and a Liberal agent in Sheffield, were separately convicted of forging proxy votes. In Enfield in 1992, Tory agent Miles Parker was fined £750 for the same offence. In Brighton […]

Terrorism, Anti-Semitism and Dissent

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Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

[…] NED was funding the opposition in Venezuela when MacShane denounced Hugh Chavez during the failed coup attempt. (8) The Labour Friends of Israel Dunwoody’s researcher and election agent for some time was David Mencer, a former member of the Israel armed forces, and now secretary of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). Stephen Byers, one […]

The Perfect English Spy

Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££

[…] tried to clamp down on information about the spooks, there was a massive explosion of leaking by the services themselves. White is portrayed as a kind of agent for the overt Whitehall, put in charge of both services to re-orient them, make them face the realities of the post-war world – and be more […]

The Andropov Deception

Lobster Issue 10 (1986) £££

[…] Union – source-of-all-terrorism line, and general apologist for US (and UK) support for some of the most obnoxious regimes in the “free world”? Crozier’s “hero”, a NATO agent called Peter Lock (is Crozier telling us NATO has its own Intelligence service?) is. an emotionless psychopath for whom “killing caused a sexual swelling”. (p. 6) […]

Web Update

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

Many thanks, as always, to Terry Hanstock for contributions. Comments and contributions welcome. My email is ‘War on Terrorism’: Repercussions of 11 Sept. 2001 The Sept 11 2001 attacks on the US and subsequent ‘war against terrorism’ have provided law enforcement/intelligence agencies with an opportunity to push for sweeping new powers, plus fast-tracking of … Read more

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