Philip Agee, the KGB and us

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

Philip Agee died in January this year. Reading the obituaries I came across the allegations that he had gone to the KGB with his information about the CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence … Read more

Clippings Digest: August – November 1984

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

[…] the World Anti-Communist League. The Tory MP Sir Patrick Wall is the BACC Hon. President. BACC joined the WACL in 1983. Dally is ex-RAF, and was an agent for the Conservative Party for 11 years. He worked for something called Intelligence International Ltd. from 1969 to 1984. BACC recently published a book by Dally, […]

An Incorrect Political Memoir

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

This piece by Daniel Brandt began as a short letter commenting on my review of Right Woos Left by Chip Berlet (Lobster 23 p. 34). I wrote back and asked if he would like to expand it. And so he did, writing almost the whole thing at one long sitting. Anyone who joined the U.S. … Read more

The Cecil King coup plot

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

[…] Blair and Gordon Brown, have been Thatcherite. Cusack and McDonald, The UVF, (Dublin: Poolbeg, 2000) White, B., John Hume: Statesman of the Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1984) Ulster, October, 1986 The title of the article was ‘John Hume: CIA agent’. In Lobster 33. David Trimble savaged the Jonathan Powell memoir in a review in The Guardian

Web update

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] upon any sensitive operational techniques of the security and intelligence services, and in particular upon their sources of information, including the identity of any officer, contact or agent.’ After the House of Lords ruling (see below), Liberty is taking the issue of whether the Official Secrets Act 1989 is compatible with the ECHR to […]

George Orwell and the IRD

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

[…] its creation, it always seemed likely that Bilderberg was a British enterprise; and Wilford concludes this, citing a C. D. Jackson comment that Retinger was a British agent, an opinion ‘pretty well shared by some other people who are in a position to know better than I ’ – reference, presumably, to the CIA […]

Our Searchlight problem

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

[…] British state had been referred to again. Atkinson referred to International Times at that time ‘operating out of an office near Charing Cross, the set-up had an agent of the Somoza family hanging around’. (6) And the smear worked. Within a week I had received a letter warning me about Larry O’Hara from a […]

Children and the Official Secrets Act

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

Some of the spook recruitment pitches in the media of the last two years have gone out of their way to impress upon prospective candidates the family-friendly credentials of the major state spook employers.(1) But such measures, no matter how sincere and/or necessary, are for the most part aimed at a parent’s convenience – and … Read more

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