Print: Journals and book review

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] was seeking additional aid to the Contras. CBS Evening News (7-28-88) – the only major network to cover the proceedings – reported on the testimony of DEA agent Ernest Jacobsen, who said that White House officials undermined a DEA probe of the Colombian cocaine kingpins by blowing an undercover informant’s cover when they leaked […]

Tittle-tattle: New Labour – old Spooks?

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] Parks and Taylor, are both convinced that when Hakluyt served in the Paris embassy as Sir Edward Stafford’s secretary he was really there as the client and agent of Walsingham to gather geographical information; that is he was an Elizabethan spook. Trouble at t’Guardian? A worrying story concerning two journalists, the Met and the […]

Joseph K and the spooky launderette

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

From April to late June 1992, I spent some three months in a Dutch refugee camp, OC Zeewolde. I had applied for political asylum. The Dutch authorities had agreed immediately, to fully process the application. I gave them no reason for my application. The Bosnian war was beginning and the Dutch reception centres for refugees … Read more

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

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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 […]

The Rhodes-Milner Group

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] one of the members of Rhodes’ circle, “a brilliant young graduate of Cambridge, Jan Smuts, who had been a vigorous supporter of Rhodes and acted as his agent in Kimberley as late as 1895 and who was one of the most important members of the Rhodes-Milner group in the period 1908-1950 …. became the […]

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

Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

Operation Julie, a nation-wide police investigation of LSD production, was launched in 1976. Two years later, although some 60 members of the British ‘microdot conspiracy’ had been convicted, Detective Inspector Dick ‘Leapy’ Lee was dissatisfied. The operational commander of ‘Julie’, Lee was interested in the international connections of the network, but was blocked from probing … Read more

In Brief

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

Kissinger Commission Letter in International Herald Tribune 22nd January 1984 from one Eugene L. Stockwell who testified before the Kissinger Commission on Central America. He writes: “During my hour and a half testimony most of the commissioners repeatedly indicated that they believed today’s Nicaragua to be as bad or worse than Nicaragua under Somoza; Mr … Read more

A review of the (bad) reviews of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] largely sympathetic feature. (Donald MacIntyre got very worked up about accusations that Tony Crosland could stoop to dirty politics and may well have been a CIA ‘ agent of influence’.) In response to the Ian McIntyre review I wrote a letter which included this. ‘I would have taken Mr McIntyre’s analysis more seriously however, […]

Morningside Mata Haris: How MI6 deceived Scotland’s great and good

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b <www.birlinn.co.uk>   Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish … Read more

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