Historical Notes: Channel 4 SOE mystery. Venona Decrypts

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££

[…] and died in 1962 as a result of an air accident in South-East Asia. Faulks, in reporting this tale, suggested that Bodington may have been an MI6 agent before the war (he had been a journalist) and that the connection between him and Dericourt involved more than friendship. Curiously, Faulks left it there. But […]

The United States and the overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-67

Lobster Issue 20 (1990) £££

[…] diplomats say.’ Perhaps 5,000 names were given to the military during the massacres in 1965 which left perhaps 250,000 dead. Somehow Kadane had persuaded a senior CIA agent in Indonesia and his diplomatic boss at the time to talk, on the record. The story was run, briefly, in the British serious press. A couple […]

The death of Italy’s military intelligence chief in Iraq and some examples of persuasion

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

[…] state sector from the private; i.e. they could have come full circle……. The use of the word ‘handler’, rather than ‘case officer’, is pejorative. It diminishes the agent because it implies there is no equality in the relationship. As an experienced but relative minnow, Italy’s network is likely to have been a good one. […]

Operation Black Dog

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] US B52 bomber launching from Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska, and flying a round-trip to the Persian Gulf. The bomber carried one bomb containing VX nerve agent, the most potent chemical weapon in the US CW armoury. The bomb was dropped on elements of the Republican Guard in Southern Iraq, I was informed. […]

Getting it right: the security agencies in modern society

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] it. Not so. A few weeks went by and another person tried to attach himself to me, this time claiming to be to be a former MI5 agent who would spill the beans. But he was ill, so ill, and the NHS in London was so bad…..This goes on for some weeks and I […]

The Strange Case of Patrick Daly, MI5 agent

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] them as an insignia of importance. He was a collector of money for INLA and its forerunner. He took a rake-off from acting as some kind of agent for Irish labour, with sub-contracting companies who hired workers from him. Whether this was cash for non-existent workers on company payrolls or, as the local press […]

One Boggis-Rolfe or two?: Philby: The Hidden Years

Book cover
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] to establish that Philby did more damage to British interests after 1951, when he was partly severed from SIS, than before, when he was an undetected Soviet agent in place. As Robin Ramsay noted in Lobster 37, this idea isn’t very convincing – not in any obvious sense, at least. After 1951, Philby worked […]

The DFS, Silvia Duran and the CIA-Mafia connection

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

[…] 1985 drug scandals. (Jose Antonio Zorrilla, the ex-DFS chief arrested and indicted in 1989 for murder, was in 1963 private secretary to Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, the DFS agent whose signature attested to the validity of the most radically altered version of Duran’s statement.) At least two ex-DFS officers who were also former CIA agents […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early on in his career, around the time he stood in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982. He was just the sort of agent MI5 wanted at the time, a man who appeared to be committed to the Labour Party but who in fact was – to use Thatcher’s phrase […]

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Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] Hambling also asks why fuel air explosives were used in Operation Black Cat. One explanation might be that planners were concerned that a residue of VX nerve agent might have been blown back towards coalition troops and, therefore, utilised air fuel explosives to incinerate every last surviving particle of nerve agent. The best approach […]

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