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. […]

Updates

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] Was the author of Swallows and Amazons a Soviet Secret agent?’,(8) Andrew Rosthorn rebutted the charge made by Professor Christopher Andrew, that Ransome had been a Soviet agent. The story took another strange turn when York Membery revealed in The Observer 21 July 2002, ‘Swallows, Amazons and secret agents’, that not only had Ransome […]

Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico: new leads

Lobster Issue 6 (1984)

[…] code-named ‘solo’. (12) Childs, a member of the CPUSA, and an informant for the FBI, was sent by Hoover to Cuba in early 1964 as an undercover agent to learn what he could about the assassination from Castro. ‘Solo’ returned to tell Hoover that Castro said Oswald in Mexico City “vowed in the presence […]

After Iraq: some FCO/SIS issues

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] has linked his name to ‘saving’ Africa. Previously it was Palestine.) The ‘benefits’ of torture Meantime, Chief Scarlett is presented to the public as an expert in agent running and recruitment: i.e. the PR ‘legend’ being created is that his ‘strategy’ will be to put the demands of intelligence, rather than what can be […]

Forty Years of Legal Thuggery

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

[…] noted, if necessary, in future editions of The Lobster. Steve Dorril (PHILBY) In 1971 the Soviet press carried a number of articles in which former British Intelligence Agent Kim Philby named a number of MI6 officers, principally those who had served in Beirut and the Middle East in the 1950s and 60s. ‘Izvestiya‘ (2.10.71) […]

Decoding Edward Jay Epstein’s ‘LEGEND’

Lobster Issue 2 (1983)

[…] paranoid fruitcake whose chronic suspiciousness was a major obstacle to the CIA’s gathering of intelligence on the Soviet Union: Angleton seems to have assumed that every defector, agent, informant, was a Soviet disinformer. (5) It would appear that Hersh’s story gave Colby the pretext to rid the Agency of Angleton – something many of […]

Watergate revisited: Hougan’s ‘Secret Agenda’

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

Watergate revisited: Hougan’s Secret Agenda Introduction No apologies for returning to Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda. As Steve Dorril said in Lobster 8, this is a major event. This essay is in two parts. In the first I make some critical remarks about Secret Agenda’s central theses; In the second I speculate about other items on … Read more

Rebel, rebel

Book cover
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

British Spies and Irish Rebels British Intelligence and Ireland, 1916-1945 Paul McMahon Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £30 First up, I have no specialist knowledge of this area, so if there any howlers in here, I’m unlikely to spot them. However, I know a good book when I see one. This has been … Read more

Non-lethality: John B. Alexander, the Pentagon’s Penguin

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

On April 22, 1993 both BBC1 and BBC2 showed on their main evening news bulletins a rather lengthy piece concerning America’s latest development in weaponry — the non-lethal weapons concept. David Shukman, BBC Defence Correspondent, interviewed (Retired) U.S. Army Colonel John B. Alexander and Janet Morris, two of the main proponents of the concept. (1) … Read more

The view from the bridge. Hidden Agendas. Jack Hill. Ghandi. Sinn Fein. Oswald

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] Rhodes Scholar Spy by Richard Hall (Random House, Australia, 1991). It is an account of Ian Milner, a pre-WW2 New Zealand Rhodes Scholar who became a Soviet agent in the same period as the Philby group while working for the New Zealand Foreign Ministry. What is interesting about the book, however, is not the […]

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