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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Hilda Murrell: a death in the private sector

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

This is the first anonymous article we have ever printed. However, we know the identity of the author and have absolute confidence in the person who provided us with the document. In places we have removed small sections, indicated by the use of brackets (—–), which provided personal details which would have made identifying the … Read more

Kincoragate: More Bodies

Lobster Issue 3 (1984)

[…] alive. John McKeague at the beginning of the seventies was the most important paramilitary figure in N. I. He had overthrown Terence O’Neil by a series of ‘agent provocateur’ bombings and street disturbances which backed Paisley’s political agitation with devastating effect. He became leader of the Red Hand Commando Loyalist paramilitary group set up […]

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) […]

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

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 […]

Feedback

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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