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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

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

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

Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] North, and Felix Rodriguez, later became familiar names during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. More obscure was one Michael Hand, who had been a CIA contract agent in Laos. In 1973, Hand and his partner Frank Nugan established the Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney. A slew of top-level retirees from the CIA and […]

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