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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Fiji coup update

Lobster Issue 15 (1988)

[…] Bacon, based on a TV programme she did for the Australian SBS company (Somebody’s Man in Fiji, The Listener December 26 1987). Freeman looks like a CIA agent, actually boasts (eg to Bacon) that he is CIA, and he has ex US military and special forces people working for him. He fits the bill […]

The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during World War 2

Lobster Issue 20 (1990)

[…] Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, after Munich. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1939-40 Goering encouraged these approaches. Through his friend Max von Hohenlohe-Langenberg’s negotiations in Switzerland with London’s agent Malcolm Christie, he led the British to believe that Germany did not have the food and raw material resources for a long war. Without going so […]

The Big C: Further notes on ‘conspiracy’

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] shah of Iran and Anwar as-Sadat lost their countrymen’s respect because both were (wrongly) seen as agents of Washington.’ Wrongly, huh? Depends on how he is using ‘agent’. Do I think either the shah or Sadat was an actual case officer-run U.S. intelligence ‘agent’ — no, I don’t. But neither, I’m pretty sure, do […]

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] conspiracy theories: Oswald was involved in the conspiracy to murder the President; and he was an FBI informant and a CIA or Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agent; but he was also working for the communists as a double agent of the KGB or GRU! Russell proposes that, having been sent to the USSR […]

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

Northern Ireland Act 1974

Lobster Issue 14 (1987)

[…] with some volunteers from the UDF. He had assassinated John Francis Green, an active member of the IRA who was living south of the border. As an agent of the British Government operating across the border as an assassin he had brought back photographs as proof of that operation. When Captain Nairac showed the […]

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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