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 […]

Cloak and Dollar, and, Know Your Enemy

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] in Oswald’s demi-monde of KGB agents and Cuban exiles…..’ We’ve had supporters of Castro and now he gives us KGB agents! Which ones, Professor? The only KGB agent in the story that I can recall is the KGB officer Kostikov who was under diplomatic cover in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. Oswald – […]

Spooks. Hollis. Tomlinson

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] a famous Estonian footballer, called Evald Mikson. Mikson, learned Sanden, had worked with the Germans when they invaded Estonia in 1941, and had interrogated a captured Estonian agent of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. (One may imagine that in such circumstances – an Estonian working for the Nazis – such an ‘interrogation’ was, as […]

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

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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

‘Privatising’ covert action: the case of the Unification Church

Lobster Issue 21 (1991)

[…] and Moon himself, the UC was intimately involved in the Korean influence campaign directed by elements of the KCIA. Second, the UC was not simply an ‘ agent of influence’ for the ROK regime, as some investigators have asserted. As the Subcommittee itself noted, ‘Moon and his organisation acted from a mixture of motives […]

A ‘great venture’: overthrowing the government of Iran

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] analyst Barry Rubin comments, ‘only five Americans with a half-dozen Iranian contacts had organised the entire uprising’.(64) The British input, however, had clearly been significant. One Iranian agent of the British – Shahpour Reporter, who subsequently served as adviser to the Shah – was later rewarded with a knighthood, before becoming a chief middleman […]

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