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

‘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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Jim Jones and the Conspiracists

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

[…] of conspiracy’. In the context of the Peoples Temple, she summarises the conspiracists’ point of view, which holds ‘that people in Jonestown were murdered by U.S. government agent agents – either military or intelligence. These agents,’ she continues, ‘committed the murders to conceal some other, more damaging information…’.(3) Well, fair enough. The definition certainly […]

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 Strange Case of Patrick Daly, MI5 agent

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] them as an insignia of importance. He was a collector of money for INLA and its forerunner. He took a rake-off from acting as some kind of agent for Irish labour, with sub-contracting companies who hired workers from him. Whether this was cash for non-existent workers on company payrolls or, as the local press […]

Trust no one: the secret world of Sidney Reilly

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Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] Intelligence Service) used as cover the name and address ‘2 Whitehall Court c/o Captain Spencer’. There was indeed a Captain Harold Spencer operating as a British intelligence agent at this time. He later cropped up in 1918 peddling the allegations of sexual deviance in the British establishment that Pemberton-Billing used in his libel trial.(4) […]

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