Political life in Britain

Lobster Issue

[…] way he has fascinating stories to tell about John Addey, James Sherwood, Joseph Godson, the Gang of Four and many more. He also had experiences of the intelligence services worth reading. This is not an academic work, though academics could learn much from it. Nor is it just a collection of anecdotes from a […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] recommended that a ‘Home Desk’ should be ‘added to the Information Research Department . . . to act as the focus for the collation and dissemination of intelligence about communist activities on the home front’. McEvoy describes some of the later concerns of the Home committee – for example the historian Eric Hobsbawm and […]

TO CATCH A SPY: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold by Tim Tate

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] of Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery. It gets pretty complicated here because another senior retired MI5 officer, Arthur Martin, and James Angleton, former head of CIA counter- intelligence, were also talking to people — notably Jonathan Aitken MP — about Soviet moles in MI5. At this point the British state, in the shape of […]

The Mossad Spy It’s not what you’ve done it’s who you are… the transgender spy

Lobster Issue

[…] see what others hadn’t: Olivia’s life spent concealing the fact that she felt she was a woman might have given her the deception skills to be an intelligence officer. At 18 she joined the Israel Defence Force (IDF) as a woman, in preparation for entering Mossad. There are vivid accounts of military engagements and […]

The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, by Oliver Eagleton

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] I’ve yet seen. It’s almost worth the price of the book in itself. For the author 1 1 relates one example after another in which police and intelligence agency abuse is not prosecuted, lawfare is encouraged and how, in extending the work of the CPS overseas under a Tory government ‘as part of this […]

Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the end of Empire by Aaron Edwards

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] fire, they ‘cowered’ – as opposed to sheltering, which was what white men did. They ‘lounged’ a lot. Instead of shouting, they ‘hollered’. While Britain used ‘covert intelligence’, they ‘spied’ treacherously. Their attacks were ‘heartless’ and ‘cowardly’. They were addicted to ‘fighting, killing and treachery’, usually for lucre, or under the influence of ‘gat’ […]

The Hotel Tacloban by Douglas Valentine

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] stylistic point of view it is highly appropriate to focus on MacArthur also because of the coincidence of their first names. William Colby (1920-1996) Director of Central Intelligence, i.e. head of the CIA (1973-1976) Prior to that he had served as chief of the Far East Division and Chief of Station in Vietnam, with […]

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] the professionals flew out that evening’. One South African security expert, whom Wrong interviewed, told her that the killing clearly demonstrated the influence of Mossad on Rwandan intelligence. The assassination ‘was standard Israeli MO’. The regime, of course, denied any involvement in Karegeya’s murder, but at the same time celebrated it and used it […]

The Secret Team

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] affairs, it is a bewildering collection of semipermanent or temporarily assembled action committee and networks the respond pretty much ad hoc to specific troubles and to flash intelligence inputs from various parts of the world, sometimes in ways that duplicate the activities of regular American missions, sometimes in ways that undermine those activities, and […]

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