Newsinger on Strarmer

Lobster Issue

[…] being ‘woven together with some thin threads into a left-wing conspiracy theory in which Starmer is presented as an agent of the security state or even AngloAmerican intelligence organisations’. These are, he insists, ‘insidiously effective smears’. (p. 163) On the contrary, the argument that Starmer’s so-called ‘pragmatism’ lead to him wholeheartedly embracing the interests […]

The Secret War Between the Wars MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s by Kevin Quinlan

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] handling of the very significant Tyler Kent/Right Club events which might have had a serious impact on WW2, delaying American entry; and the careful debriefing of Soviet intelligence defector Krivitsky, the first of its kind. Versions of these events, based on the same files, are in Christopher Andrew’s Defence of the Realm and had […]

Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

Lobster Issue 87 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] was red meat for her base. As we know, the death penalty was not re-introduced. In fact, Thatcher had been briefed for some time by UK military intelligence that she could not realistically fight the IRA head–on (as Neave would have wished) and the likelihood was that high levels of violence would continue unless […]

White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] ‘the iron curtain’, e.g. how many missiles the Soviets had, etc., was unknown and the ‘danger’ belief was just viable. By 1960 it was clear to US intelligence and military that the Soviet Union was a nuclear minnow, compared to the US. That ‘danger’ was the rationalisation for the CIA’s activities. There was no […]

Kicora review

Lobster Issue

[…] of them suggested giving Detective Caskey ‘false files’. He noted that ‘successive Police Ombudsmen reports have revealed such practices as ranging from the “slow waltz” of withholding intelligence from detectives or conducting sham interviews, or other efforts to disapply the rule of law to agents of the state. The obstruction of investigations through the […]

In The Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Britain and Saudi Arabia which led to allegations of massive corruption. The investigation was closed down by the Blair government when the Saudis threatened to end their intelligence relationship with Britain if it was pursued.4 He gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Conservative Party and made a donation of £20 million to […]

The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story by James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the hacking trials themselves. We learn that Mulcaire’s early career was as a ‘tracer’ for John Boyall who, among other things, carried out contract work for the intelligence services. When the NOTW and Boyall fell out, Mulcaire was the beneficiary and became ever more deeply involved with obtaining material by assorted means in support […]

Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes by Phil Miller

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] recovered, we do know from Reynolds that Morton recommended that Britain provide assistance in the training of Sri Lankan special forces and in training and reorganising their intelligence apparatus. As Miller points out, this involved providing assistance to a regime whose troops and police were routinely torturing and killing Tamil prisoners. Morton returned to […]

British Counterinsurgency by John Newsinger

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] that disastrous campaign, we heard a fair bit of comment that the Americans should have listened to the Brits because the British state – its military and intelligence – is good at counterinsurgency.2 Newsinger’s account of British CI campaigns since 1945 shows that this is a delusion. With the exception of a couple of […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] narratives are found wanting and counter-narratives (of varying plausibility) abound: from the suspicious deaths of government weapons experts, cryptographers and shadowy financiers to the covered-up connections between intelligence agencies and terror groups (see Curtis 2010). Criminologists should shrug off the stigma attached to theorizing that diverges from official accounts and carefully excavate the deep […]

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