Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] to achieve a rapid seizure of power in the name of the ‘National Will’, in senior ranks of the armed forces and sections of the security and intelligence services, on the Right of the Conservative Party, in business and financial circles and among sections of the media. The object seems to have been the […]

Using the UK FOIA

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] This is because disclosure of the withheld information would breach the principle that the UK government does not release the names of officials from its own external intelligence agency, and by extension, those of allied intelligence services. Consequently, the 1 FCO has argued that it would seriously compromise such cooperation and thus prejudice the […]

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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE

[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 […]

Parish Notices

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] military power; indeed its subsidiary status is shown by the cables which show diplomatic staff being asked to gather ‘biometric’ data, as if they were low level intelligence assets. Digital security simply isn’t possible. In two years Ministry of Defence staff lost 340 laptops.1 The simple but uncomfortable truth is that to be secure, […]

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 […]

Swedish echoes

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] short notice as it was deemed too serious a topic for the ‘family friendly’ Wogan. Captain Hayward’s book mentioned nothing at all about his service in 14 Intelligence Company. No doubt, rightly or wrongly, he felt abandoned by the British state (which he had protected by sanitising what could have been a much juicier […]

Mark Lewis and ‘the ultimate hacker’

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] in parliament from Dale Campbell-Savours MP and a meeting of senior civil servants in the office of Home Secretary Alun Michael. Campbell-Savours, a member of the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, complained to Cumbria police that he was being harassed by dozens of strange telephone calls, apparently generated by a computer in Florida. He […]

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] coup to seize power for himself. He ‘did little to hide his involvement in drug trafficking’ and, according to an interview with Col. Russell Thaden, the NATO intelligence chief, on one occasion he ‘blew his stack upon learning U.S. and British forces had jointly bombed a large drug lab in northern Afghanistan’. He calmed […]

Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland by Anne Cadwallader

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] be familiar: in the 1970s Northern Ireland’s state forces – the police (RUC), the military (UDR) and military reservists, almost exclusively Protestant – shared personnel, weapons and intelligence with the Loyalist (Protestant) paramilitaries. And so when those paramilitaries began killing Catholics – because they were Catholics, not because they were Republicans; sectarian not political […]

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