Spooks – U.S.

Lobster Issue 1 (1983) £££

12. Spooks – U.S. After the disastrous Iranian hostage operations, the Pentagon created a new intelligence/covert ops unit called Army Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), also known, apparently, as “the activity”.  Augmenting both the CIA and the Pentagon’s own DIA, ISA existed for at least a year without Presidential/Congressional knowledge or approval. The unit is […]

Re:

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

[…] Statecraft, 14 (3) (2003) pp. 70-82. Is there intelligent life out there? Alan Block confirms our worst fears in his first paragraph: “The history of the Central Intelligence Agency illustrates that it can neither control its agents, operatives, assets, and, indeed, officers, nor are its covert policies divorced from both common and often uncommon […]

Robert Kennedy and the Middle East connection

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] Nixon and the bane of Kissinger – have a perhaps neglected provenance in the administration of Lyndon Johnson. The crippling of the 455-foot USS Liberty, a SIGINT intelligence vessel run jointly by the US navy and the NSA, in a sustained two hour attack by Israeli bombers and torpedo craft at the height of […]

Steady as she goes: Labour and the spooks

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] disaster waiting to happen. The last major figure who talked like this in office was Jimmy Carter and he got royally screwed by his foreign service and intelligence people. The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee And what of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee? It snoozes on. Former MI5 officer David Shayler has offered […]

Iraq

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

[…] programme (3) where he stated: ‘David was murdered on the 17th. On Saturday the 19th, within 48 hours of the murder, I was contacted by a British intelligence officer who told me he’d been murdered. That didn’t take me by surprise, I was suspicious of the suicide theory from the word go. Now that […]

Searchlight again

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] It had to happen. Larry O’Hara, who for more than two years has been slandering anti-fascists and accusing Searchlight of being the centre of a web of intelligence intrigue, in league with British intelligence, Mossad and probably the Salvation Army, has found his way into the arms of the very same MI5 he is […]

Elvis has left the building: Political Perspectives on the Fall of Polly Peck

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] policy. The Bank of England added weight to the position. Cuckney was an ex-MI5 officer. (5) He had also worked at Farnham Castle, a government centre for intelligence briefing, from 1974-84. Before that, he was attached to the Crown Agency and also IMS, the MoD company. He later achieved a more public profile as […]

Philip Agee, the KGB and us

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

[…] CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West: ‘In the Communist sphere outside of Europe, we [KGB) worked closest with the Cubans…….The Cubans’ ardour also spurred them to take […]

Did the CIA sink a ship-load of Leyland buses in the Thames?

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

Veterans of a notorious Miami-based CIA dirty tricks team have boasted that they were helped by British Intelligence officers to sink an East German ship loaded with British-built Leyland buses. Three years after the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the MV Magdeburg was hit by a Japanese ship in the River Thames. […]

Two Sides of Ireland (Book reviews)

Lobster Issue 13 (1987) £££

[…] covert operations during 1974, made possible by the presence of a British informer in the Gardai. Codenamed “the badger”, this informer was recruited by the Special Military Intelligence Unit, MI6’s connection with the RUC, and, although of low rank, was (and still is) in a key position to assist the British clandestine border crossings: […]

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