Fiji coup update

Lobster Issue 15 (1988)

[…] mostly from the Fiji Sun 9th July 1987. “Paul Freeman was involved in a destabilisation action against a NZ labour government in 1975. He received a Security Intelligence Service (SIS) file from an SIS employee, Rohan Jays, with embarrassing information about a Labour MP. Freeman publicly handed the file to the Prime Minister, thus […]

The Tory Right between the wars

Lobster Issue 15 (1988)

[…] March 1987 Pressure Groups, Tory Businessmen and the aura of political corruption before the First World War – Frans Coetzee – in Historical Journal, December 1986 Military Intelligence and the defence of the realm: the surveillance of soldiers and civilians in Britain during the First World War – David Englander – in British Society […]

The Intelligence Game: Illusions and Delusions of International Espionage

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Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of so much of the work of the intelligence services everywhere.’ The result is an entertaining but very sharp analysis of that peculiar mixture of ruthless patriotism and utter incompetence which characterises so much of […]

The CIA: A history of torture

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] Fadlallah was untouched, some eighty bystanders, men, women and children, were killed and over two hundred injured. The terrorist organisation responsible for this attack was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).(1) An overwhelming case can be made that the CIA has been the most dangerous terrorist organisation at work in the world since the Second […]

Eternal Vigilance? 50 years of the CIA

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] of things is uninteresting. This collection contains three essays of note. The first is Bob de Graff and Cees Wiebes’ study of the CIA and the Dutch Intelligence Service, which is the first of its kind that I can think of; and is, presumably, a template for the relationship between the CIA and the […]

Everything is going to change

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] convincing. While establishing his thesis of a Kennedy newly devoted to the cause of peace, he also stakes his ground quickly on Oswald, establishing his credentials in intelligence – a familiar argument to anyone who knows the JFK case – but also showing that, far from hating Kennedy or seeing him as a target […]

Fifth Column: A brief sojourn East of Suez: a last gasp for British great power status

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] its turn, was not merely Islamist and tribal but it had relationships that spread back to the major cities of Pakistan and even into its military and intelligence services. Western operations in West Asia have to deal with a world beyond Afghanistan that encompasses Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia – as well as India […]

The Committee

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] into a cohesive, province-wide, secret organisation, the Ulster Central Coordinating Committee. This worked with an ‘Inner Force’ which had formed inside the RUC. The Inner Force supplied intelligence on IRA members and sympathisers to ‘the Committee’, who directed assassins to chosen targets with protection provided by the ‘Inner Force’. This book is about that […]

The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence

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Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] tremendous piece of research and though there are half a dozen of the 27 chapters which I didn’t find of much interest – the technical side of intelligence gathering, chiefly; and some of the espionage stuff – for the most part the book is dotted with fascinating bits and pieces. Large chunks of it […]

Ten Thirty Three: The Inside Story of Britain’s Secret Killing Machine in Northern Ireland

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Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] their recognition that military victory was impossible? There can be little doubt that one factor was the improved performance of the security forces, in particular of the intelligence and surveillance arms. So effective had they become that the journalist, Jack Holland, could write, with only slight exaggeration, that in the 1990s the safest thing […]

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