Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/ intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess affair. Some of the material will be familiar […]

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 […]

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 […]

Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism

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Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up there with Stephen Dorril’s MI6 book, Paul Lashmar and James Oliver’s book on IRD and Richard Aldrich’s The Hidden Hand. Rereading it, I was […]

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 […]

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 Big C: Further notes on ‘conspiracy’

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] timing of this is not fortuitous: ….the Conservative Victories in 1979 and 1983, the defeat of the miners in 1985 (in which the security services played an intelligence gathering role)….. the collapse of cherished beliefs….. led inescapably to the conclusion that there was a right-wing conspiracy which had hoodwinked the entire nation….’ There has […]

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 […]

Also Noticed

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Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 Cees Wiebes Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, Studies in Intelligence History, 2003 ISBN 3-8258-6347-6 p/b, 34.9 euros, $39.95 from Amazon. The publisher declined to send me a review copy but I read one chapter sent by e-mail from the author. This isn’t my field but it seems […]

Trust no one: the secret world of Sidney Reilly

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Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] – provided he could earn a living or clinch a deal in exchange. By 1904-1905, in the Far East, he was simultaneously wheeling and dealing with the intelligence services of Russia, Japan, Britain, France and the USA. In due course his abilities and official connections in various countries made him a natural for the […]

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