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 […]
Lobster Issue 13 (1987) £££
[…] 30th Something very strange happened in British politics almost a decade ago. A Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and the journalist with the closest links to the British intelligence services, Chapman Pincher, both said that elements of MI5 had been trying to bring down the Labour Government during 1974-76 – and nothing happened. There was […]
Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement […]
Lobster Issue 6 (1984) £££
[…] believed that “Castro was somehow involved in a plot to assassinate President Kennedy.” The story turned out to be a disinformation exercise – Alvarado was a Nicaraguan intelligence officer (9) – though the real reason it was dropped was probably because the Nicaraguan was too close to CIA officers like David Phillips. Interestingly enough […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)
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[PDF file]: The ‘Tsarevich’ Nikolai Chebotarev and his links to British Intelligence. Peter Luce The recent review of Kevin Coogan’s The Spy Who Would be Tsar: The Mystery of Michal Goleniewski and the Far-Right Underground1 prompted me to re-read the work of another claimant to the Russian imperial succession. In 1998 Michael Gray, a former Technical […]
Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)
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[PDF file]: Understanding Shadows The Corrupt Use of Intelligence Michael Quilligan Atlanta (GA): Clarity Press, 2013, $21.95 (USA), p/b The author is or was – it isn’t clear which – one of the writers for Intelligence, the Paris-based fortnightly intelligence newsletter1 (and this has an introduction by Intelligence’s founder/editor, Olivier Schmidt.) In the early years of […]
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££
[…] knows what it is doing about civil disorder. It is fishing. As the facts come out, they often seem to fit into the standard pattern of poor intelligence and some mistreatment of those arrested. We remain convinced that miscarriages of justice are likely in this mismanaged chaos. We have noted the signs of a […]