The gentleman in velvet

Book cover
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

James Jesus Angleton The CIA and the craft of counter intelligence Michael Holzman Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008, p/b, $28.95 Of all the figures in the Anglo-American spy world that we have been made aware of in the last 40 years, James Jesus Angleton was the most glamorous: the chain-smoking, the orchid-growing, the […]

US involvement in the Fiji coup d’etat

Lobster Issue 14 (1987) £££

[…] former prime minister.(Sydney Morning Herald, May 19 1987) “Ratu Mara was in it from the beginning,” said one source. The Times on Sunday said that while initial intelligence advice was that it was a narrowly based military coup, within a few days evidence was available to the Australian Government that the coup “was backed […]

Morningside Mata Haris: How MI6 deceived Scotland’s great and good

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b   Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish […]

Tittle-tattle: New Labour – old Spooks?

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

[…] combination of the lack of a security service with a corrupt police force left the Fijian government with little chance of learning about the activities of foreign intelligence services in Fiji. Which possibly ‘kinda delighted’ the CIA. The situation at the moment is that with the Fijian Council of Chiefs (a traditionalist body) permanently […]

The Great Betrayal

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

Books The Great Betrayal Nicholas Bethel (London 1984) This is either a ‘snow job’, designed to discourage further research in this area (British intelligence attempts to destabilise Soviet and communist influenced regimes), or is just a poor effort on Bethel’s part. One can’t deny that it is useful – after all, it is the […]

The Ulster Citizen Army smear

Lobster Issue 14 (1987) £££

[…] On this there is no agreement. Some journalists who were in Northern Ireland at the time remain convinced that it was nothing more than a British Army/ intelligence operation, a ‘funny’. Some suspect it to have been a psy ops job, possibly even run by Wallace himself. Although this view is intelligible given what […]

Splinter Factor

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] there is an essay by Richard Aldrich of Salford University, one of the small but growing numbers of British academics trying to incorporate the activities of the intelligence and security services into post-war British history. In his essay on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) after the end of the Second World War, Aldrich writes […]

The Organising of Intellectual Consensus: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and Post-War US-European Relations (Part I)

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] would be the key figure in arranging the formation of the CCF, and he is a good example of someone who moved easily between intellectual, political, and intelligence circles.(32) He came to prominence through his single-handed disruption of the German Writers Congress held in East Berlin in October 1947 by complaining about the lack […]

Historical Notes: Anglo-American Conflict? UK becomes a US intelligence target

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] told me the story himself very shortly after it had all happened (I was researching a doctorate at Birmingham at the time). The UK becomes a US intelligence target Of course the old undercurrents of distrust did not go away after the foundation of the wartime Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. There is an interesting snippet […]

Accessibility Toolbar