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 […]

Terrorism, Anti-Semitism and Dissent

Book cover
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

[…] the US/UK treatment meted out to Iraqis, we see the NATO alliance alive, enlarged and active in Asia; the UK Defence Secretary arguing for ever-larger arms and intelligence expenditure in line with the Pentagon’s; talk of the ‘war on terrorism’ is everywhere, with the British Home Secretary squeezing out long-established civil liberties, and prominent […]

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 Dirty War, and, The SAS in Ireland (Book reviews)

Lobster Issue 21 (1991) £££

[…] Mayne, and an investigation of Loyalist sectarian killers, The Shankhill Butchers (1989). His book opens with the attempts in 1970 by Captain James Kelly of Irish Military Intelligence to import weapons for the North (Kelly’s books were reviewed in Lobsters 13 and 15) and continues through the history of the Northern Irish conflict up […]

Who Owns Agca? Plots to Kill the Pope

Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££

[…] Sterling’s, and it is hers I will concentrate on. As with her last book, The Terror Network, much of her ‘evidence’ is attributed to unidentified police and intelligence officers. This bothered me less than it did with The Terror Network. This book is more modest in its ambitions, more tightly focused, the unattributable assertions […]

Iraq

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

[…] various neo-con and/or Israeli-supporting think tanks and action groups, notably the PNAC, had been pushing for more military action against Iraq; and the bits of the military- intelligence network in Washington under their control, such as the Defence Policy Board, within a week of 9/11 began planning how to use 9/11 as the pretext […]

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 […]

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 […]

A Pretext for War; Ghost Wars

Book cover
Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America’s intelligence agencies James Bamford, New York: Doubleday, 2004, h/back, $26.95 Ghost Wars: The Secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 Steve Coll New York: Penguin, 2004, h/back, $29.95   These books cover some […]

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