Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)
[…] think it was ‘an inside job’. But this does not mean that there is nothing to be investigated. As with most official reports into events with sensitive intelligence and/ or political dimensions – and 9/11 had both, in spades – the report into 9/11 was concerned with establishing the official narrative (Al Qaeda attacks) […]
Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)
[…] one of the architects of the British Secret State. He played, we are informed, ‘a far more important and active part in the creation of Britain’s modern intelligence community than is generally recognized’; and, moreover, his ‘lifetime shadow war’ in defence of British interests, culminated with Operation Boot, the overthrow of Mussadiq in Iran.(1) […]
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)
[…] why some in the private security business may know something about it, is because its absence is where they make their money. As the industry counts ‘business intelligence’ as an area of expertise, there was something highly ironic about the industry personnel demonstrating their ignorance of CSR, and its importance to their clients, in […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)
[…] died after making inquiries into a helicopter deal between the Iraqis and Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen. You discuss this as one of several anomalous deaths among intelligence assets in the context of asking why anyone would want to work for the spooks. Naiveté is the obvious answer, but you failed to mention that […]
Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)
[PDF file]: In Spies We Trust: the story of western intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Oxford University Press, 2013, £20, h/b Bernard Porter Britain and America came quite late to the spying game, but by the late 20th century had come to dominate it. It is this, I suppose, that justifies the subtitle of this book, which scarcely […]
Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)
[PDF file]: The Black Door Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac London: William Collins, £30 T his new book by two respected academics has a lot to tell us about how Britain is run. We are told, for example, that at a CBI dinner in December 1971, the Labour Party […]
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)
[…] Office, annual seizures of 20,000 tabs means that ‘the use of LSD in Britain was restricted to a small number of people’. Lee approached the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit (CDIU), who ‘denied having any information which showed LSD to be a problem’. It would take Lee another three years to fully discover that ‘since […]