Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)
[…] (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been one of the continuing threads of British […]
Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)
[…] seems as surprising as it did in 1976. Just as the ‘mind control’ story is part of parapolitics because of the activities of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in the field (and their Soviet equivalents, no doubt), so some of the UFO literature of recent years has begun to resemble the literature of […]
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)
[…] Who of the British Secret State. Though I cannot remember why Dorril thought this and though there is nothing specific in Ashdown’s known career which says ‘ intelligence’, the career move from Special Boat Squadron to Foreign Office is pretty obvious.(1) The alleged SIS affiliation seems to have stuck, however. The doyen of British […]
Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)
[…] money from Kuwait into the Tory Party. (The Kuwaiti Investment Office is one of the major property owners in London.) With hindsight Among the books about British intelligence operations I, Kovaks by Leslie Aspin (London: Everest Books, 1975) was never taken terribly seriously. This was partly because there were fewer spook-wise journalists at 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 51 (Summer 2006)
[…] Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott instead. The second significant snippet was the news that Jonathan Aitken had been hand-carrying messages from James Angleton, CIA’s head of counter- intelligence, to Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the opposition. What these said we don’t know but I think we may presume, as the programme did, that they […]