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 30 (December 1995)
CIA set for Pentagon buyout? Lester Coleman, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) man who co-authored Trail of the Octopus (about CIA drug-channel involvement in the Lockerbie bombing) writes in the latest Unclassified (quarterly publication of the Association of Former National Security Alumni, no. 34, Fall 1995), that the CIA feels itself threatened by a […]
Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)
[…] and becoming a barrister. Though not yet a qualified lawyer, during his brief career at the MOD, his work was sometimes connected with legal aspects of the intelligence services. He was a minor member of that London NW1/NW5 set(2) and still lives in Kentish Town within a hundred yards or so of retired Labour/SDP […]
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)
[…] political dimension. Did the Conservative government approve of this? Did they know of this? Larkin presumes so but cannot demonstrate it. Larkin lacks a senior British Army, intelligence officer or civil servant, let alone a cabinet minister, willing to admit this was the policy. (1) For example, he writes p.42: ‘this elite group had […]
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 38 (Winter 1999)
[…] the political and social damage inflicted on the then British ruling elite by the various defections, and the revelations surrounding them, surpassed in the end any immediate intelligence damage sustained during their time in place. The British ‘culture of secrecy’ was badly damaged. Riley touches on this theme but doesn’t develop it. Did the […]