Welcome to Lobster, the journal that looks at the impact of the intelligence and security services on history and politics. From espionage to dirty tricks to conspiracy theories. What else is in Lobster? Check out the keywords in the box in the sidebar, right. Lobster issues are free. Over 80 issues of Lobster magazine […]
[…] thought their codes unbreakable and chatted way in great detail about their agents. But by 1950 enough of the Soviet material had been decoded for the US intelligence community to begin piecing together the Soviet networks in the US. These intercepts – code named Venona – many of which remain unbroken to this day, […]
[…] the National Front, said the attack was because the Americans “were responsible for the continued situation in Cyprus.” “Previously unknown organisation” is usually a euphemism for ‘an intelligence operation’. Daily Telegraph (16 February 1985). US preparing contingency plans to remove its bases from Greece in 1988 when present leasing arrangements expire. Oh sure. Anybody […]
[…] of the party which found its voice within the Labour movement through Socialist Commentary and, more widely, through Encounter magazine, one of the wide range of Central Intelligence Agency-funded activities fronted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom from the early days of the Cold War. His perspective is one wholly, almost perversely, absent from […]
[…] inaction, claiming that they ‘had the most powerful interest in the tape’. On 15 May, Stalker saw another MI5 officer in Belfast, the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI), who, after consultation with Hermon, said that the way was now open to ‘complete consultation’ but subject to ‘unspecified safeguards’. MI5 were to be merely […]
[…] the FBI and CIA. In many instances, these and other government agencies did everything possible to stop him, and others, from obtaining relevant information. Loftus commented: ‘ Intelligence agencies change their record-keeping procedures with astonishing rapidity. Only the file clerks who suffer through each of these reorganizations can track down and locate the cold […]
[…] abuse of boys at the Kincora children’s home in Northern Ireland. Somehow copies of his articles reached Captain Holroyd who contacted him. Holroyd had been in military intelligence in Northern Ireland, where he had become a victim of the internecine politics of the period. Holroyd was in touch with Colin Wallace, who had been […]
[…] without blushing and putting it in scare quotes. (Shayler’s complaints about MI5 can be seen in his submission to the Cabinet Office Review of the security and intelligence services, printed here as appendix 2: they are almost entirely bureaucratic and technical.) In a recent column of his in Punch – issue 93 in the […]
[…] And since then this ‘threat’ has worked a treat, ramifying and multiplying into an new, vast, hydra-headed, near-invisible, global threat, justifying vast new expenditure and military and intelligence expansion all over the world. But threat generation isn’t enough in itself; the threat also has to be legitimised; and, despite the DIA and Air Force […]
[…] of real interest to researchers, such as the Council on Foreign Relations; and, thirdly, because some versions of ultra-right conspiracy theory have been not without influence in intelligence and government circles. When one attempts to analyse right-wing conspiracy theory it soon becomes clear that much of it is vacuous in the extreme, with little […]
