MI5 and the threat from the left in the 1970s

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] ‘MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain’ Jimmy Burns reported in The Financial Times 29 December 2006 on a contingency paper by MI5, presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee on April 9 1976. That paper included this: `Throughout the seventies there has been a growth in the general public uneasiness about the current aims […]

Curious Liaisons

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] crashed alien craft; retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former Director of the National Security Agency; and retired Rear Admiral Shapiro, former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence. As a former NSA head, Inman’s evidence in particular is quite a coup. For if any state agency in the U.S. could be presumed to know […]

Lobster Issue 39: Contents

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] direction Lobster has taken. When Lobster began in 1983 there seemed every point in collecting and publishing every available scrap of information on the British security and intelligence services: we had Reagan and Thatcher, a resurgent British imperialism on the coat-tails of America, and a repressive, authoritarian regime at home. Publicising what the British […]

Loose cuts and short ends

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] ‘Peter Wright’ was, according to The Times, 10 November 1952, ‘a professor of history in Cawnpore from 1937 to 1939. During the war he was in the intelligence service, and was Press censor at Delhi’. He was expelled by the colonial authorites in Kenya for being too friendly with members of Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya […]

Clippings Digest to May 31st. 1984

Lobster Issue 5 (1984)

[…] similar but not identical. Jurors for Bettaney trial vetted by MI5 Sunday Times 4th March “All post to and from the Eastern Bloc monitored by the UK intelligence services. Incoming mail from the USSR is … opened, sanitised (?) and the recipient’s name and address taken and passed on to MI5”. Computer Talk 5th […]

The CIA and the Culture of Failure

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] 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 […]

Agca: true confessions

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

[…] – which placed responsibility for the bombings on left-wing terrorists. As we now know, responsibility lay with those on the right-wing who had connections both to the intelligence services and Gelli. See Stuart Christie’s Portrait of a Black Terrorist, Refract, London 1984) SISMI had other links to Ali Agca in Ascoli prison as well […]

Who were they travelling with? SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party

Book cover
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] 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 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] But none of the reviewers that I can find referred to the section in which Haines says on page 140 that a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee told him that ‘he and the FCO believed she was an Israeli spy, but didn’t, or couldn’t, offer any evidence.’ Haines speculates that perhaps this […]

Spooks – U.K.

Lobster Issue 1 (1983)

[…] tactic of officials will be to brief Ministers on what insiders call ‘reality’ as opposed to ‘gossip’ in the Party’s document.” (More Hennessy ‘gossip’ .) 4. Secret Intelligence (Richard Norton-Taylor, G., June 6th 1983) Thatcher Advisers Refuse To Face M.P.’s Questions. (Peter Hennessy T. April 21 1983) The new Select Committees attempted to monitor […]

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