Hess, ‘Hess’ and the ‘peace Party’ (Book review)

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] for a while. Involved in some of it had been the Duke of Windsor. His supporters in the Tory Party included the Imperial Policy Group, whose Secretary/ intelligence officer was Kenneth de Courcy. Just before the war de Courcy was running round Europe testing the waters, writing reports for Neville Chamberlain. (1) ‘IPG had […]

Eclipse: the last days of the CIA

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] the Reagan years when the in-coming Know-nothing administration decided they would impose their childish notions about the world onto the Agency and get it to produce ‘ intelligence’ to support their conspiracy theories about the ‘communist menace’. The very idea of attempting ‘the politics of the CIA’, let alone getting as close as Perry […]

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 […]

Spy Wars

Book cover
Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] and deadly games Tennent H. Begley London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, h/b, £18.99   Begley was one of James Angleton’s allies in CIA counter intelligence and this book is the Angletonian view of the Nosenko case, one of the touchstones or causes célèbres of the CIA in the post-war era. Briefly, […]

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 […]

One Boggis-Rolfe or two?: Philby: The Hidden Years

Book cover
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 […]

Politics and Paranoia

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] In the mid 1980s I was one of the few people in the Labour Party who were trying to educate themselves about the role played by the intelligence and security services in our democracy. In 1985/86 I was corresponding with my equivalents in New Zealand and getting material from them on the attempts being […]

The rise of warfare capitalism

Book cover
Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. Where Naomi Klein has gone one stage further is in grasping how the drum-beat of still further wars is being fueled by poor intelligence derived from ‘interrogations’ (i.e. torture) carried out by private intelligence consultants in privately run torture centres outside the US. This complements the cherry-picking of the best […]

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 […]

Miscellany

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] 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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar