The View From MI5

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] Tory MP, Foreign Affairs Circle, editor of East-West Digest), Lord Salisbury (then Chair of the Monday Club), Joseph Josten (now dead, then a Czech journalist and British intelligence agent, probably MI6), John Slessor (Marshall of the Royal Air Force, backer of Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance and a member of the mysterious Resistance and Psychological […]

Overthrowing Whitlam

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] John Pilger the excuse to put out his version of the overthrowing of the Gough Whitlam government. The most interesting point he made was that the UK intelligence services were involved with the CIA. Extraordinary though this now seems, this had never struck me. The links between the US, UK, New Zealand and Australian […]

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 […]

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 […]

Stalker, Conspiracy?

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] 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 International Centre of Free Trade Unionists in Exile

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro

Book review
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] few years of American’s imperial twilight. As his investigations proliferated and he discovered the usual overlaps between the various threads he was working on – organised crime, intelligence agencies; what we might call, after Peter Dale Scott, deep politics – he began to perceive what he thought were signs of centralised control over large […]

The Andropov Deception

Lobster Issue 10 (1986)

Publications The Andropov Deception John Rossiter (Sherwood Press, London 1984) ‘John Rossiter’ is Brian Crozier, long-time asset of British and American intelligence agencies. (see Times 29 October 1984), and this is quite the worst – and worst written – thriller I’ve read (even worse than The Spike). Rather like The Spike, The Andropov Deception […]

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