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 […]

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and, The Haunted Wood

Book cover
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] 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, […]

Like books we should have so many witnesses?: Some recent JFK literature

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] lam when he met Oswald in Texas and New Orleans. He saw him daily and got to know him well. Lewis claims Clay Shaw was Guy Bannister’s intelligence boss and that both Jack Ruby and Roscoe White were Camp Street regulars. Presents a convincing picture of the shadowy intelligence world in the Crescent City. […]

David Mills revisited

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] been likely to reveal the activities of one of its partners, Arcadi Gaydamak, a central figure in ‘Angolagate’, the arms-running scandal which rocked the French political and intelligence establishments in the late nineties and beyond. In the following, the substance and facts are taken from, ‘Making a Killing’ a long article written by Yossi […]

Contemporary British History 1931-61: politics and the limits of policy

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] a part in the anti-Soviet operations of the early years of Cold War 1 — the small-scale British version of the conversion of the CIA from an intelligence agency into a covert operations adjunct to US foreign policy. (Aldrich is one of the handfuls of British academics who are trying to incorporate the activities […]

Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] 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 […]

The 1953 Coup in Iran: an Iranian insider’s view

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] Officers’ College, and currently is serving in His Majesty’s Guard.’ According to a CIA report dated February 1976, ‘The Shah’s communication and relations with his military and intelligence organs are conducted through one of his oldest friends, who was the Shah’s classmate. Hossein Fardust and the Shah attended the same school, Le Rose, in […]

The JFK literature: some recent titles

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] evidence shows that in each of these cases, the assassinations were ordered from London and carried out by professional assassins under the control of His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Services. In each instance, the targeted American President had been in a policy war with the British Crown at the time of his murder.’ Thus speaks […]

House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] a huge book elaborating Bosch’s thesis. Around that core are subsidiary themes. One is a personal memoir. The author’s father was General Carroll, head of the Defence Intelligence Agency in the 1960s, and as a child the author played in the corridors of the Pentagon, turning against American power and militarism during the Vietnam […]

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 […]

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