Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)
[…] on Transport; LFI veteran Mike Gapes stays on as chair of Foreign Affairs, and who is that old radical lefty who is now chairing the Security and Intelligence Committee? Step forward one-time Hornsey College of Art rebel and comrade of the striking miners, Dr Kim Howells. Described by The Jewish Chronicle as ‘a staunch […]
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, […]
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 […]
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)
Langley Pierce Interproducts, Perth, Scotland, 1994, £9.95 Strange little book, 90 pages listing and, it claims, identifying the shortwave radio stations used by the world’s intelligence services to broadcast coded messages – groups of numbers – to field agents and stations. Want to eavesdrop on Mossad’s numbers? SIS’s? The KGB’s? etc etc. Is any […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]