Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Sources: Journals

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] and ‘weeded’ — being doled out to the handfuls of people who are interested in this country’s history. Top Secret: An Interim Guide to Recent Releases of Intelligence Records at the Public Record Office, by Louise Atherton, is rather a large drib — practically a torrent by UK standards. This has 17 sections, 31 […]

The New Spies: Exploring the Frontiers of Espionage

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] sources. In fact this is more interesting than I expected. In this instance Adams has persuaded some of the big cheeses from the CIA and the Russian intelligence service to talk to him, as well as SIS and MI5, and the result is a kind of survey of the new world disorder. I’m not […]

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 […]

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 […]

Hess – the Fuhrer’s Disciple

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[…] and banal letters back to his family in Gemany. (3) Yet the KGB and State Department reports, based respectively on the testimony of Kim Philby, the Czech intelligence chief Colonel Moravetz, and Churchill’s personal link to the security and intelligence services, Sir Desmond Morton, all point to one fact: Hess came with Hitler’s backing […]

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