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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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. […]

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 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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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