The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott instead. The second significant snippet was the news that Jonathan Aitken had been hand-carrying messages from James Angleton, CIA’s head of counter- intelligence, to Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the opposition. What these said we don’t know but I think we may presume, as the programme did, that they […]

Tittle-tattle

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 […]

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 […]

Spooks – U.K.

Lobster Issue 1 (1983) £££

[…] tactic of officials will be to brief Ministers on what insiders call ‘reality’ as opposed to ‘gossip’ in the Party’s document.” (More Hennessy ‘gossip’ .) 4. Secret Intelligence (Richard Norton-Taylor, G., June 6th 1983) Thatcher Advisers Refuse To Face M.P.’s Questions. (Peter Hennessy T. April 21 1983) The new Select Committees attempted to monitor […]

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 dark side of Washington: Seymour Hersh and the Kennedy legacy

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] weaving in and out of graphic depictions of JFK’s colourful personal life. And Hersh presents a compelling picture of an almost seamless milieu of machine politics, off-the-wall intelligence operations and organised crime. So what’s new, then? The Castro assassination plots, for one, are viewed as actively driven by the Kennedys – Bobby in particular. […]

A note on Arthur Andersen and Co.

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] degree of involvement in a firm’s total business practice as opposed to just finance and accounting. This involved the collection and classification of both general and detailed intelligence on many hitherto peripheral matters. These included labour relations, availability of raw materials, plants, products, markets and the effectiveness of the organisation and its future prospects. […]

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 […]

Old spooks’ tales

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] However, many of these new claims are sourced to ‘interview with old spook’. Loftus (and co-author Mark Aarons) claim to have interviewed hundreds of elderly, unidentified, retired intelligence officers for the information in the book. Though this is deeply unsatisfactory, it is nonetheless a very striking read. Loftus did a long radio interview with […]

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