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 […]

Eclipse: the last days of the CIA

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] the Reagan years when the in-coming Know-nothing administration decided they would impose their childish notions about the world onto the Agency and get it to produce ‘ intelligence’ to support their conspiracy theories about the ‘communist menace’. The very idea of attempting ‘the politics of the CIA’, let alone getting as close as Perry […]

Curious Liaisons

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] crashed alien craft; retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former Director of the National Security Agency; and retired Rear Admiral Shapiro, former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence. As a former NSA head, Inman’s evidence in particular is quite a coup. For if any state agency in the U.S. could be presumed to know […]

Loose cuts and short ends

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] ‘Peter Wright’ was, according to The Times, 10 November 1952, ‘a professor of history in Cawnpore from 1937 to 1939. During the war he was in the intelligence service, and was Press censor at Delhi’. He was expelled by the colonial authorites in Kenya for being too friendly with members of Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya […]

Print: Journals and book review

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] – no more as yet – that he was in Mosley’s post-war group. This information on his father makes that rumour a little more interesting. Foreign Literary Intelligence Scene Bi-monthly; subscription is $25.00 (US), though there is no indication of an overseas rate. May be best to write and inquire first if outside the […]

Politics and Paranoia

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] ISBN 9780955610547 There are a number of talks in Politics and Paranoia about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd. (Holroyd had been in the British Army Special Military Intelligence Unit and Wallace had been a Senior Information Officer for the Army, both in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.) Looking back on this now it is […]

One Boggis-Rolfe or two?: Philby: The Hidden Years

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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 […]

The CIA and Mountbatten

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] security scandals in the early sixties we tried to coax our computer to check on our findings on some of your top people in the services and intelligence services. The computer couldn’t tell us who was or wasn’t a spy, but it could assess people as to what extent they were a security risk. […]

Your Right To Know: How to use the Freedom of Information Act and other access laws

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] a vested interest in suppressing information for political convenience make the decision about what is a matter of national security…It is therefore lamentable that all security and intelligence services have been given a blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act via s23…..It provides an absolute exemption for information that was supplied directly or […]

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