The Big Breach

Book cover
Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] new SIS recruits were briefed by the then SIS chief McColl. One of the new recruits put the obvious question: ‘ “Sir, why do we have an intelligence service at all? There are countries more important on the world stage, with much more powerful economies, who have only small or nonexistent external intelligence gathering […]

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 […]

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 […]

Intercepting Number Stations

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

MacV-Sog Command History: Annexes A, N, and M (1964-66)

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] but a volume devoted to SOG alone remained a missing quantity until Charles F. Reske came along. Reske is one of those people who shift easily between intelligence and academe. During the Vietnam years, he served with the Naval Security Group, the U.S. Navy’s agency for signals intelligence (SIGINT), and he has collected degrees […]

North American Spies: New Revisionist Essays

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] ranges widely from the obscure ‘secret operations of Spanish consular officials within Canada during the Spanish-American war’ to the useful account of the ‘birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency’. In between are a number of good essays on American intelligence which are well-serviced with notes and bibliography. It is hardly revisionist, though in an […]

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 […]

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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