Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and, The Haunted Wood

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] thought their codes unbreakable and chatted way in great detail about their agents. But by 1950 enough of the Soviet material had been decoded for the US intelligence community to begin piecing together the Soviet networks in the US. These intercepts – code named Venona – many of which remain unbroken to this day, […]

Clippings Digest: August – November 1984

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

[…] national police force being organised piece-meal. Labour Research (October) notes that in 1983 report of Chief Inspector of Constabulary there is reference to establishment of Regional Criminal Intelligence officers in the police regions of England and Wales; and in April (1984) they all went ‘live’ on the Police National Computer. Phone-tapping In a piece […]

Secrecy and Power in the British State: A History of the Official Secrets Act

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[…] pp. 8-9: ‘The interplay between policy-making, political power and its expression in the different institutional frameworks of the British state — the Cabinet, Whitehall, the security and intelligence services and so on — gives rise to national security policies that exhibit identifiable characteristics based on social class and political beliefs …..British policy-makers have entrenched […]

Brands and Britannia: Some aspects of national image and identity

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] sold to Spaniards who have no national interest in promoting London’s Heathrow as a gateway to Britain. See Private Eye 27 September 2007. It is possible the intelligence reform highlighted by Nick Clegg MP has been stood down. He was quoted in The Times 11 September 2007 with a plan ‘which would mean a […]

Clippings: The Lie Detector Story

Lobster Issue 3 (1984)

Clippings The Lie Detector Story In the wake of the Prime case, US intelligence has made polygraph (lie detector) introduction into GCHQ at Cheltenham a condition of future GCHQ-NSA cooperation. “At a meeting in July with Civil Service union leaders, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made it clear that Senior Whitehall officials were […]

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 […]

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] right wing conspiracy theories: Oswald was involved in the conspiracy to murder the President; and he was an FBI informant and a CIA or Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agent; but he was also working for the communists as a double agent of the KGB or GRU! Russell proposes that, having been sent to […]

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 […]

Overthrowing Whitlam

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] John Pilger the excuse to put out his version of the overthrowing of the Gough Whitlam government. The most interesting point he made was that the UK intelligence services were involved with the CIA. Extraordinary though this now seems, this had never struck me. The links between the US, UK, New Zealand and Australian […]

From Parapolitics to Deep Politics: Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

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Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] world: ‘Among the ‘deep’ or repressed sociological features of our universities and cultural life are the following facts published by the Church Committee in 1976: The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred academics, who, in addition to providing leads and occasionally making introductions for intelligence purposes, occasionally write books and other materials […]

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