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 […]

Hess – the Fuhrer’s Disciple

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[…] and banal letters back to his family in Gemany. (3) Yet the KGB and State Department reports, based respectively on the testimony of Kim Philby, the Czech intelligence chief Colonel Moravetz, and Churchill’s personal link to the security and intelligence services, Sir Desmond Morton, all point to one fact: Hess came with Hitler’s backing […]

Clippings Digest to May 31st. 1984

Lobster Issue 5 (1984)

[…] similar but not identical. Jurors for Bettaney trial vetted by MI5 Sunday Times 4th March “All post to and from the Eastern Bloc monitored by the UK intelligence services. Incoming mail from the USSR is … opened, sanitised (?) and the recipient’s name and address taken and passed on to MI5”. Computer Talk 5th […]

The rise of warfare capitalism

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. Where Naomi Klein has gone one stage further is in grasping how the drum-beat of still further wars is being fueled by poor intelligence derived from ‘interrogations’ (i.e. torture) carried out by private intelligence consultants in privately run torture centres outside the US. This complements the cherry-picking of the best […]

Parallel development: the Workers Party and the Progressive Unionist Party in Northern Ireland

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] much on the right of that party, connived in the creation of the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s. Their collaborators included members of G2, Irish Army Intelligence. They particularly included Captain John Kelly – whose memoirs to this effect were subsequently self published and contents upheld in an Irish Court (Dillon, 1989; 1-24). […]

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 […]

Yo, Blair!

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] On both sides of the Atlantic, Iraq has demonstrated the primacy of politicians. We saw opposition to the attack on Iraq from sections of the Anglo-American military, intelligence agencies and diplomats, accompanied by the biggest campaign of leaks of classified information I can remember. Yet nothing happened. British participation in the invasion was not […]

The fiction of the state: The Paris Review and the invisible world of American letters

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] whose eccentric family reminded everyone of the Sitwells. His wife, Perdita, had, it turned out, been secretary to James Jesus Angleton, literary scholar and chief of counter intelligence at the CIA. (His deputy was the novelist, William Hood.) Ned Chase took me to the legendary Billy’s, watering hole to the literary world, and told […]

Agca: true confessions

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

[…] – which placed responsibility for the bombings on left-wing terrorists. As we now know, responsibility lay with those on the right-wing who had connections both to the intelligence services and Gelli. See Stuart Christie’s Portrait of a Black Terrorist, Refract, London 1984) SISMI had other links to Ali Agca in Ascoli prison as well […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] regime’s links to Al Qaeda and the existence of WMDs. Why did he believe claims which a large chunk of his colleagues and most of the world’s intelligence services didn’t, and which could be seen to be false by asking that nice Mr Google? ‘I took these stories seriously because they were corroborated by […]

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