Sources: Journals

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] and ‘weeded’ — being doled out to the handfuls of people who are interested in this country’s history. Top Secret: An Interim Guide to Recent Releases of Intelligence Records at the Public Record Office, by Louise Atherton, is rather a large drib — practically a torrent by UK standards. This has 17 sections, 31 […]

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 […]

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, […]

The New Spies: Exploring the Frontiers of Espionage

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] sources. In fact this is more interesting than I expected. In this instance Adams has persuaded some of the big cheeses from the CIA and the Russian intelligence service to talk to him, as well as SIS and MI5, and the result is a kind of survey of the new world disorder. I’m not […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] a huge book elaborating Bosch’s thesis. Around that core are subsidiary themes. One is a personal memoir. The author’s father was General Carroll, head of the Defence Intelligence Agency in the 1960s, and as a child the author played in the corridors of the Pentagon, turning against American power and militarism during the Vietnam […]

Spy Wars

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] and deadly games Tennent H. Begley London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, h/b, £18.99   Begley was one of James Angleton’s allies in CIA counter intelligence and this book is the Angletonian view of the Nosenko case, one of the touchstones or causes célèbres of the CIA in the post-war era. Briefly, […]

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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