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 […]

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, […]

Who were they travelling with? SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

[…] of the party which found its voice within the Labour movement through Socialist Commentary and, more widely, through Encounter magazine, one of the wide range of Central Intelligence Agency-funded activities fronted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom from the early days of the Cold War. His perspective is one wholly, almost perversely, absent from […]

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 […]

Stalker, Conspiracy?

Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

[…] inaction, claiming that they ‘had the most powerful interest in the tape’. On 15 May, Stalker saw another MI5 officer in Belfast, the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI), who, after consultation with Hermon, said that the way was now open to ‘complete consultation’ but subject to ‘unspecified safeguards’. MI5 were to be merely […]

The CIA and the Culture of Failure

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] And since then this ‘threat’ has worked a treat, ramifying and multiplying into an new, vast, hydra-headed, near-invisible, global threat, justifying vast new expenditure and military and intelligence expansion all over the world. But threat generation isn’t enough in itself; the threat also has to be legitimised; and, despite the DIA and Air Force […]

The International Centre of Free Trade Unionists in Exile

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

[…] the FBI and CIA. In many instances, these and other government agencies did everything possible to stop him, and others, from obtaining relevant information. Loftus commented: ‘ Intelligence agencies change their record-keeping procedures with astonishing rapidity. Only the file clerks who suffer through each of these reorganizations can track down and locate the cold […]

The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro

Book review
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] few years of American’s imperial twilight. As his investigations proliferated and he discovered the usual overlaps between the various threads he was working on – organised crime, intelligence agencies; what we might call, after Peter Dale Scott, deep politics – he began to perceive what he thought were signs of centralised control over large […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

[…] But none of the reviewers that I can find referred to the section in which Haines says on page 140 that a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee told him that ‘he and the FCO believed she was an Israeli spy, but didn’t, or couldn’t, offer any evidence.’ Haines speculates that perhaps this […]

Miscellany

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] the National Front, said the attack was because the Americans “were responsible for the continued situation in Cyprus.” “Previously unknown organisation” is usually a euphemism for ‘an intelligence operation’. Daily Telegraph (16 February 1985). US preparing contingency plans to remove its bases from Greece in 1988 when present leasing arrangements expire. Oh sure. Anybody […]

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