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 […]

Curious Liaisons

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] crashed alien craft; retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former Director of the National Security Agency; and retired Rear Admiral Shapiro, former head of the Office of Naval Intelligence. As a former NSA head, Inman’s evidence in particular is quite a coup. For if any state agency in the U.S. could be presumed to know […]

Loose cuts and short ends

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] ‘Peter Wright’ was, according to The Times, 10 November 1952, ‘a professor of history in Cawnpore from 1937 to 1939. During the war he was in the intelligence service, and was Press censor at Delhi’. He was expelled by the colonial authorites in Kenya for being too friendly with members of Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya […]

Politics and Paranoia

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] ISBN 9780955610547 There are a number of talks in Politics and Paranoia about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd. (Holroyd had been in the British Army Special Military Intelligence Unit and Wallace had been a Senior Information Officer for the Army, both in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.) Looking back on this now it is […]

One Boggis-Rolfe or two?: Philby: The Hidden Years

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] the political and social damage inflicted on the then British ruling elite by the various defections, and the revelations surrounding them, surpassed in the end any immediate intelligence damage sustained during their time in place. The British ‘culture of secrecy’ was badly damaged. Riley touches on this theme but doesn’t develop it. Did the […]

Your Right To Know: How to use the Freedom of Information Act and other access laws

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] a vested interest in suppressing information for political convenience make the decision about what is a matter of national security…It is therefore lamentable that all security and intelligence services have been given a blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act via s23…..It provides an absolute exemption for information that was supplied directly or […]

Welcome to Lobster

Lobster Issue

Welcome to Lobster, the journal that looks at the impact of the intelligence and security services on history and politics. From espionage to dirty tricks to conspiracy theories. What else is in Lobster? Check out the keywords in the box in the sidebar, right. Lobster issues are free. Over 80 issues of Lobster magazine […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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