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 […]

Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] Office, annual seizures of 20,000 tabs means that ‘the use of LSD in Britain was restricted to a small number of people’. Lee approached the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit (CDIU), who ‘denied having any information which showed LSD to be a problem’. It would take Lee another three years to fully discover that ‘since […]

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, […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] blocs in the fifties. Brandt notes that the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded a series of feminist organisations in the 1970s and asserts that the ‘the intelligence community needed to balkanize the 1960s student movement, because students were starting to do research into the American power structure and connect the dots.’ The evidence […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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