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 […]

More Notes on the Right

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] Major Edgar Bundy. In 1967 Major Bundy – “Major” from his US Air Force days – was director of the Church League of America (CLA), a far-right intelligence operation directed against America’s “subversives” -i.e. the left and the unions.(6) Remove the CLA’s veneer of Christianity (sic) and what is left looks rather like Britain’s […]

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 […]

Clippings Digest: August – November 1984

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

[…] national police force being organised piece-meal. Labour Research (October) notes that in 1983 report of Chief Inspector of Constabulary there is reference to establishment of Regional Criminal Intelligence officers in the police regions of England and Wales; and in April (1984) they all went ‘live’ on the Police National Computer. Phone-tapping In a piece […]

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 […]

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 […]

Clippings: The Lie Detector Story

Lobster Issue 3 (1984)

Clippings The Lie Detector Story In the wake of the Prime case, US intelligence has made polygraph (lie detector) introduction into GCHQ at Cheltenham a condition of future GCHQ-NSA cooperation. “At a meeting in July with Civil Service union leaders, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made it clear that Senior Whitehall officials were […]

Secrecy and Power in the British State: A History of the Official Secrets Act

Book cover
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 View From MI5

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] Tory MP, Foreign Affairs Circle, editor of East-West Digest), Lord Salisbury (then Chair of the Monday Club), Joseph Josten (now dead, then a Czech journalist and British intelligence agent, probably MI6), John Slessor (Marshall of the Royal Air Force, backer of Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance and a member of the mysterious Resistance and Psychological […]

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and, The Haunted Wood

Book cover
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, […]

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