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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Politics and Paranoia

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] In the mid 1980s I was one of the few people in the Labour Party who were trying to educate themselves about the role played by the intelligence and security services in our democracy. In 1985/86 I was corresponding with my equivalents in New Zealand and getting material from them on the attempts being […]

Intercepting Number Stations

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

Langley Pierce Interproducts, Perth, Scotland, 1994, £9.95 Strange little book, 90 pages listing and, it claims, identifying the shortwave radio stations used by the world’s intelligence services to broadcast coded messages – groups of numbers – to field agents and stations. Want to eavesdrop on Mossad’s numbers? SIS’s? The KGB’s? etc etc. Is any […]

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 […]

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 […]

A short history of Lobster

Lobster Issue

[…] abuse of boys at the Kincora children’s home in Northern Ireland. Somehow copies of his articles reached Captain Holroyd who contacted him. Holroyd had been in military intelligence in Northern Ireland, where he had become a victim of the internecine politics of the period. Holroyd was in touch with Colin Wallace, who had been […]

The rise of warfare capitalism

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. Where Naomi Klein has gone one stage further is in grasping how the drum-beat of still further wars is being fueled by poor intelligence derived from ‘interrogations’ (i.e. torture) carried out by private intelligence consultants in privately run torture centres outside the US. This complements the cherry-picking of the best […]

Behind right-wing conspiracy theories

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] of real interest to researchers, such as the Council on Foreign Relations; and, thirdly, because some versions of ultra-right conspiracy theory have been not without influence in intelligence and government circles. When one attempts to analyse right-wing conspiracy theory it soon becomes clear that much of it is vacuous in the extreme, with little […]

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