The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott instead. The second significant snippet was the news that Jonathan Aitken had been hand-carrying messages from James Angleton, CIA’s head of counter- intelligence, to Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the opposition. What these said we don’t know but I think we may presume, as the programme did, that they […]

Spooks – U.K.

Lobster Issue 1 (1983) £££

[…] tactic of officials will be to brief Ministers on what insiders call ‘reality’ as opposed to ‘gossip’ in the Party’s document.” (More Hennessy ‘gossip’ .) 4. Secret Intelligence (Richard Norton-Taylor, G., June 6th 1983) Thatcher Advisers Refuse To Face M.P.’s Questions. (Peter Hennessy T. April 21 1983) The new Select Committees attempted to monitor […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

[…] on Transport; LFI veteran Mike Gapes stays on as chair of Foreign Affairs, and who is that old radical lefty who is now chairing the Security and Intelligence Committee? Step forward one-time Hornsey College of Art rebel and comrade of the striking miners, Dr Kim Howells. Described by The Jewish Chronicle as ‘a staunch […]

From Parapolitics to Deep Politics: Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

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Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] world: ‘Among the ‘deep’ or repressed sociological features of our universities and cultural life are the following facts published by the Church Committee in 1976: The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred academics, who, in addition to providing leads and occasionally making introductions for intelligence purposes, occasionally write books and other materials […]

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] right wing conspiracy theories: Oswald was involved in the conspiracy to murder the President; and he was an FBI informant and a CIA or Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agent; but he was also working for the communists as a double agent of the KGB or GRU! Russell proposes that, having been sent to […]

The Big Breach

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] new SIS recruits were briefed by the then SIS chief McColl. One of the new recruits put the obvious question: ‘ “Sir, why do we have an intelligence service at all? There are countries more important on the world stage, with much more powerful economies, who have only small or nonexistent external intelligence gathering […]

The Conspirators: secrets of an Iran-Contra insider

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] National Liberty Press, 2001, $14.95, ISBN 0-97-10042-0-X Alexander ‘Al’ Martin is a retired Lt. Commander in the US Navy, a former member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle-ranking player in the thicket of scandals known as Iran-Contra. This might be the most startling book written about post-war American politics; and it […]

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 […]

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 […]

Contemporary British History 1931-61: politics and the limits of policy

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] a part in the anti-Soviet operations of the early years of Cold War 1 — the small-scale British version of the conversion of the CIA from an intelligence agency into a covert operations adjunct to US foreign policy. (Aldrich is one of the handfuls of British academics who are trying to incorporate the activities […]

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