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 […]

David Mills revisited

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] been likely to reveal the activities of one of its partners, Arcadi Gaydamak, a central figure in ‘Angolagate’, the arms-running scandal which rocked the French political and intelligence establishments in the late nineties and beyond. In the following, the substance and facts are taken from, ‘Making a Killing’ a long article written by Yossi […]

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 […]

The dark side of Washington: Seymour Hersh and the Kennedy legacy

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] weaving in and out of graphic depictions of JFK’s colourful personal life. And Hersh presents a compelling picture of an almost seamless milieu of machine politics, off-the-wall intelligence operations and organised crime. So what’s new, then? The Castro assassination plots, for one, are viewed as actively driven by the Kennedys – Bobby in particular. […]

MacV-Sog Command History: Annexes A, N, and M (1964-66)

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] but a volume devoted to SOG alone remained a missing quantity until Charles F. Reske came along. Reske is one of those people who shift easily between intelligence and academe. During the Vietnam years, he served with the Naval Security Group, the U.S. Navy’s agency for signals intelligence (SIGINT), and he has collected degrees […]

A note on Arthur Andersen and Co.

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] degree of involvement in a firm’s total business practice as opposed to just finance and accounting. This involved the collection and classification of both general and detailed intelligence on many hitherto peripheral matters. These included labour relations, availability of raw materials, plants, products, markets and the effectiveness of the organisation and its future prospects. […]

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 […]

House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

Book cover
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] a huge book elaborating Bosch’s thesis. Around that core are subsidiary themes. One is a personal memoir. The author’s father was General Carroll, head of the Defence Intelligence Agency in the 1960s, and as a child the author played in the corridors of the Pentagon, turning against American power and militarism during the Vietnam […]

The thirteenth pillar – the death of Di reconsidered

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] an MI6 informer paid to spy on Diana and Dodi. Other sources claim that Paul was also a Mossad agent and an informant for the French foreign intelligence service. As Head of Security at the Ritz, Paul would have been ideally placed to observe and monitor the comings and goings of the guests. Regular […]

Old spooks’ tales

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] However, many of these new claims are sourced to ‘interview with old spook’. Loftus (and co-author Mark Aarons) claim to have interviewed hundreds of elderly, unidentified, retired intelligence officers for the information in the book. Though this is deeply unsatisfactory, it is nonetheless a very striking read. Loftus did a long radio interview with […]

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