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, […]

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 […]

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 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] ISBN 9780955610547 There are a number of talks in Politics and Paranoia about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd. (Holroyd had been in the British Army Special Military Intelligence Unit and Wallace had been a Senior Information Officer for the Army, both in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.) Looking back on this now it is […]

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 […]

Your Right To Know: How to use the Freedom of Information Act and other access laws

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] a vested interest in suppressing information for political convenience make the decision about what is a matter of national security…It is therefore lamentable that all security and intelligence services have been given a blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act via s23…..It provides an absolute exemption for information that was supplied directly or […]

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 […]

Print: Journals and book review

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] – no more as yet – that he was in Mosley’s post-war group. This information on his father makes that rumour a little more interesting. Foreign Literary Intelligence Scene Bi-monthly; subscription is $25.00 (US), though there is no indication of an overseas rate. May be best to write and inquire first if outside the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] In The Sunday Telegraph of 20 March he ran a piece, ‘Iran plans secret “nuclear university” to train scientists’, which was attributed to ‘reports received by Western intelligence’. Crazy wavies, right? Meanwhile, out there in the wonderful world of commercial science, the ability to do what mind control victims have been complaining of for […]

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 […]

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