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

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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 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 CIA and Mountbatten

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] security scandals in the early sixties we tried to coax our computer to check on our findings on some of your top people in the services and intelligence services. The computer couldn’t tell us who was or wasn’t a spy, but it could assess people as to what extent they were a security risk. […]

Stalker, Conspiracy?

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] inaction, claiming that they ‘had the most powerful interest in the tape’. On 15 May, Stalker saw another MI5 officer in Belfast, the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI), who, after consultation with Hermon, said that the way was now open to ‘complete consultation’ but subject to ‘unspecified safeguards’. MI5 were to be merely […]

Hess, ‘Hess’ and the ‘peace Party’ (Book review)

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] for a while. Involved in some of it had been the Duke of Windsor. His supporters in the Tory Party included the Imperial Policy Group, whose Secretary/ intelligence officer was Kenneth de Courcy. Just before the war de Courcy was running round Europe testing the waters, writing reports for Neville Chamberlain. (1) ‘IPG had […]

The International Centre of Free Trade Unionists in Exile

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] the FBI and CIA. In many instances, these and other government agencies did everything possible to stop him, and others, from obtaining relevant information. Loftus commented: ‘ Intelligence agencies change their record-keeping procedures with astonishing rapidity. Only the file clerks who suffer through each of these reorganizations can track down and locate the cold […]

The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro

Book review
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] few years of American’s imperial twilight. As his investigations proliferated and he discovered the usual overlaps between the various threads he was working on – organised crime, intelligence agencies; what we might call, after Peter Dale Scott, deep politics – he began to perceive what he thought were signs of centralised control over large […]

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, […]

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in […]

Like books we should have so many witnesses?: Some recent JFK literature

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] lam when he met Oswald in Texas and New Orleans. He saw him daily and got to know him well. Lewis claims Clay Shaw was Guy Bannister’s intelligence boss and that both Jack Ruby and Roscoe White were Camp Street regulars. Presents a convincing picture of the shadowy intelligence world in the Crescent City. […]

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