Brands and Britannia: Some aspects of national image and identity

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] sold to Spaniards who have no national interest in promoting London’s Heathrow as a gateway to Britain. See Private Eye 27 September 2007. It is possible the intelligence reform highlighted by Nick Clegg MP has been stood down. He was quoted in The Times 11 September 2007 with a plan ‘which would mean a […]

Lobster Issue 39: Contents

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] direction Lobster has taken. When Lobster began in 1983 there seemed every point in collecting and publishing every available scrap of information on the British security and intelligence services: we had Reagan and Thatcher, a resurgent British imperialism on the coat-tails of America, and a repressive, authoritarian regime at home. Publicising what the British […]

Agca: true confessions

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

[…] – which placed responsibility for the bombings on left-wing terrorists. As we now know, responsibility lay with those on the right-wing who had connections both to the intelligence services and Gelli. See Stuart Christie’s Portrait of a Black Terrorist, Refract, London 1984) SISMI had other links to Ali Agca in Ascoli prison as well […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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