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 CIA and the Culture of Failure

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] And since then this ‘threat’ has worked a treat, ramifying and multiplying into an new, vast, hydra-headed, near-invisible, global threat, justifying vast new expenditure and military and intelligence expansion all over the world. But threat generation isn’t enough in itself; the threat also has to be legitimised; and, despite the DIA and Air Force […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] But none of the reviewers that I can find referred to the section in which Haines says on page 140 that a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee told him that ‘he and the FCO believed she was an Israeli spy, but didn’t, or couldn’t, offer any evidence.’ Haines speculates that perhaps this […]

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 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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and, The Haunted Wood

Book cover
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, […]

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 […]

North American Spies: New Revisionist Essays

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] ranges widely from the obscure ‘secret operations of Spanish consular officials within Canada during the Spanish-American war’ to the useful account of the ‘birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency’. In between are a number of good essays on American intelligence which are well-serviced with notes and bibliography. It is hardly revisionist, though in an […]

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