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, […]

The CIA and the Culture of Failure

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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 […]

Drugging America: a Trojan Horse

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] embarrassment to ‘national security’ while trying to prosecute the ‘war on drugs’. It also contains the best account I have read of how the actions of the intelligence agencies in the United States, chiefly the CIA, produce unanticipated consequences. I will try to summarise this. A group of Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans created […]

Christic’s version of Dealey Plaza

Lobster Issue 15 (1988)

[…] as Sources #67 and #68, who are tenured professors at accredited universities in the U.S. who conduct professional research into government documents, interview persons in the U.S. intelligence community, and teach accredited courses regarding the history of the activities of our American intelligence community – as well as Source #69, who is a retired […]

An Incorrect Political Memoir

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] microcomputer revolution came along I was technically ahead of every other leftist in the country. That isn’t saying much; ‘technically advanced leftist’ is a lot like ‘military intelligence.’ But I could design and build circuits and write software. With the microcomputer, something I had been trying to do the hard way was suddenly within […]

Margaret Thatcher: Vol 1: The Grocer’s Daughter

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Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] (p. 372) – an absurd description for a man who, by his own admission, spent virtually the whole of the post-war period working for British and American intelligence. His role in educating Thatcher on security and intelligence issues with his Shield group of old spooks is omitted and his memoir is not included in […]

On the Trail of the JFK Assassins

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] come and arrest him. Years later he claimed he got himself jailed to be off the streets when JFK was killed. He claimed he had been an intelligence officer who had been working with Lee Harvey Oswald and been asked by the KGB to kill Oswald to try to derail the assassination plot. (This […]

Defector Politics: or, grooving with Mr G.

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] ‘MI5 has a policy of doing nothing at all to punish or deter agents of influence….’ because ‘it is not illegal to co-operate in peace-time with hostile intelligence agencies to feed Western media with disinformation’. So, now you know: once again the public sector shows itself to be incompetent (or infiltrated) and the private […]

Re:

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] Spooks Richard L. Russell, an academic based at the Near East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, the National Defense University, examines the strengths and weaknesses of American intelligence during the first Gulf War. As you would expect from someone who worked for the CIA (he was a political-military analyst specialising in Middle East and […]

Our Searchlight problem

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] year Searchlight staffer Graeme Atkinson replied to this debate, writing of ‘the hoary old ‘Gable memorandum’ ‘ and asserting that ‘not a single accusation about Searchight’s ‘ intelligence connections’ holds water.’ (5) In August this year Searchlight published a column by Ray Hill in which Larry O’Hara was attacked for a short piece he […]

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