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, […]

Secrecy and Power in the British State: A History of the Official Secrets Act

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] pp. 8-9: ‘The interplay between policy-making, political power and its expression in the different institutional frameworks of the British state — the Cabinet, Whitehall, the security and intelligence services and so on — gives rise to national security policies that exhibit identifiable characteristics based on social class and political beliefs …..British policy-makers have entrenched […]

Plot elements in the Colosio Murder Mystery

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] Some sources within Mexico City report that Carlos Salinas is in fact still a visitor there, protected by a large bodyguard of military and federal police, with intelligence provided by the USA… 1993 24 May Cardinal JUAN JESUS POSADOS OCAMPO and six others are assassinated at Guadalajara International Airport, by members of the ARELLANO […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Soviet ‘threat’: “Russia Puts The Brake On Military Spending”

Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££

[…] over the estimates of Soviet military capability tends to get overlooked in favour of the more exciting aspects of US foreign policy and the work of US intelligence agencies. This is a pity, because those estimates form the basis for the official US government definition of ‘reality’. A low estimate of Soviet spending/capabilities makes […]

Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Media

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Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair London:Verso, 1999, £10   Much has been written about the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the global drugs trade but this is the first book that actually brings it all together in one place. The authors haven’t exposed much that is new, instead they have taken […]

SAS: the Stiff Memoir

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] reason seems likely to be Stiff’s later career in the SAS, as an employee of David Stirling’s Watchguard International, and as a member of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CI0). Stiff reveals, among other things, his involvement in a campaign of bombing and assassination in Zambia and in an abortive conspiracy to assassinate Robert […]

Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] Repington (‘….career ended due to an indiscretion, 1902…’ according to the Dictionary of National Biography), the military correspondent of the Morning Post. Repington fed smears, gossip and intelligence to Pemberton-Billing. There were still some desultory peace talks with Germany under way. Repington (and those who backed him) wanted these stopped. Many allegations were aimed […]

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