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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Plotting for Peace and War

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] aristocrats and eccentric M.Ps or forces which were much more powerfully rooted in the structure of the British State? What was their relationship with the security and intelligence services? Why did Churchill feel the need to have his own intelligence adviser, Sir Desmond Morton? Costello seems to believe that the pro-appeasement faction was powerful […]

Is Libya still the prime suspect for the murder of WPC Fletcher?

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] sensational episode. Fairly quickly after this appalling crime, expressions of disquiet with official explanations were voiced. If guns had been taken into the Libyan embassy, surely the intelligence agencies would have known? If there had been a Libyan embassy plan to fire at the anti-Gaddafi demonstrators on that fateful day on 17 April 1984, […]

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 […]

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 […]

New Labour news

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour […]

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 […]

Great Northern? Was the author of Swallows and Amazons a Soviet secret agent?

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] claim in The Times by the Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, that Arthur Ransome has been identified in KGB documents as ‘the most important secret source of intelligence on British foreign policy’ for the Cheka, the terror organisation of Bolshevik Russia, has infuriated lovers of Ransome’s work. Unlike Michael Foot, similarly traduced, Ramsome is […]

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