No one ever suddenly became depraved

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

‘Britain, 2005. Saddam Hussein, still the ruler of Iraq and possessor of a long-range nuclear missile, seeks revenge on the west. Warned by intelligence reports of Saddam’s plan, the United States deploys a space-based missile shield, which will catch the Iraqi rocket before it gets to Washington. The key installation is based in Yorkshire […]

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 […]

Freedom of Information — new access legislation

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

[…] you where it is. Absolute exemptions are not subject to any public interest test, and include information supplied by, or concerning: the Security Service, MI5; the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6; GCHQ; the Special Forces, e.g. the SAS; tribunals concerning intelligence and interception of communications including the Investigatory Powers Tribunal; and the National Criminal Intelligence […]

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 […]

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 […]

The History of Espionage

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

The clandestine world of surveillance, spying and intelligence from ancient times to the post 9/11 world Ernest Volkman London: Carlton, 2007, h/b, £20   This is a lavishly and creatively illustrated, large format, (i.e. slightly bigger than A4) glossy paper, coffee-table book on the history of espionage. A former journalist with Newsday, and author […]

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 […]

The Man from the FRU

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] past couple of years. In ‘Exposing the dirty war’ (The Sunday Times Review, 13 April 2003) just before Stevens’ publication, Ware wrote of: ‘…..a group of shadowy intelligence operatives who believed they were accountable to nobody‘ (emphases added). And in case we hadn’t got the message, Liam Clarke told us in The Sunday Times […]

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] the history of the Agency, merely a history. Huge areas of the Agency’s activities have been ignored, as Jeffrey Richelson, one of the best informed historians of intelligence points out.(7) Richelson’s complaint is that the author has concentrated too much on the Agency’s covert operations. This is clearly true if we are to take […]

Miscellaneous: Cold war. Disinformation. Elite. Unclassified. G.K. Young, Unison

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

[…] by Basque ETA terrorists on behalf of the Sandinistas. Curiously the reports were based on leaks – phone-calls to major newspapers in Washington and the U.S. from Intelligence sources, including the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy’. The latter is a kind of updated IRD, and ‘public diplomacy’ is a 1980s euphemism for disinformation […]

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