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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cold War stories 2

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] Europe. Ingeborg Philipsen spoke of the Danish Society for Freedom and Culture, established in January 1953 by the former resistance fighter Arne Sejr. Sejr operated a private intelligence group called The Firm, formed in 1948 to conduct psychological warfare in Denmark in connection with the Danish Intelligence Service and the CIA. But Sejr’s interest […]

The Libyans and the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] US; but all carried out by Republican governments. Is it possible that on both sides of the Atlantic the professional diplomats and the rational core of the intelligence community are slowly throwing off some of the vile nonsense perpetrated in the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher years? The release of various official US documents which could easily have […]

The Clash of the Icons

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] to reproduce conversations verbatim, a talent that made him a highly prized asset of the CIA station chief, John Hart, in Saigon. Hart and the CIA’s foreign intelligence staff wanted to know what influential Vietnamese citizens and officials were privately thinking, and plotting; so, through his CIA contacts, Ellsberg was introduced into Saigon’s most […]

Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] services is expressed by the fact that they – the politicians – refused to even listen to what Machon and Shayler had to say. As did the Intelligence and Security Committee. Oversight? Overlook, more like it. As always happens, the system then tries to shoot the messenger bearing the bad news. When it comes […]

Origins of the Vigilant State. Honeytrap. A Putney Plot

Lobster Issue 15 (1988)

[…] a number of interesting subsidiary trails. One is his discovery that ‘Nigel West’s’ book on the Special Branch is junk. In a paper in Vol.1 No.3 of Intelligence and National Security (see journals in this issue) Porter describes ‘West’s’ book as “the most unreliable history book ever written by anyone who has not deliberately […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] allowed his old friend from MI6 to escape to Soviet Russia. On the face of it these were two of the most monumental blunders perpetrated by British Intelligence since the War. Presumably the reality must have been different from the way in which the public perceived these events or he would surely have been […]

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 […]

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