The History of Espionage

Book cover
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 […]

Reading Italy

Lobster Issue 6 (1984) £££

[…] from BCM/Refract, London WC1N 3XX, price £4.50. Christie has amassed a great deal of information about the European fascist and neo-fascist movements and their links to the intelligence services of various NATO countries. Delle Chiaie is a thread running through the book but by no means its sole subject. The narrative is well held […]

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Book cover
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 […]

Historical Notes: Channel 4 SOE mystery. Venona Decrypts

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££

[…] Dansey have given such a bizarre and terrible mission to Dericourt? Timewatch argued that Dansey hated SOE, regarding it as a nuisance which disrupted the gathering of intelligence from Occupied Europe. If one of SOE’s most important operations could be sabotaged, then the organisation could be taken over by MI6, and attention could be […]

MISC.: Wapping. Gordiefsky. October Surprise. Stone’s JFK. Martin Luther King

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] pro quo for the pension he is now receiving, is to bolster the key myth of MI6, that while we may be the junior partner in the intelligence relationship with the U.S., we’re the best, the most subtle and the most reliable — the people to handle those uncouth Yanks, to hold their hands […]

Trouble makers

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] gave an example of why the British state is willing to eat almost any amount of shit handed to them by the US. ‘The UK has no intelligence assets in central Asia. We are dependent on information given to us by the United States’ CIA and NSA.’ The British overseas lobby in Whitehall – […]

Operation Black Dog

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] CW armoury. The bomb was dropped on elements of the Republican Guard in Southern Iraq, I was informed. Heavy casualties resulted. The operation, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, was a counter-strike, following an Iraqi Scud that fell on Israel. The missile had contained Sarin. Fuming, the Israelis had prepared to detonate a nuclear […]

The Thimble Riggers: The Dublin Arms Trials of 1970

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] second version of this story by James Kelly. The first, Orders for the Captain, was reviewed in Lobster 15. Kelly was a senior officer in the Irish intelligence service who became involved in an attempt by the Republic’s government to buy deniable weapons for the Catholics in the North in 1970 when there appeared […]

MI5: New Threats for Old? Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] (p. 6) It defies belief to think that anti-fascists would deliberately admit to covertly monitoring fascist meetings from within the same premises: such would alert Nazi “counter- intelligence”. This points, therefore, to the state having at least one, or maybe more, operatives inside the local BNP, and them being very confident indeed. ‘(Emphasis added) […]

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 […]

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