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 […]

Coach into pumpkin: some problems with Paget

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] credible confirmed by the report of an inquiry carried out by Sir John Stevens………’ You or I might take this as a claim that Britain’s security and intelligence institutions have been involved in assassinations (the attempts to get Nasser or Lumumba spring to mind). Paget’s reply to Fayed’s assertion is: ‘It is important to […]

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 […]

Trick or Treason: the October Surprise Mystery

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

Robert Parry Sheridan Square Press, New York, 1993 ISBN 1-879823-08-X This is an account both of the October Surprise story and of the author’s attempts over two years to stand it up. This works at several levels. The first is an intelligible recounting of the main features of the developing October Surprise allegations. He reviews … Read more

Spooks and the House of Commons

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

An interesting piece by Mark Hollingsworth appeared in Punch of 23 May-5 June 2001, ‘Spooks in the House’, on intelligence and security personnel who become MPs. Some of the material was familiar but less well known were Raymond Fletcher, and Le Cercle. Fletcher was a Labour MP who was witch-hunted by MI5 as a […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Kincora scandal and related subjects

Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££

[…] all about Kincora in 1974 — Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak, Irish Times, 25 June 1985, p. 7. MI5 knew about assault allegations, Kincora cover-up part of intelligence plot — Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak, Irish Times, 26 June 1985, p. 16. The queer card — Phoenix, 8 November 1985, p. 9. Epilogue on […]

Stakeknife and Mad Dog

Book cover
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

[…] untrue ….the FRU was prevented by RUC Special Branch from infiltrating loyalist murder gangs.’ (p. 32) (1) The exception to this was ex-Army Brian Nelson, the ‘ intelligence officer’ of the UDA, who directed the UDA’s killing of republicans for the FRU. Ingram suspects that Nelson never left the British Army (as does Paul […]

Trying to kill Nasser

Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££

[…] accomplished by Egyptian officers using a cache of weapons hidden in the sand. The key man in Cairo was Mahmoud Khalil, the head of Egyptian Air Force Intelligence who was called to a meeting in Rome with his MI6 contact in February 1957. Between then and the following November Khalil was given a total […]

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