Friends of the British Secret State

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] one Soviet employee has ever been busted for involvement with the IRA. On close examination Massie’s story dribbled away into nothing. All he actually had was “Israeli intelligence believes Shabtal Kalmanovitch may know how the network in organised and financed.” Gerard Kemp Another old spook outlet, Gerard Kemp, is still putting his name to […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

I am being slagged off, therefore I am

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[…] after this curious telephone call, I was sent a photocopy of the review of Smear! by Robert Cecil from the Winter ’92 issue of the Journal of Intelligence and National Security. To quote the biographical material on his book about Guy Burgess, A Divided Life (Bodley Head, London, 1988), Mr Cecil is a former […]

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 […]

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 Last Investigation, and, Deep Politics

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] CIA in mind), as “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.” This term referred chiefly, but not exclusively, to the world of intelligence agencies and similar organizations, where secrecy and covert operations were adopted as a matter of deliberate policy. ‘I still see value in this definition and mode […]

Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] particular, condemned Egyptian claims of US/UK collaboration in the Israeli war effort as, ‘the Big Lie’,(11) much evidence suggests extensive and active cooperation on the logistics and intelligence sides; and encouragement of the Israeli pre-emptive programme. Like Nasser in the North, the UK was also fighting a losing guerrilla war, in South Yemen. As […]

Parafinance: Enron and drilling for red ink

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] 1997 in a search for papers relating to Fininvest. (19) Very little paper work had survived, however. Many papers had been shredded to save space. (20) Berlusconi’s intelligence connections are unclear, as are Andersen’s. They have been his long-term accountants since he made his first fortune in a Milanese housing deal politically leveraged by […]

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