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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Lobster Issue 21 (1991) £££
[…] O’Sullivan, Pantheon Books, New York, 1989, $15.95. Since the revelation of the activities of Forum World Features in the mid 1970s, it has become apparent that Western intelligence services have used ‘research institutes’ and ‘study centres’ with impressive and neutral-sounding titles to put over their world view and create public antipathy towards the enemy […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
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 […]
Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££
[…] ran a publication called Review of World Affairs, a kind of running commentary on the international scene. The USSR suspected that this was an arms length British intelligence operation whose purpose was to sow distrust between members of the wartime Grand Alliance so that when the war finished Britain would be positioned for an […]
Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££
[…] needs to be struck between: the rights (both legal and moral) of children; the rights of parents and obligations to their child as well as to the intelligence agencies as employer; and the employers’ obligations to both, where these conflict. An example would be in Rimington’s sister agency, SIS, where the practice used to […]