The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] Wilson’s Cabinet Office is infiltrated. Rhodesian agents murder one of their own operatives who has turned against them in London, and another agent is killed by British intelligence after they and Special Branch monitor his activities. The agent, Geoff Dominy ….’ (emphasis added) Typical of Searchlight to make a startling allegation without offering any […]

Historical Notes (De Courcy, Pilcher and Hess; The 1949 sterling crisis)

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 […]

Combat 18 and MI5: some background notes

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££

[…] attributed to Harold Covington, described as the ‘outside influence to bring together several disparate factions and groupings into C18’ (p. 2). There was speculation of a possible intelligence input, that of the ‘South African state security services’ (p. 3), though the only evidence offered was the presence of some anti-Apartheid individuals on the Redwatch […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

[…] Independent on Sunday. Friends of ‘the friends’ McShane was joined by his former New Labour Foreign Office colleague Lord Foulkes in speaking on behalf of the British intelligence services and calling for the early ending of the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. Whereas McShane’s rise in Labour politics was through trade union […]

Spies and children

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 […]

History Will Not Absolve Us (Book review)

Book cover
Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] text of a speech given by Fidel Castro the day after the shooting. Fidel’s speech is rather striking: 24 hours after the shooting he – or his intelligence people – had already spotted the attempts in the immediate aftermath to portray Oswald as pro-Soviet and pro-Castro. We get letters from Kruschev to Castro; we […]

Agreement! The State, Conflict and Change in Northern Ireland

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] she shows why there has been recent stalemate over the RUC. This armed police force was pivotal in much of the action and most of the floating intelligence in the past. Could the same people provide an equitable police force for all the people of Northern Ireland? To mix metaphors somewhat, the description she […]

Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British anti-semitism 1939/1940

Book cover
Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1918, founded the Britons Society and spoke at public meetings with Hitler, in Munich, in 1923. Domville, an ex-Director of Naval Intelligence, ran The Link which had 4300 members in June 1939 including two cousins of Neville Chamberlain who were still active in local government in Birmingham. The […]

Kitson revisited

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] large. He regarded the army’s methods as ‘thorough rather than inspired’ and instead developed his own approach. This involved using his own troops as collectors of background intelligence which he made operational use of, rather than just relying on Special Branch or acting blind.(5) His growing reputation as a counter-insurgency specialist saw him go […]

ELF update

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] Here, however, all is not as reassuringly black and white as it appears. There appeared to be some evidence to support sub-vocal ELF projection in a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) survey of work in this field in what used to be called the Soviet bloc. Since then… Last year a request was made, by […]

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