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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Major Farran’s Hat

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

[…] either conciliate or effectively repress the Zionists, the British were doomed. The lack of a viable political strategy showed itself on the ground in the lack of intelligence. Intelligence is the key to operational success in counterinsurgency and the British signally failed to penetrate the Zionist resistance. The scale of the failure is shown […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££

[…] latterly of USIS. It was Mr. Romerstein who accused me of recycling Soviet disinformation, and who, I would guess, is the source of the rumours in US intelligence circles that the KGB were funding Lobster. Another SIS memoir SIS buffs might like to check the Journal of Contemporary History, July 1995, in which former […]

9-11

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

[…] her comments at Kwiatkowski is dropping broad hints that, in her view, there is something fishy here. In ‘Pakistan and 9/11’, at B. Raman, a former Indian intelligence officer, discusses advance knowledge of 9-11 among Pakistan’s intelligence community and concludes: ‘It is, therefore, impossible that the Pakistani authorities would not have known of Al […]

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 […]

Let my people go

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

[…] Thabo Mbeki, or their ministers, civil servants, diplomats and generals. They will be able to target opposition politicians too. They will become immensely powerful. If adequate artificial intelligence applications could be developed – what are called ‘Turing Test-compliant’ artificial intelligence applications – it would soon become affordable to target millions of people with automated […]

The smearing of Colin Wallace

Lobster Issue 14 (1987) £££

[…] and, to my knowledge, Wallace has never alleged this. “In an account he claims to have written in 1976 as evidence of his intimate involvement in the intelligence world, Wallace talks of an MI6 operative he knew. In fact that document reveals an event – the death of a policeman – that actually occurred […]

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