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 […]

Wallace Clippings planted on Chapman Pincher

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] I.R.A. as paid gunmen and saboteurs. Until now the few Americans involved have served mainly as instructors and they have tended to remain in Eire. But British Intelligence now has wind of a big recruiting campaign in the U.S. backed by pro-I.R.A. organisations in New York. There is no shortage of ex-Vietnam veterans – […]

Wallace etc

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] facts about Information Policy: it was perceived as partly an MI6 operation. Hence the hostility to Wallace shown by MI5 when it got overall control of the intelligence set-up in Northern Ireland. Rubbishing Wallace Since what has now become ‘the Wallace Affair’ broke again at the end of January, all the major disinformation lines […]

Stakeknife and Mad Dog

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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 […]

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] Union (ESU). ‘In January 1953 the ESU, with funding from an American source described as a private donor, established a Current Affairs Unit under the direction of intelligence expert General Leslie Hollis and the chairmanship of Francis Williams’ (p. 175). I would need to see the evidence of the ‘private donor’; the presumption must […]

History Will Not Absolve Us (Book review)

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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 […]

Apartheid’s friends

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] the parapolitics of the period in this country. But after that we are off into largely new areas, as Sanders takes us through the political, military and intelligence history of South Africa, through the fall of the apartheid regime and up to 2005. There are occasional familiar episodes – the South African involvement in […]

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 […]

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 […]

How many divisions does the Pope have?

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] seeking support for what was called a Danube Confederation. This was actually a recasting of Intermarium, a project that the Vatican, and, to a certain extent, British Intelligence, had tinkered with since the 20s. This produced little actual success. Two British-backed attempts to install pro-western clericalist governments in Poland and Slovakia before the arrival […]

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