The View From The Bridge

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] announced that Combat 18 was an MI5 ‘honey trap on the far right’; that one of its founders, the American Harold Covington, ‘had known links to the intelligence services’ and was a ‘long-time asset of the FBI’; and that its creation by MI5 was ‘understandable and possibly justifiable at the time’. I kid you […]

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 […]

Deadly Illusions

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Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] these are very much the KGB secrets the Russian government and KGB does want us to read. And no wonder. This is a story of how Soviet intelligence ran rings round the Brits. If there are any secrets the British government is trying to keep buried here, I missed them. But I’m probably suffering […]

‘Conspiracy Theories’ and Clandestine Politics

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] though they do not conform to the elaborate and often bizarre scenarios concocted by conspiracy theorists. How, indeed, could it be otherwise in a world full of intelligence agencies, national security bureaucracies, clandestine revolutionary organizations, economic pressure groups, secret societies with hidden political agendas, and the like? No monolithic conspiracy There has never been, […]

‘A Most Extraordinary Case’

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] to your case, and are unable to assist you further.’ Kennedy wrote to the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, three times in June/July 1999. The replies, from the Intelligence and Security Liaison Unit of the Home Office Organised and International Crime Directorate (12 August 1999) and from the Home Secretary’s Advisory Board, Metropolitan Police Committee […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] ‘……the armed forces, police or national security services‘ – a phrase whose time is a-coming, I think; a little hint of the amalgamation of the security and intelligence services now being talked of. (See Corinne Souza’s piece in Lobster 40.) Things reptilian Despite my best efforts to avoid David Icke’s nonsensical ravings a dollop […]

Scott et al

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] to the bottom of a subject as complex as this simply by appointing a judge and a couple of bright lawyers. You would need a large team, intelligence personnel with access to everything and Prime Ministerial power to sack people for non-cooperation or obstruction, and expert guidance from some of the participants. And none […]

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 […]

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 […]

America, Israel and the Israel lobby

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] deals with the 2003 invasion of Iraq which, the authors argue, was triggered by intense Israeli lobbying of the US and the provision by Israel of misleading intelligence to back up the view that an invasion and war was urgently required. It is conclusively demonstrated by Mearsheimer and Walt that neither oil companies nor […]

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