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 two Indonesias and the two Americas

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] East Timor were routinely beaten while in the process of being detained…. Four residents of Lavateri village near Baucau, East Timor detained on April 4 by an intelligence team, were reportedly beaten with rifle butts, with one individual suffering a broken rib and another having a cross carved into the palm of her hand. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Export or Die: Britain’s Defence Trade with Iran and Iraq

Book cover
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] out that the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister would have been informed, on the basis of the former’s responsibility for SIS and the latter’s interest in intelligence affairs, not to mention her ‘specific interest in Iraq’s activities’.(1) All the same, a careful reading of the Scott Report does support Miller’s general if not […]

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 […]

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 Anti-CND Groups. Ingrams

Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££

[…] The M10/11, hand-held, almost recoilless weapon was designed by Gordon Ingram and Mitch Werbell II, a mysterious White Russian, OSS-China veteran small arms manufacturer and occasional US intelligence operative. Werbell has been termed a ‘creative genius’ by weapons historians for his designs of noise suppressors for automatic weapons and for his other ‘silent kill’ […]

The ‘Terrorist Threat’ in Britain

Lobster Issue 17 (1988) £££

[…] the British Right’s ideological package, but in the past few years they have become much more explicit. At one level it looks fairly straightforward. The British military/ intelligence complex has been preparing for years for the time when the ‘Soviet threat’ ceases to guarantee their budgets. And that might be soon. Georgi(?) Arbatov, one […]

Secret Contenders

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] a travel agents’ convention which appears more like an international gathering of secret agents all getting pissed together. CIA stations carry our propaganda and study the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS) and local left activity. But Beck learns that by the 1960s RIS had long since ceased using foreign Communist Parties for espionage. In Havana […]

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