Stakeknife and Mad Dog

Book cover
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?

Book cover
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 […]

Battling Wall Street: the Kennedy Presidency

Book cover
Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££

[…] brief account of changes in economic policy, and, in particular, changes in the USA’s foreign policy, which followed LBJ’s take-over of the reins. The US military and intelligence helped install a bunch of dictators in Latin America, as well as stepping-up the war in S.E. Asia. (And, not mentioned by the author, closed the […]

Apartheid’s friends

Book cover
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 Kincora Scandal

Book review
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

[…] lot of (mostly unsourced) information about William McGrath and his strange organisation Tara. At various points Moore asserts that McGrath and Tara were being run by British intelligence – MI5, apparently – though it is never entirely clear, because Moore offers no evidence. I had a chat with Harry Irwin who compiled the Kincora […]

Deadly Illusions

Book cover
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 […]

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 […]

Saddam Hussein on Trial

Book cover
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

[…] among key Ba’athist leaders. Saddam Hussein himself had long since retreated into writing novels. Well aware of weakness and despair in the Iraqi leadership, Western military and intelligence agencies prepared for invasion. When Saddam Hussein’s daughter Raghad Hussein requested his assistance in 2004, Al-Ani consulted an international team of lawyers that found the Iraqi […]

‘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, […]

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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar