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 […]

Termini

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] society in 19th century use of private detectives to break labour organisations; the history of so-called ‘red squads’; the growth of federal law enforcement agencies and their intelligence gathering; the growth of private, political intelligence gathering from McCarthy to the ADL network blown in the 1990s; And much more, all done in a couple […]

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 […]

Last Talons of the Eagle

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] authors have to writing a serious historical work. Have they never heard of St. Elmo’s Fire? Or could a simple explanation just be legitimate disinformation from Allied intelligence agencies? And what about the Germans’ known experiments with TV and radio-controlled anti-aircraft missiles? A top secret Nazi project is probably the least likely explanation. Some […]

Jim Jones and the Conspiracists

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] the Peoples Temple, she summarises the conspiracists’ point of view, which holds ‘that people in Jonestown were murdered by U.S. government agent agents – either military or intelligence. These agents,’ she continues, ‘committed the murders to conceal some other, more damaging information…’.(3) Well, fair enough. The definition certainly describes the point of view of […]

From roll back to blowback

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] chemical and biological weapons were ‘blowback’ from U.S. activities. Creating blowback is one of the things the CIA – no, let’s be fair: the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in general – are good at. AP reported on 6 January that the suspects in a series of bombings by Muslim extremists in Manila had […]

Tittle-Tattle

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] general election against then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and has since become Rector of the University of Dundee. Once the use of torture in the production of intelligence became an issue parliamentarians could no longer ignore, Murray hoped he would be called to give evidence to the Joint Human Rights Committee investigating precisely that […]

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 […]

Where’s Ware?

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] exaggerated his claims to have been a parachutist and the organiser of a display parachuting team run by the British Army. (And thus his other claims about intelligence operations in Northern Ireland should not be taken seriously…..) In 1990, in a piece called ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ in the Spectator (24 March […]

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 […]

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