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 […]

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 […]

Lundy, and, Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] WIA reply. I sometimes had niggling doubts about Lundy’s defence that it was part of his job to mingle with the criminal fraternity in order to gain intelligence and develop his strategy of using informers. These are relatively minor doubts, though, since his record on convictions does look highly impressive. More suspect is his […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Kitson revisited

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] large. He regarded the army’s methods as ‘thorough rather than inspired’ and instead developed his own approach. This involved using his own troops as collectors of background intelligence which he made operational use of, rather than just relying on Special Branch or acting blind.(5) His growing reputation as a counter-insurgency specialist saw him go […]

Saddam Hussein on Trial

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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 […]

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