‘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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Wallace Clippings planted on Chapman Pincher

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] I.R.A. as paid gunmen and saboteurs. Until now the few Americans involved have served mainly as instructors and they have tended to remain in Eire. But British Intelligence now has wind of a big recruiting campaign in the U.S. backed by pro-I.R.A. organisations in New York. There is no shortage of ex-Vietnam veterans – […]

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 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 […]

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