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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Parafinance: Enron and drilling for red ink

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] 1997 in a search for papers relating to Fininvest. (19) Very little paper work had survived, however. Many papers had been shredded to save space. (20) Berlusconi’s intelligence connections are unclear, as are Andersen’s. They have been his long-term accountants since he made his first fortune in a Milanese housing deal politically leveraged by […]

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 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] system behaved far more rationally – better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS […]

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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] late Lord Mountbatten, recycling the claims of some on the right that he was a Soviet agent (without any evidence) and there is this: ‘Many within British intelligence circles knew him as a visitor to Kincora, a boy’s home used by the paedophile and gay members of the Protestant Order , civil servants and […]

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 […]

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