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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Trying to kill Nasser

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

[…] accomplished by Egyptian officers using a cache of weapons hidden in the sand. The key man in Cairo was Mahmoud Khalil, the head of Egyptian Air Force Intelligence who was called to a meeting in Rome with his MI6 contact in February 1957. Between then and the following November Khalil was given a total […]

Deadly Illusions

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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 […]

The Kincora scandal and related subjects

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] all about Kincora in 1974 — Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak, Irish Times, 25 June 1985, p. 7. MI5 knew about assault allegations, Kincora cover-up part of intelligence plot — Ed Moloney and Andy Pollak, Irish Times, 26 June 1985, p. 16. The queer card — Phoenix, 8 November 1985, p. 9. Epilogue on […]

Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British anti-semitism 1939/1940

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1918, founded the Britons Society and spoke at public meetings with Hitler, in Munich, in 1923. Domville, an ex-Director of Naval Intelligence, ran The Link which had 4300 members in June 1939 including two cousins of Neville Chamberlain who were still active in local government in Birmingham. The […]

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 […]

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 […]

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