Death of the Strong Man

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] sabotage or a lack of security for the crash, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Gul will almost certainly have to step down as head of the powerful Inter Services Intelligence organisation, ISI. As head of ISI, Gul is the key figure involved in the training and equipping of the mojahedin based around Peshawar, and is their […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

‘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 […]

Groupings on the British Right

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] and propaganda. The name reminds me of the Institute for the Study of Conflict and this may turn out to be another in the evolving sequence of intelligence fronts which includes ISC, Forum World Features and Control Risks. Moral Re-armament MRA last appeared on the fringes of the miners’ strike. Now Manchester Chief Constable […]

Starting Notes On The British In Vietnam

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] 1969. During the Vietnam War the GCHQ monitoring station at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong (UKC 201 in the international Sigint network) provided the Americans with intelligence up to 1975, long after Harold Wilson had – publicly at least – expressed his Government’s opposition to the war. The NSA co-ordinated all signals intelligence […]

History Will Not Absolve Us (Book review)

Book cover
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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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