From roll back to blowback

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] chemical and biological weapons were ‘blowback’ from U.S. activities. Creating blowback is one of the things the CIA – no, let’s be fair: the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in general – are good at. AP reported on 6 January that the suspects in a series of bombings by Muslim extremists in Manila had […]

Where’s Ware?

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] exaggerated his claims to have been a parachutist and the organiser of a display parachuting team run by the British Army. (And thus his other claims about intelligence operations in Northern Ireland should not be taken seriously…..) In 1990, in a piece called ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ in the Spectator (24 March […]

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 […]

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 […]

Curried Knight: Maxwell Knight and the MI5 in-house history

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] does not mention that Knight was a leading member of the British Fascists and seems to have colluded with them against the left while he was an intelligence officer. Professor Andrew notes that an MI5 agent, James McGuirk Hughes (whose name Andrew misspells), became the British Union of Fascists’ head of intelligence, presenting this […]

Perfidious Albion: an end to deceit

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] perceptions, they are nowhere near as all-pervasive in the UK as they are in the US. Yes, there is a dutiful reflection of the orthodoxies of foreign, intelligence, business and armed services policy fed to us by their pliant press corps, but there are also divergences from the approved script, a matter of much […]

Our American problem

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Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] wrote that book – The End of History – showing that the American Way was the ultimate human achievement. Others are (or were) prominent in the American intelligence community, including Carnes Lord, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt. All these were either taught by Strauss directly, or by students of his. So was the author […]

‘Conspiracy Theories’ and Clandestine Politics

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] though they do not conform to the elaborate and often bizarre scenarios concocted by conspiracy theorists. How, indeed, could it be otherwise in a world full of intelligence agencies, national security bureaucracies, clandestine revolutionary organizations, economic pressure groups, secret societies with hidden political agendas, and the like? No monolithic conspiracy There has never been, […]

America, Israel and the Israel lobby

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] deals with the 2003 invasion of Iraq which, the authors argue, was triggered by intense Israeli lobbying of the US and the provision by Israel of misleading intelligence to back up the view that an invasion and war was urgently required. It is conclusively demonstrated by Mearsheimer and Walt that neither oil companies nor […]

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