The ‘Terrorist Threat’ in Britain

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] the British Right’s ideological package, but in the past few years they have become much more explicit. At one level it looks fairly straightforward. The British military/ intelligence complex has been preparing for years for the time when the ‘Soviet threat’ ceases to guarantee their budgets. And that might be soon. Georgi(?) Arbatov, one […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] Independent on Sunday. Friends of ‘the friends’ McShane was joined by his former New Labour Foreign Office colleague Lord Foulkes in speaking on behalf of the British intelligence services and calling for the early ending of the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. Whereas McShane’s rise in Labour politics was through trade union […]

Secret Contenders

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] a travel agents’ convention which appears more like an international gathering of secret agents all getting pissed together. CIA stations carry our propaganda and study the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS) and local left activity. But Beck learns that by the 1960s RIS had long since ceased using foreign Communist Parties for espionage. In Havana […]

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 […]

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] Haig, a popular candidate; second, although not named, he is situated in the past of Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward. Hougan says that Woodward worked for Naval Intelligence at the highest levels and speculates that Deep Throat was connected to Admiral Zumwalt who was opposed to Nixon’s foreign policy. Woodward has denied this, as […]

‘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, […]

My enemy’s enemy…: Museum Street

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] scandals blighted the Labour Party. Were these events connected? Co-ordinated? If so — and there is no evidence yet — what was the mechanism? The CANZAB counter- intelligence conferences begun in the 1960s look interesting…. Below, Owen Wilkes discusses the first book, albeit a novel, to attempt to elaborate the New Zealand situation; and […]

Agreement! The State, Conflict and Change in Northern Ireland

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] she shows why there has been recent stalemate over the RUC. This armed police force was pivotal in much of the action and most of the floating intelligence in the past. Could the same people provide an equitable police force for all the people of Northern Ireland? To mix metaphors somewhat, the description she […]

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 […]

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 […]

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