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 […]

Lundy, and, Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] WIA reply. I sometimes had niggling doubts about Lundy’s defence that it was part of his job to mingle with the criminal fraternity in order to gain intelligence and develop his strategy of using informers. These are relatively minor doubts, though, since his record on convictions does look highly impressive. More suspect is his […]

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

Book cover
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 […]

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 […]

Deadly Illusions

Book cover
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 […]

‘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, […]

Saddam Hussein on Trial

Book cover
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 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 […]

‘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 […]

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