From roll back to blowback

Book cover
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 […]

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 […]

Tittle-Tattle

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] general election against then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and has since become Rector of the University of Dundee. Once the use of torture in the production of intelligence became an issue parliamentarians could no longer ignore, Murray hoped he would be called to give evidence to the Joint Human Rights Committee investigating precisely that […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

RE:

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] most of the original witnesses had not been interviewed.(9)He also revealed that his inquiry team had wanted to investigate the possible bugging of Diana’s telephones by US intelligence services but were denied access to the records.(10)This was not enough to prevent the media from hailing the report as a triumph of fact over fiction, […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] latterly of USIS. It was Mr. Romerstein who accused me of recycling Soviet disinformation, and who, I would guess, is the source of the rumours in US intelligence circles that the KGB were funding Lobster. Another SIS memoir SIS buffs might like to check the Journal of Contemporary History, July 1995, in which former […]

The Last Investigation, and, Deep Politics

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] CIA in mind), as “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.” This term referred chiefly, but not exclusively, to the world of intelligence agencies and similar organizations, where secrecy and covert operations were adopted as a matter of deliberate policy. ‘I still see value in this definition and mode […]

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