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 […]

Saddam Hussein on Trial

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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 […]

Spook-wise: MI6 and Clare Short

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] Africa. The spooks must love having Labour in office, terrified to oppose anything they ask for. Hitherto secret Whitehall committee trying to deal with unauthorised exposure of intelligence material was itself exposed in the Sunday Times 21 May 2000. A page of the Guardian (tabloid section) 24 September 1999 was devoted to the Ken […]

Halliburton: Winning the Brown and Root Way

Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

[…] Snr’s Secretary of State. (66) Another Halliburton director, Ray Hunt, of Dallas based Hunt Oil Co. and a major Bush donor, serves on George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. (67) Other directors include Hunt’s son who served on Bush’s energy transition team, along with fellow director C.J. ‘Pete’ Silas. (68) In the circumstances, […]

The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 $75.00 (US), £37.99 (UK), h/b   This is an interesting and timely book and it is a great pity it is so expensive. Put out as a paperback and maybe with a less academic-sounding title, this would sell. Little of it is intellectually taxing and any […]

Justice Delayed

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] majority of MKULTRA documents in 1973 during the Watergate scramble to plug leaks and obliterate history. Helping Gottlieb destroy these documents was the then Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms. But due to one family’s own diligent search for truth, in a strange case of Justice Delayed, the truth about MKULTRA may finally come […]

The CIA and The Paris Review

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Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

[…] he was an agent of influence for the CIA, according to a former ambassador who served on the National Security Council. That is, he was not an intelligence officer as Matthiessen was, but one of the many journalists who were paid sub rosa to penetrate the media to influence policy. By deciding who would […]

Directory of British Political Organisations, 1994

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] entry for Searchlight summarises extensively the growing recognition on the ‘left’ of that journal’s involvement in dirty tricks, disinformation and role as an agency of the British intelligence services. But Mercer is surprisingly gentle with them, and should have commented upon and documented some of their frequent deliberate falsifications, gross inaccuracies and smears. The […]

The Citizen Smith case or the spy who came in from Oporto

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] he subsequently received. I suspect the evidence was exaggerated at a higher level in MI5 in order to ensure that Mr. Smith received a heavy sentence. The intelligence services depend on disproportionate sentences for breaches of the Official Secrets Acts to cultivate the mystique of the importance of their work. I believe Mr. Smith […]

Understanding EU Policy Making

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

Raj Chari and Sylvia Kritzinger London: Pluto Press, 2006, £16.99, p/b See note 4. The authors begin by noting how policies emanating from the European Union are of increasing importance to the citizens of the member states. They divide these policies into those which they describe as ‘1st order’, which include single market measures, competition … Read more

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