A review of the (bad) reviews of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] (emphasis added) when even we had them over a year before, and No. 10 Downing Street, two years before. He attributed to us a ‘conviction’ (‘that disloyal intelligence officers were behind every humiliation that Wilson suffered’) which we don’t have, and announced, as if it were a revelation, that the rumours about Marcia and […]

Acid: a new secret history of LSD

Book cover
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] an unwitting part of the CIA’s MKUltra programme while a post-grad student at Oxford; and the section on the mysterious Ronald Stark, LSD entrepreneur and apparent American intelligence asset, has been elaborated. Most importantly, all the technical foul-ups which marred the first edition have gone. Vision were really crap when they first started out […]

People

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] by Richard Hall mentioned that she wrote for the newsletters Africa Analysis, Africa Confidential and the Economist’s Foreign Report. The last two are frequently talked of as intelligence operations — Brian Crozier and Robert Moss, for example, have edited the latter — but is there any evidence about the former? Seth Kantor died in […]

PR, espionage and language

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] pride: if the British are doing it, so should we. This meant that a welfare issue could be prioritised. At times, it could also mean that the intelligence services could pass a coded message, via Hansard, to, for example, a senior health professional who was a source in another country, without being seen to […]

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

[…] in 2003, advised Blair against providing anything more than moral support for the US invasion. (9) There was no enthusiasm in the Foreign Office and the defence, intelligence and security establishments were divided.(10) Reasons for the depth of opposition included distrust of the ambitions of the George W. Bush administration, anxiety about isolation from […]

Don’t Mention The War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and the Media

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] Chris Ryder are treated as straightforward sources despite public knowledge about their disinformation roles. Alan Protheroe of the BBC is not described as a former Army TA intelligence officer. Still, these are minor criticisms of the best analysis I have read of the politics of news production in this country – and the best […]

Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network

Book cover
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] the NSA-run global network of communications interception. But his work goes much further than that and anyone interested in GCHQ or the NSA, the history of signals intelligence since WW2, the relationship between politicians and spooks, the anti-nuclear campaign in New Zealand, or, indeed, the geo-politics of that part of the Pacific, will find […]

Feedback

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] the EU to the British people. These propaganda campaigns did little to educate people about the realities of EU membership and they significantly out-spent the campaigns of Eurosceptics. As such they effectively undermined the democratic process. The case stands. Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, (London: John Murray, 2001)

British History and the British Right

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] which Porter, in view of his previous works, is ideally placed to have made. (1) There are plenty of works detailing the activities of the security and intelligence services and their allies in the Forces, in the City and in industry at key moments in the development of contemporary Britain, but most of these […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] Net. He appears to believe that he can negotiate with MI6 in some fashion. But as Phillip Knightley says in the Belfast Telegraph piece, they’re the Secret Intelligence Service and they will pursue him to the ends of the earth: pour encourager les autres, if for no other reason. In a posting at Cryptome […]

Accessibility Toolbar