[…] for example, he talks of the CIA in its ‘great, early days ….. manned by the flower of American youth…. something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth.’ Ah, the self-confidence (and self-delusion) in ‘doing good in the world by stealth’. RR
Scott Newton, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, £30 This is the book Newton was working on which produced the spin-off pieces published in Lobster: ‘The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during WW2’ in Lobster 20, and ‘The Who’s Who of Appeasement’ in Lobster 22. As those essays showed, Newton … Read more
[…] MI6 no. 2, George Kennedy Young, loomed large in the imagination of the section of the British left which was interested in the political activities of former intelligence officers. His activities with Unison in 1973-5 remain unclear but here John Andrews describes the group which succeeded it, Tory Action. Lobster 19 contained an autobiographical […]
Benny Morris London: I. B Tauris, 2002, £24.50, h/b In report after report on the major media we hear about or see pictures of ‘refugee camps’ in Israel – and no-one ever explains from where the refugees came. Perhaps editors think we know already. Benny Morris is an Israeli historian who became well known … Read more
[…] public relations campaign for the Kuwaiti government during the Gulf War. According to Covert Action, it is a company with strong links to the US security and intelligence community. Lloyd is the author of the anodyne history of the EEPTU, Light and Liberty (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1990). These are discussed in the next […]
[…] Colonel John Alexander, who is now NATO advisor on non-lethal weapons. As was reported in the previous Lobster 28, Alexander has consulted with both British and American intelligence agencies since Armen’s interest in him. Armen is undeterred by this harassment and his research is continuing. He has recently received 2,500 pages of declassified material […]
In Parish Notices in the last issue I wrote ‘there isn’t much in this issue about the economic situation because there really isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said, for example by Larry Elliot in The Guardian every week.’ Well, I changed my mind about that and here are the bits I found … Read more
[…] Power: The Secret Funding of the Tory Party, (London: Vision, 1998, pp.19-20). Perhaps it should be pointed out here, for the benefit of those who see the intelligence agencies as a possible threat to democracy, that a 1999 investigation by the Home Office’s chief historian found that in the case of the Zinoviev letter […]
Corinne Souza Edinburgh/London: Mainstream, 2003, £15.99, h/b This is an important and interesting book but rather hard to describe because it contains so much. At its heart is Souza’s father, an Iraqi Anglophile, who became SIS’s agent in Iraq, and later in London. Using her firsthand knowledge supplemented by her father’s papers, Souza has … Read more
[…] who will be sent to work as Resident Operators and Control Agents in foreign countries will amount to about 230.’ Considerate of them to tell the counter- intelligence services of the NATO alliance, is it not? A decade later we find the same theme in J. Bernard Hutton’s 1972 The Subverters of Liberty (p. […]
