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 […]

Private Warriors

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Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] sector has become increasingly involved in the use of military force abroad (a) because of greater deniability – the same motive which produced ‘private’ spooks in the intelligence field, – and (b) because of the political sensitivity of American casualties abroad. If someone is going to come home in a body bag, better it […]

The Nemesis File: the true story of an SAS execution squad

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] they were rubbished in the Sunday Times (26 November 1995) by MOD flacks James Adams and Liam Clarke; and Fred Holroyd, who was in working in Army Intelligence in the same patch in the same period, has not dismissed them. He says that a lot of Republicans did simply disappear in this period. The […]

Way out West: a conspiracy theory

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] be said, not a shred of evidence that Hollis ever passed a single piece of information to the Soviets, nor that he had any contacts with Soviet intelligence officers or agents. But this doesn’t hinder the conspiracy theorists who will seize on any scrap of evidence to bolster the Hollis theory. As history shows, […]

CIA and Drug-Trafficking by Contra Supporters

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] including an important piece by Robert Parry, ‘Lost History: Contras, Dirty Money and the CIA.’ Another important background piece is Jack Blum’s testimony to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last year, which is reproduced in Covert Action Quarterly no. 59. However, in my opinion the two best pieces on the CIA-drugs issue which appeared […]

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 […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] the Open Democracy web site, and Michael Maclay, the ex-Foreign Office man who became Mandelson’s colleague at London Weekend Television before helping run the MI6-linked Hayklut private intelligence organisation. Parliamentary Secretary in Derry Irvine’s Lord Chancellor’s Department, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, also joined the BAP in 1987. She now serves on its UK advisory […]

Economic Fundamentalism: a Laboratory Experiment

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] I know. On this generally, see Paul Landais-Stamp and Paul Rogers, Rocking the Boat (Berg, Oxford and New York, 1989). For a brief account, focused on the intelligence connections, see Robin Ramsay, ‘How the US tries to subvert Lange’, END Journal No. 26, February 1987. Between 1983 and ’86 seventeen employees of TVNZ went. […]

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] drug and other criminal activities the Nicaraguan bishops had complained back in 1978. Equally disastrous was the initial decision to leave oversight of the Contras to Argentine intelligence officers, for whom the drug-financing of operations was a way of life. On March 16, 1998, in response to Webb’s allegations, the CIA Inspector-General admitted that […]

A Game of Moles: the Deceptions of an MI6 Officer

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] contender for the prize for most inaccurate jacket ever written. It begins by stating that this is the first MI6 memoir (it isn’t), calls MI6 officer Bristow an ‘agent’, (the one thing which drives intelligence officers nuts), and then makes claims not to be found in the text. Of interest only to serious MI6 buffs.

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