The Perfect English Spy

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] – with G. K. Young prominent – needed reigning in. They were too expensive and too embarrassing when things went wrong. White wanted SIS to be an intelligence service – yes, with clandestine sources – but also one which, he could assure his colleagues in Whitehall, would not embarrass them. No more coup plotting […]

Cyberculture: Counterconspiracy

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] Leftism; editor Thomas on ‘Reich and Little Rock’; a snippet on Cord Meyer, Mary Meyer, James Angleton et al; and a long extract from Charles Ameringer’s U.S.Foreign Intelligence: the Secret Side of American History. The first volume is the better of the two if you want information; the second contains a couple of long […]

Spy Master: The Betrayal of MI5

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] The facts are somewhat different. As early as mid-1961 Ward was being run by the Security Service officer, Keith Wagstaffe, then working for D1 (a), Operations, Counter- intelligence. The Service decided to try and ‘honeytrap’ Ivanov, for which Ward was most willing and eager to provide a suitable female – Christine Keeler. After things […]

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, […]

Phoenix: Policing the Shadows, and, Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland

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Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] shot. Phoenix found his activities curtailed and was fearful that the Protestants were going to be sold out. He believed that the handing over of responsibility for intelligence work to MI5 was part of this sellout. Those thought most likely to oppose any deal, whether politicians, civil servants or even police, were themselves to […]

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 […]

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 […]

Mrs Thatcher, North Sea oil and the hegemony of the City

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

Introduction I began writing this in the early 1980s. If you were then reading the Guardian or the Observer, and knew a little, simple economics, it didn’t take genius to notice that while the UK’s manufacturing economy was being decimated by Conservative Party economic policy, the City of London was booming. More interestingly, and less … Read more

Understanding others

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] and error in Northern Ireland, involves the following: A comprehensive plan to alleviate the political conditions behind the insurgency; civil-military cooperation; the application of minimum force; deep intelligence; and an acceptance of the protracted nature of the conflict. Deep cultural knowledge of the adversary is inherent to the British approach.’ In his interesting short […]

Obituaries

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] published by him in Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland to circumvent censorship, it was subsequently republished in an expanded edition. Under the new title, The British Intelligence Services in Action, it has become a modern classic, is virtually impossible to now locate, and still compares well with subsequent volumes by Martin Dillon, Paul […]

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