[…] This is inevitable. The world changes, priorities change and the people writing for Lobster change. When Lobster began in 1983 its chief focus was information on the intelligence and security services. There was almost no information on them in those days and every scrap seemed important. These days such information is available in abundance […]
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
[…] to obscure the details of a picture we knew already: when the interests of an American company were threatened by a modest reforming government, the US military, intelligence and propaganda organisations – the network detailed by Lucas – stepped in, fabricated a ‘Soviet threat’ with a little help from their assets in the media, […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] chance meeting between the two comes to the attention of MI5, and Blunt is instructed to befriend Losey and monitor his activities on behalf of the American intelligence services. In doing so, he comes to admire Losey’s principled political views and his refusal to name names, unlike many of his compatriots. As their friendship […]
[…] issue 2, for example, contains a long piece about the Bilderbergers, by Sir Louis Le Bailly, former Naval Attaché to Washington, and former Director-General of the Defence Intelligence Staff. It isn’t a very good piece: it contains banal errors, Le Bailly doesn’t bother with documentation, and it is xenophobic – Germanophobic – to a […]
[…] kill the Pope?”, the opening paragraph of the first article reads: “A car mishap on an Irish road has raised the shattering spectre that the US Central Intelligence Agency is implicated in the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul 2 in Rome in May 1981.” According to Magill “from reading the article in the […]
[…] election, and most important of all, Sean O’Callaghan. O’Callaghan figures in McDonald’s account as an ex IRA man, but perhaps a better characterisation would be ex Irish intelligence agent. He has become ‘a pivotal behind the scenes player’, acting as liaison between Trimble and the loyalist paramilitaries and playing a key role in devising […]
[…] more dense, more difficult in places and more depressing than it did in isolated essays. The underlying message is clear and alarming: if governments give military- or intelligence agency-sponsored scientists large amounts of money and no political control they will eventually come up with technologies with which to control the behaviour and thinking of […]
[…] 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 […]
