Blinded by the light: Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy

Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy Phillip Willan Phillip Willan’s Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, (Constable, London, 1991) is a detailed and interesting book, dealing in a thorough (if partially flawed) way with a fascinating subject. It covers a wide array of interlocking subjects including the infamous P2 … Read more

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 […]

Smearing Wallace and Holroyd

Lobster Issue 15 (1988) £££

[…] These included the Miami Showband killings of July 1975. Besides this forensic evidence Holroyd had knowledge of the history of these guns. He knew, through his own intelligence work, two of those involved in the massacre and that they were ‘used’ by a RUC Special Branch officer, who he has named. That officer Holroyd […]

Spies at Work

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] a quick skim across Massiter, Bettaney, Charles Elwell – and thence into British Briefing, David Hart etc. (And Colin Wallace was not ‘a former officer in Army Intelligence’; and has not, to my knowledge, suggested that the League had office space in MI5 headquarters . But since this, like most of the assertions in […]

Defending the Warren Commission:the line from Langley

Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

[…] Oswald would not have been any sensible person’s choice for a co-conspirator. He was a ‘loner’, mixed-up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that […]

Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] zealous control for the next twenty years’ — and never mentions it again. Mangold tries to explain Angleton’s enormous power wholly by his being head of Counter Intelligence. This is not convincing. Surely part of Angleton’s bureaucratic power came precisely from the “Israeli account’. The book is essentially an account of the disastrous effects […]

Pinay 2: Jean Violet

Lobster Issue 18 (1989) £££

[…] its factory in Germany seized by the Nazis during the war. Violet resolved the problem and Pinay was so satisfied he recommended him to the new French intelligence organization, SDECE. Violet duly became an SDECE operative, utilizing a global network of contacts to assist that agency in its work.(2) Violet’s early post-war deeds also […]

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 […]

Weapons of Mass Deception and Regime Unchanged

Book cover
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

[…] left to say. In the absence of evidence of the Iraqi regime’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, to the distress of the professional diplomats and most of their intelligence services, the Bush-Blair ‘allies’ used dodgy information from defectors, selectively edited what other information they had, or simply made it up as part of the ‘perception […]

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 […]

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