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 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] Sunday Times 4 January 1998). Better known under his pen name Richard Deacon, McCormick was one of the post-war pioneers in the field of writing books about intelligence services and operations from scraps of real information. James Earl Ray died, aged 70. Harold Jackson devoted fourth-fifths of his long obituary in the Guardian (24 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Acid: a new secret history of LSD

Book cover
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] an unwitting part of the CIA’s MKUltra programme while a post-grad student at Oxford; and the section on the mysterious Ronald Stark, LSD entrepreneur and apparent American intelligence asset, has been elaborated. Most importantly, all the technical foul-ups which marred the first edition have gone. Vision were really crap when they first started out […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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