Still hazy after all these years

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] hinted that something might turn up from an unexpected quarter. Turner suspects that Farewell America was that something; that although the book was put together by French intelligence people, it was the contact with Kostikov which led to it. The pseudonymous writer of the book was Thomas Buchanan, author of the 1964 Who Killed […]

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, […]

My encounter with George K. Young and Tory Action, 1979-1988

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] MI6 no. 2, George Kennedy Young, loomed large in the imagination of the section of the British left which was interested in the political activities of former intelligence officers. His activities with Unison in 1973-5 remain unclear but here John Andrews describes the group which succeeded it, Tory Action. Lobster 19 contained an autobiographical […]

Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network

Book cover
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] the NSA-run global network of communications interception. But his work goes much further than that and anyone interested in GCHQ or the NSA, the history of signals intelligence since WW2, the relationship between politicians and spooks, the anti-nuclear campaign in New Zealand, or, indeed, the geo-politics of that part of the Pacific, will find […]

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 […]

British History and the British Right

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] which Porter, in view of his previous works, is ideally placed to have made. (1) There are plenty of works detailing the activities of the security and intelligence services and their allies in the Forces, in the City and in industry at key moments in the development of contemporary Britain, but most of these […]

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 […]

The crisis

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

In Parish Notices in the last issue I wrote ‘there isn’t much in this issue about the economic situation because there really isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said, for example by Larry Elliot in The Guardian every week.’ Well, I changed my mind about that and here are the bits I found … Read more

Recent JFK (and related) literature

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] index. The most important book on the case published in the last few years. A mass of new evidence – Oswald as FBI informant, Ruby’s gun-running activities, intelligence agencies out of control, and more. Marred only by the La Fontaines’ novelistic autobiographical interludes and the belief that the Anti-Castro Cuban groups could go for […]

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 […]

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