Spook-wise: MI6 and Clare Short

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] Africa. The spooks must love having Labour in office, terrified to oppose anything they ask for. Hitherto secret Whitehall committee trying to deal with unauthorised exposure of intelligence material was itself exposed in the Sunday Times 21 May 2000. A page of the Guardian (tabloid section) 24 September 1999 was devoted to the Ken […]

A Game of Moles: the Deceptions of an MI6 Officer

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] contender for the prize for most inaccurate jacket ever written. It begins by stating that this is the first MI6 memoir (it isn’t), calls MI6 officer Bristow an ‘agent’, (the one thing which drives intelligence officers nuts), and then makes claims not to be found in the text. Of interest only to serious MI6 buffs.

The Labour Party

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Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] to them; on other issues that clearly bore on the question of war, like decolonisation, Europe, and the economy; on possible extraneous influences, like business and the intelligence community; on strands of Labour opinion outside the parliamentary party – trade unions, Fabians, pressure groups, and at constituency level; and a little further back in […]

The 1986 National Front Split, Part 1

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] the ‘dirty tricks’ attributed to the ‘political soldiers’. He denies all the charges and his explanation for the hostility is that as head of the ‘Security and Intelligence Department’ (of which Barrett was briefly a member), he played a prominent part in the disciplinary tribunals of those suspended or expelled, with concomitant legal action […]

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, […]

Digging in the Oyston archive

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

[…] largely unaware that he had been marked down as a dangerous enemy of the centralised British political system. According to the former MI5 officer David Shayler, the intelligence services file on Owen Oyston was re-examined in 1992 by the head of MI5, when it looked as if Neil Kinnock’s revived Labour party might defeat […]

The CIA and the Marshall Planks

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Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] for example, he talks of the CIA in its ‘great, early days ….. manned by the flower of American youth…. something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth.’ Ah, the self-confidence (and self-delusion) in ‘doing good in the world by stealth’. RR

Profits of Peace: The Political Economy of Anglo-German Appeasement

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

Scott Newton, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, £30 This is the book Newton was working on which produced the spin-off pieces published in Lobster: ‘The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during WW2’ in Lobster 20, and ‘The Who’s Who of Appeasement’ in Lobster 22. As those essays showed, Newton … Read more

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 […]

Feedback

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] experimental than strategic, but it was definitely offensive rather than defensive, and was part of an ongoing development program within the bowels of the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence establishments. Re: the comments in Lobster 45 p. 24, subhead ‘Monkey business?’, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations poured millions into women’s studies, black studies, and […]

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