Eye Spy!

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] Lander, Director-General of MI5. Our fearless journalist reports that ‘Sir Steven had clearly been shaken by cruel and untimely remarks made by Tom King, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee.’ Poor baby! How fortunate that EYE SPY! was there to sympathise. Unnamed fearless reporter continues: ‘The Director-General should never have been put 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 […]

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 […]

The CIA and the Marshall Planks

Book cover
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

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 […]

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

Book cover
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

The Valkyrie Operation

Book cover
Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] they duly did, of course. The books concentrates on Moyle’s role as the editor of Defence Helicopter World – a piece of transparent cover for someone whose intelligence role must have been obvious to all concerned. He went sniffing round the Chilean arms manufacturer Cardoen who was planning to produce a kit enabling the […]

New Labour, New Atlanticism: US and Tory intervention in the unions since the 1970s

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] that he ‘has been a long standing member of the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding’. Conclusion These are just some of the right-wing and intelligence efforts to suborn the trade union and Labour Party Right in recent decades. So, should anyone take notice of any of the above? Radical trade unionists […]

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

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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar