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 […]

Official: CIA does mean Cocaine Importing Agency after all

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] be trying to ignore the CIA’s ‘confession’, even less attention has been paid to revelations of the retired Uraguyan Admiral Eladio Moll, one time head of Uraguay’s intelligence service. In July last year Moll testified before a Uraguayan congressional commission about ‘the gringo doctrine’ – ie the instructions from the US to its ‘allies’ […]

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.

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 […]

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

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 View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] by all manner of spooks to run all manner of disinformation while he was editor and this spiel of his on Chile looks very much like an intelligence briefing – maybe even one of those distributed at the time of the Chile coup when Neil was working for the Economist, a regular outlet for […]

Wilson, MI5 and the rise of Thatcher

Lobster Issue 11 (April 1986)

[PDF file]: […] and the following week; Guardian 16 July 1976; Searchlight nos. 18 and 21. 7. Private Eye speculated that the documents had been leaked by “moderates” inside British intelligence, alarmed at the activities of some of the “wild men”. This view, attractive though it is, has no evidence to support it. 8. Best collection of […]

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