Mrs Thatcher, North Sea oil and the hegemony of the City

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

Introduction I began writing this in the early 1980s. If you were then reading the Guardian or the Observer, and knew a little, simple economics, it didn’t take genius to notice that while the UK’s manufacturing economy was being decimated by Conservative Party economic policy, the City of London was booming. More interestingly, and less … Read more

The Neave letters

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] (Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Penguin 1983), the book about the 1976 assassination of Chilean opposition leader, Orlando Letelier. In mid-1975 General Pinochet ordered the Chilean intelligence service, DINA, to gather compromising material on the human rights situation in other countries. DINA dispatched an anti-Castro Cuban, Virgilio Paz, to Belfast to obtain photographs […]

Obituaries

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] published by him in Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland to circumvent censorship, it was subsequently republished in an expanded edition. Under the new title, The British Intelligence Services in Action, it has become a modern classic, is virtually impossible to now locate, and still compares well with subsequent volumes by Martin Dillon, Paul […]

Operation Mind Control

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] vile vibes of any photocopy shop! The Jonestown section is very thorough, and Bowart makes a strong – if perhaps exaggerated – case for some sort of intelligence connection. Likewise for the horrific events in Waco, Texas. The mind control transmitter section, though, is disappointing. I too have read the articles suggesting we plant […]

Terrorism: how the West can win

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] did not get out in time.” Thus, it appears, “getting out in time” means anything up to 15 months later! (This really is vaguely insulting to one’s intelligence.) Jilian Becker, now part of the new London-based terrorism institute (see elsewhere in this issue), writes of captured PLO documents showing: “that the Soviet Union, through […]

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 […]

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 […]

Feedback

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] the EU to the British people. These propaganda campaigns did little to educate people about the realities of EU membership and they significantly out-spent the campaigns of Eurosceptics. As such they effectively undermined the democratic process. The case stands. Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, (London: John Murray, 2001)

Notes on contamination

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] issue 2, for example, contains a long piece about the Bilderbergers, by Sir Louis Le Bailly, former Naval Attaché to Washington, and former Director-General of the Defence Intelligence Staff. It isn’t a very good piece: it contains banal errors, Le Bailly doesn’t bother with documentation, and it is xenophobic – Germanophobic – to a […]

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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