The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Horse Guards Road , you’re likely to find that everyone but you is an investment banker!’ 3 Fixing facts, faking history I think that the phrase ‘the intelligence and the facts were being fixed round the policy’, which was in the 2002 memo from Matthew Rycroft to a section of those managing the UK’s […]

Misc reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] is still possible to navigate through this foggy, booby-trapped interior landscape; but he also shows how difficult the journey becomes once the mob begins to gather. * Intelligence Wars American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda Thomas Powers New York Review Books, 2002, £16.99, h/b S omewhere between an academic and a journalist, Thomas […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] of ‘Who struck John’ is mentioned in Peter Usowski, ‘The White House, Richard Helms, and Watergate: A Clash between Executive Power and Organizational Responsibility’ in Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Extracts, June 2022) at . Usowiski’s interpretation is the same as mine. Garrick Alder spotted this. 40 Quoted in David Talbot, Brothers: […]

The Atlantic Semantic

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] sister of Max (a council member of Brian Crozier’s ISC and also with the Committee for the Free World). During WW2 Nora Beloff had worked for Political Intelligence at the Foreign Office, and her attacks on the extreme left of the Labour Party had the backing of David Astor.4 Michael Crick drew on Beloff, […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] of ‘Who struck John’ is mentioned in Peter Usowski, ‘The White House, Richard Helms, and Watergate: A Clash between Executive Power and Organizational Responsibility’ in Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Extracts, June 2022) at . Usowiski’s interpretation is the same as mine. Garrick Alder spotted this. 8 Quoted at and in David […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] Leeden Michael Ledeen’s death in May this year produced a flurry of articles about him. Not discussed, in those I read, was Ledeen’s possible relationship with Israeli intelligence. Which is odd, really, for Israel’s interests run through his career as an interface between US state and non-state officials and Israel. Google AI gave me […]

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] case with press releases and presentations (including one by the US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council) using collections of classified documents and intelligence assessments. The problem was that Iraq did not have any WMD. UN weapons inspectors did not find any before or after the 2003 war. US and […]

Angles Morts

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] Soviets because he had been blackmailed or because he truly believed it, he had indeed been a victim of the Great Game of espionage. None of the intelligence Curiously, Gillman and Midolo report that Worsthorne was described as a good contact by the KGB London rezident and double agent Oleg Gordievsky. Murder in Cairo […]

View from Lob 73

Lobster Issue

[…] this current issue. Much of this was interesting to me. For one thing, NFB has continued doing what Lobster used to do: surveying published material on the intelligence and security services and producing synopses of it. There is a long essay about Lockerbie; and, while I am no expert on this subject, I didn’t […]

Divine Rascal: On the Trail of LSD’s Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead by Andy Roberts

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] now tarnished and forgotten. Occasionally there are allusions to a parallel narrative in the background. As early as page 14 the author states ‘. . . secret intelligence services, initially in America and Britain and latterly in former Iron Curtain countries, may have played a subtle but carefully-planned role in LSD’s discovery and penetration […]

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