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 […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] column in the previous Lobster, is the official US euphemism for a wide range of symptoms up to and including brain damage, referred to by all but intelligence bureaucrats as Havana Syndrome, since the first incidents happened at the US embassy there. Re-reading some of the reporting and comment on this, two things struck […]

German links to the Hammarskjöld case

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018)

[PDF file]: […] only here, at least one night-time attack is reported.24 Fourthly, on the night of the attack, radio signals of the attacking plane were received by a British intelligence radio station in Cyprus.25 To reach this station, radio signals from Ndola had to cover 5,300 km. Only High-Frequency (HF) radio signals can cover such a […]

view from bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] column in the previous Lobster, is the official US euphemism for a wide range of symptoms up to and including brain damage, referred to by all but intelligence bureaucrats as Havana Syndrome, since the first incidents happened at the US embassy there. Re-reading some of the reporting and comment on this, two things struck […]

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 […]

The CIA, torture, history and American exceptionalism

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] Vietnam, and the protests of the Sixties, and Nixon and Watergate. It was headed into the Tehran Embassy crisis, a revolution the trillions of dollars of US intelligence never saw coming, and the fall of our buddy in democracy, the Shah. Jimmy Carter took the blame for that, and America launched itself into twenty […]

The British Gladio and the murder of Sergeant Speed

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] Contingencies Unit the year before at Windscale; the ‘stay behind’ aspect was essentially a cover story. The context The mid-1970s was a turbulent period for the Anglo-American intelligence and security services. In the United States, in the wake of Watergate the CIA was under scrutiny by Congress and journalists as never before. CIA officers, […]

The DRE newsletter (June – August 1963)

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] by the disappearance of the boat’ – or so the FBI was told by the CIA, who in turn had received their information from the US Coastguard Intelligence Service. Since the ban on anti-Cuban covert action had been imposed by the US federal government and was being enforced through the State Department, the possibility […]

The secret life of Bellingcat’s so-called ‘Timmi Allen’

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] 9 Olaf’s father was apparently a Stasi officer,10 and it seems that Olaf was inspired to follow in his footsteps. As is the case with many other intelligence and security agencies, literal patronage was a preferential pathway for potential Stasi recruits. Perhaps the best-known instance of this structural nepotism is to be found in […]

The economic crisis continues

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] the mistakes of history, you simply repeat them.’ 21 Enter the spooks On 3 February the American magazine Manufacturing and Technology News reported: ‘The Director for National Intelligence is undertaking a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the state of American manufacturing. Growing concern over loss of domestic capability and dependence on foreign nations 20 […]

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