South of the border (occasional snippets from)

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] same as the old ‘C’ Much fanfare – huge media excitement, it seemed – at the appointment of a woman as the new Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (the ‘C’ of SIS, for the acronym enthusiasts). The whole point of this, it would seem, was to herald a gentler, more feminine touch to […]

Team mercenary GB: Part 1 – the early years

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] operation into motion. Each time, however, it seemed as if the usual unofficial sanction was not entirely forthcoming. From impounded arms shipments to stern warnings from the Intelligence community, the plot seemed doomed. Indeed, 2 See Christopher Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers and International Security: The Rise of Private Military Companies, (London: Routledge, 2006) pp. 46-49. […]

Thatcher’s Secret War by Clive Bloom

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] lines later there is the following quotation. ‘Brutally summarised……Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism grew out of a right-wing network in this country with extensive links to the military- intelligence establishment. Her rise to power was the climax of a long campaign by this network which included a protracted destabilisation campaign against the Labour and Liberal […]

The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] project’s ‘ballooning’ costs which is due to report in winter 2024/25. The latest opportunity for consultants will be how will departments fare with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology which former PM Tony Blair has set great faith in solving no end of public sector challenges. With former Tory leader William Hague […]

The Colonel and I: My Life With Gaddafi by Daad Sharab

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] a constant jockeying for power and favour, like a medieval court. At the centre of all this, as I increasingly found to my cost, was Abdullah Senussi’s intelligence service.’ (p. 50) She was also an interpreter of the world outside Libya – and outside the Middle East – to Gaddafi. Like most of those […]

Consultants Challen

Lobster Issue

[…] project’s ‘ballooning’ costs which is due to report in winter 2024/25. The latest opportunity for consultants will be how will departments fare with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology which former PM Tony Blair has set great faith in solving no end of public sector challenges. With former Tory leader William Hague […]

Did the Mossad steal John le Carré’s cunning plan?

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] le Carré’s cunning plan? Andrew Rosthorn In the July 1982 foreword to his 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl,1 John le Carré 2 thanked the Israeli ‘ intelligence fraternity’ for their ‘advice and co-operation’. The author (whose 25th spy thriller, Agent Running in the Field,3 was published by Penguin in October) offered ‘sincere thanks’ […]

Gone but not forgotten… (Donald Trump book reviews)

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] NATO. Moreover, Trump was on numerous occasions openly sympathetic to Russia and admiring of Putin, even to the extent of ‘siding with Russia’s dictator over his own intelligence agencies’. (p. 58) Hitherto this would have been completely unthinkable, completely unacceptable to Republicans who would, without any doubt, have denounced such a president as a […]

America’s Nazi Secret by John Loftus

Lobster Issue

[…] that hundreds of Belorussian (or Byelorussian) collaborators with the occupying Nazi forces during WW2, many of whom were guilty of war crimes, were recruited by the US intelligence services of the period and/or were allowed into the United States following the end of WW2. This is the secret. This edition has a new introduction […]

Survival of the Richest: escape fantasies of the tech billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] Not so here, though various individuals are identified as the narrative proceeds. These are ultra-rich preppers – people who have considered climate change, population growth and Artificial Intelligence, and the consequences these – especially the last – may have for human existence on the planet. They also possess, in Rushkoff’s words, ‘the Mindset’. Namely, […]

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