South of the border

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] you’ll get the fuller drift. Many of the ex-spooks are quite open about their past employment. Take, for example, Dr Gerhard Conrad PhD – Visiting Professor in Intelligence Studies who, ‘is a former senior member of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND)’.7 Mr Keith Beaven, a Visiting Research Fellow, is more circumspect. His profile […]

Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind…

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] how much it resembles the way business was transacted in the 18th century. A system has developed where patronage and privilege appear to count for more than intelligence, life experience and hard work. Groups of young ambitious people cluster around significant ‘king makers’ (for the New Labour ‘project’ these appear to have been Peter […]

Apocryphilia

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] of Burgess and McLean in 1951, expansive liberal types like Klop were not in vogue. A strong case can be made for him being the most competent intelligence officer the British had working for them 1935-1950. At first glance it might appear that John Freeman, like Ustinov, was a casualty of the Cold War. […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] dots . . . I received an email from Kit Klarenberg, who is mentioned below in the column. Klarenberg is a prolific writer on British and US intelligence operations and politics. He took exception to my describing the British government’s Institute for Statecraft (and the Integrity Initiative which it created) as an attempt ‘to […]

Chris Hani book copy

Lobster Issue

[…] Research (SAIMR), but it is so incompetently done I abandoned it after reading/skimming a third of its 450 pages. It begins badly, with the LaRouche magazine Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) quoted at length on pages 6 and 7. EIR claims that SAIMR was a front for MI6 but offers no evidence for that; nor […]

Megrahi – You Are My Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence by John Ashton

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] continues even after al-Megrahi’s death. The book makes clear that al-Megrahi was a vulnerable figure. He, along with many other Libyans, was a US sanctions buster, had intelligence connections, two passports and did not tell his wife about his regular trips abroad, including those to Malta. But Ashton also puts that into political context […]

Undercover killers at the BBC

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] Lobster on the professional and political activities of Guest More’s father,4 I wrote the foreword to Undercover Killers. Atkinson’s discovery of a devastating leak of raw police intelligence that dropped into the hands of professional criminals in Manchester has exposed the danger of Westminster government schemes that were pioneered by Margaret Thatcher – to […]

Still thinking about Dallas

Lobster Issue

[…] they omitted from the story which is significant. To discuss Oswald-Cuba-CIA without referring to all the information we now have showing that Oswald was working for US intelligence agencies3 looks like deception by omission – disinformation by omission. But the omission is only deliberate if Shenon and Sabato know the 1 ‘How the CIA […]

Moscow Gold: ‘the Communist threat’ in post-war Britain

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[PDF file]: […] replacement. (This, rather than MI5 incompetence, may explain why so few Soviet operations were exposed in post-war Britain.) More cynically — and cynicism is appropriate where all intelligence and security services are concerned — MI5 had two compelling reasons not to ‘blow’ the CPGB-KGB link. While they would get some temporary kudos for so […]

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