Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind…

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[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 […]

Gone but not forgotten… (Donald Trump book reviews)

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[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 […]

The President and the Provocateur: The parallel lives of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald by Alex Cox

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] creates a striking effect, which is difficult to quite put a finger on. The macro/micro contrast between Oswald’s strange life, shuttling about at the behest of some intelligence agency or agencies – the provocateur in the subtitle being only one of his roles – within some of the hottest years of the Cold War […]

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

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[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’ […]

Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy From Truman to Trump by Jonathan Marshall

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] As a result, 120 of So that is one ‘invisible government’. Six years later David Wise and Thomas Ross published their ground-breaking book about the world of intelligence and also called it The Invisible Government. The text is online at or . 1 I write ‘allegedly’ here because not everyone thinks there was a […]

The Hotel Tacloban by Douglas Valentine

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] stylistic point of view it is highly appropriate to focus on MacArthur also because of the coincidence of their first names. William Colby (1920-1996) Director of Central Intelligence, i.e. head of the CIA (1973-1976) Prior to that he had served as chief of the Far East Division and Chief of Station in Vietnam, with […]

Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] to achieve a rapid seizure of power in the name of the ‘National Will’, in senior ranks of the armed forces and sections of the security and intelligence services, on the Right of the Conservative Party, in business and financial circles and among sections of the media. The object seems to have been the […]

Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the end of Empire by Aaron Edwards

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] fire, they ‘cowered’ – as opposed to sheltering, which was what white men did. They ‘lounged’ a lot. Instead of shouting, they ‘hollered’. While Britain used ‘covert intelligence’, they ‘spied’ treacherously. Their attacks were ‘heartless’ and ‘cowardly’. They were addicted to ‘fighting, killing and treachery’, usually for lucre, or under the influence of ‘gat’ […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Hazel Blears and you can read it for yourself. Russell interprets his experience at the Guardian as a demonstration of the penetration of the media by the intelligence services. But as I wrote to his daughter, Amy, who nudged my elbow about this story: ‘Your dad’s piece, which he has already sent me, does […]

TO CATCH A SPY: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold by Tim Tate

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: […] of Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery. It gets pretty complicated here because another senior retired MI5 officer, Arthur Martin, and James Angleton, former head of CIA counter- intelligence, were also talking to people — notably Jonathan Aitken MP — about Soviet moles in MI5. At this point the British state, in the shape of […]

Accessibility Toolbar