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 […]

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 […]

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’ […]

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 […]

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 […]

Britain’s Secret Wars: How and Why the United Kingdom sponsors conflict around the world by T. J. Coles

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] this book Coles uses the same techniques to explore…. well, not really secret wars so much as barely reported foreign policy events: military training missions, weapons sales, intelligence operations and attempts to manipulate other (relatively minor) countries in the interests of either – take your pick – multinationals or the global free trade agenda. […]

GLADIO: NATO’s dagger at the Heart of Europe; the Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis by Richard Cottrell

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] 1974 Cottrell has added the Cecil King-Lord Mountbatten meeting of 1968. (pp. 236/7) He has Sir Maurice Oldfield, a career-long SIS officer, as ‘MI5’s director of counter- intelligence and deputy controller’. He tells us (p. 240) that Peter Wright’s book ‘gave credence to Wilson’s persistent claims that he was the target of a conspiracy […]

Accessibility Toolbar