South of the border (occasional snippets from)

Lobster Issue 91 (2025) FREE

[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 […]

The Trump administration’s attempts to influence Julian Assange

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] emerges here is a pattern of one-time visits by persons considered to be close to President Trump. Both Nigel Farage and Dana Rohrabacher might be considered, in intelligence terms, as ‘floaters’ – assets The allegation of a longer term association betwixt Farage and Assange was made by Simpson in testimony before the U.S. House […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] concerned. Page 104 Winter 2009/10 Lobster 58 of his trips to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War Wilson did talk to someone who was a Soviet intelligence officer with some kind of cover – as a trade official, say. Perhaps Wilson had a few vodkas and talked about British politics. Our Soviet intelligence […]

Secret Justice: Public Interest Immunity Certificates (PIICs) and their use in the Asil Nadir trials

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] PIIs were issued to prevent an officer of Special Branch, DS Wilkinson, from verifying that Paul Grecian had been acting with official backing in order to gather intelligence on Iraq. The Public Interest Immunity certificates were signed by Kenneth Baker and Peter Lilley, relying on an assessment by the prosecuting council that the documents […]

The Plots Against the President, by Sally Denton

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] gone along with it in the first place. Nor is it any good to pin the blame solely on General MacArthur, for egging Hoover on with false intelligence about communist infiltration of the protests. Hoover had other and better sources of information available, but chose instead to rely on someone who drew out his […]

Keynes, social democracy and the Great Moving Right Show

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] wealthy since the late 1950s.34 In the British case it was given a helping hand by elements embedded within the state, notably the military and security and intelligence agencies, reluctant to embrace the end of Empire.35 Using allies in the press, politics and higher education, these forces have fought a war for the accumulation […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: […] recommended that a ‘Home Desk’ should be ‘added to the Information Research Department . . . to act as the focus for the collation and dissemination of intelligence about communist activities on the home front’. McEvoy describes some of the later concerns of the Home committee – for example the historian Eric Hobsbawm and […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] former Saudi defence employee called Omar al-Bayoumi, who had arrived in 22 the US in 1994. Even before 9/11 the FBI had al-Bayoumi down as a Saudi intelligence officer, noting his ‘extensive ties to the Saudi Government’ and his extravagant personal spending despite being officially unemployed. Al-Bayoumi had a close personal friend (another Saudi […]

On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Stark’s involvement in LSD production was either part of a CIA operation, or tolerated by the agency as long as Stark was in a position to supply intelligence. The parapolitical ‘classics’ in this field are: • • Stewart Tendler and David May, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia – […]

Dangerous Hero, and, Boris Johnson

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] because it did not stop Corbyn from being ‘a communist fellowtraveller’. (p. 37) Bower does his level best to assemble evidence that Corbyn was working for Czech intelligence in the late 1980s. They gave him the codename ‘COB’, presumably short for Corbyn and considered him a ‘potential collaborator’. But in the end Bower has […]

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