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 […]

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’ […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Establishment And how they get away with it by Owen Jones

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] there are deficiencies. For someone who apparently spent two years on postgraduate study of US history, Jones is weak on tracing links with UK in matters of intelligence and Atlanticism more broadly. He mentions, for example, Anthony Crosland, but not his CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom spell. He mentions the Heritage Foundation, but not […]

Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq by John W. Dower

Lobster Issue

[…] known how much uranium had been transported from Germany to Japan at that point in time, the US was aware, from its ability to read Japanese signals intelligence, that the Japanese Navy had a flotilla of aircraftcarrying submarines and were considering using these to carry out a long distance raid against a major target […]

Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and the Mafia: 1933 to 1966 by Jack Colhoun

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013)

[PDF file]: […] archives. So this is something like the official version. But only from the US side. There is little from the Cuban state’s version of events, notably its intelligence services, which penetrated the anti-Castro groups in America.1 The Mob flits in and out of the story. Although they put millions up at the beginning of […]

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