Political life in Britain

Lobster Issue

[…] way he has fascinating stories to tell about John Addey, James Sherwood, Joseph Godson, the Gang of Four and many more. He also had experiences of the intelligence services worth reading. This is not an academic work, though academics could learn much from it. Nor is it just a collection of anecdotes from a […]

The Plots Against the President, by Sally Denton

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[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)

[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 […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[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 […]

The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam by Peter Oborne

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] its key figure as Dean Godson, a former Daily Telegraph colleague. The author writes: Godson came from a family with a tradition of interest in Cold War intelligence work, propaganda and covert action. His father Joseph Godson was Labour attaché at the United States embassy in London in the 1950s and used his influence […]

The Hotel Tacloban by Douglas Valentine

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[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’ […]

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

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[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 […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[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 […]

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