Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££
Leonard Doyle, Guardian 24th February 1984. Sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for illegal surveillance of private citizens, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) settled out of court. LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division were accused of ‘organising a massive spying operation providing right-wing organisations with a sophisticated computer and handing on extensive files … Read more
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££
Nicholas Bethell’s memoir Spies and Other Secrets (Viking, London, 1994) includes a curious section in which Bethell describes how in 1970, after he had been involved in the first publication of Solzhenitzen’s Cancer Ward in the West, he was attacked by a curious alliance of the left, Private Eye, and various people in and close … Read more
Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££
Searchlight again In the Daniel Brandt essay in this issue there is a section on the scandal in the United States resulting from the discovery that the Jewish organisation, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has been found to be collecting data on hundreds of political groups, both right and left, and trading data with agencies of … Read more
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££
British Spies and Irish Rebels British Intelligence and Ireland, 1916-1945 Paul McMahon Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2008, h/b, £30 First up, I have no specialist knowledge of this area, so if there any howlers in here, I’m unlikely to spot them. However, I know a good book when I see one. This has been … Read more
Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££
Kimberley Cornish London: Arrow, 1999, £7.99 On p. 86 of this enthralling book Kimberley Cornish invites readers to complete the following sentence: ‘Wittgenstein was offered the Chair in Philosophy at Lenin’s university [Kazan] in 1935 because…’ What possible reason can there be except that he was serving the Soviet regime? Cornish contends that Wittgenstein recruited … Read more
Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££
[…] (14 March ’92) reported the admission by the Ministry of Defence that in an operation called HORNBEAM, trawlers had been used during the first Cold War to spy on Soviet shipping. But the MOD spokesperson refused to confirm that some trawlers had carried intelligence officers. Statewatch Bulletin (Jan/Feb 1992) includes an important update to […]
Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££
[…] at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhestan. It also led to the location of crashed Soviet TU-95 ‘Backfire’ bomber in Africa. (The accuracy of this information was later verified by spy satellites.) In 1978 the DIA took over as its office of primary responsibility.(29) Pat Price gave an equally incredibly detailed account in the course of his […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££
[…] agent operation that may have spurred the Soviets to produce more lethal chemical and biological agents. He was referring to David Wise’s book, Cassidy’s Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas. ………the deception ultimately worked against US interests by spurring the Soviets to develop more lethal chemical and biological agents and may also […]
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££
Andrew Emmerson and Tony Beard. London: Capital Transport, 2004, £25.00, h/b Gimme Shelter(s)! The secret underground government structures that originated during the Second World War and were later adapted, enlarged and augmented for the Nuclear Age were given a once-over by Peter Laurie in Beneath the City Streets (1970) and given much more detailed … Read more
