PR, Iraq and ‘the allies’

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] swipe at the Americans and double-entendre: ‘There are no chinks in our security’. Doubtless, had the script not been so bad, the story about the happily bungling spy could have played in Iraq as part of Britain’s ‘hearts and minds’ campaign: a sort of movie equivalent to British troops losing 9 – 3 to […]

An Incorrect Political Memoir

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] to one of their meetings after reading a book on U.S. involvement in Vietnam and walking out of my fraternity. They must have thought I was a spy, with my short hair and button-down clothes, but it didn’t matter because at the time SDS accepted everyone and I was wearing a strong suit of […]

The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11

Lobster Issue

By Peter Dale Scott (18,734 words) 10/29/05 See also A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11 (I wish to acknowledge the invaluable assistance in the preparation of this essay from N, a Russian who for the time being prefers to remain anonymous.)   Tajik authorities have claimed repeatedly that neither the US nor NATO exerts any … Read more

Great Northern? Was the author of Swallows and Amazons a Soviet secret agent?

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] squeeze an early reply into his next column in the Guardian: ‘The professor’s caricature of this most principled, independent and forthright of journalists as just another suborned spy is ridiculous.’ Andrew’s attack on Ransome united two experts on Ransome’s days in Russia, who had previously been arguing about the meaning of Russian documents concerning […]

Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British anti-semitism 1939/1940

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] the Phoney War remains a taboo subject in many respects – even at the level of popular fiction. Len Deighton made his name with the Harry Palmer spy thrillers, three of which, The Ipcress File (1962), Funeral in Berlin (1964) and Billion Dollar Brain (1965), were immediately filmed. The other book in the series, […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] a number of long pieces about Wallace and Holroyd – and about Kincora – for the Catholic end of the Irish media. (See, for example, ‘Framed? The spy caught up in his own web of intrigue’, Sunday World, 31 May 1987, ‘Garda “Spy” Now A Hero’, Sunday World, May 3, 1987, and ‘The MI5 […]

SISies: MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations and A Life: A. J. Ayer

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Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] – on the grounds that he was such a selfish little shit, he lacked the necessary patriotic motivation (I am not making this up) to be a spy. Lawson did move into a series of increasingly expensive houses through the eighties and nineties, however. But his wife’s family are rich. Ayer’s final years were […]

Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] what was then called the ‘silicon chip’. And Alec Guinness kept the nation spellbound with the television version of John le Carré’s 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It depicted the tempting of senior UK espionage moguls with a one-off, spectacular solution to Secret Britain’s ills, a Soviet super-spy who would get us back […]

Briefly: Ideas. Blitz to Blair. Covert Network. etc

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] of the American liberal-left who were so easily persuaded to surrender their independence and their critical judgement by the red scare of the early Cold War. I SPY: The Secret Life of a British Agent Geoffrey Elliott St Ermin’s Press/Little, Brown, London, 1998, £18.99 The agent in question was Elliott’s father, Kavan, about whom […]

Ratlines: how the Vatican’s Nazi networks betrayed Western intelligence to the Soviets

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] Franciscan printing press in Rome. Both the US Counter Intelligence Corps CIC) and Britain’s military intelligence knew what was happening. Indeed, CIC agent Robert Mudd had a spy within Dragonovic’s organisation. The CIC arranged a burglary of Dragonovic’s office and photographed his records. Mudd concluded that “all this activity stems from the Vatican’. Aarons […]

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