[…] programme: patronage, favour, flattery and relevance – classic control mechanisms – in return for marketing and data collection. As part of the latter, parents were told to spy on their children, many of them adults, as well as find solutions, PR-speak for shortcuts to containment. Exhorted to confront the seeping villainy of heinous fanatics, […]
[…] Fred Halliday proposes an outline for an anthology of Cold War literature covering five major themes: nuclear war; wars of the third world; belief and betrayal; the spy novel; and the end of cold war. Fred Halliday, ‘High and just proceedings: Notes towards an anthology of the Cold War’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, […]
A Channel 4 SOE mystery In January and February this year Channel 4 broadcast a history of the war-time Special Operations Executive, SOE, written and presented by the novelist Sebastian Faulks, called Churchill’s Secret Army. It was an interesting series with some excellent first-hand material and footage. But there were two mysteries. The first, and … Read more
Suffer the innocents? The Stevens inquiry into Britain’s state assassination policy in Northern Ireland in the 1980s began in September 1989. The police officers who signed up for it didn’t think it would take long to do. ‘We thought it was going to be a fairly routine investigation. We didn’t expect to find that there … Read more
[…] the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.’ Notes See also Shipman’s ‘Why the CIA has to spy on Britain’, The Spectator, 25 February 2009 which has one or two fragments not in the Telegraph version. See, for example, . See Lobster 55 for […]
[…] The move, proposed by Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, and President Jacques Chirac of France, is seen as the first step towards the creation of Europe’s own spy agency, based in Brussels. And in the Daily Telegraph of 28 February 2000, Alan Judd, the former (?) SIS officer Alan Petty (26) warned of plans […]
See note (1) David Phillips, the former CIA officer considered by the Select Committee on Assassinations as a possible candidate for the true identity behind the cover name ‘”Maurice Bishop” -(2)- reacted strongly when this book was published in the summer of 1980. He contacted top executives in newspapers and television, making himself available to … Read more
[…] interest he has for students of 20th century intelligence and espionage. While a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, he became the lover of Anthony Blunt, the Soviet spy, aka ‘The Fourth Man’. In the words of Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, ‘Most of their mutual gay friends assumed that they had begun as lovers […]
Parish Notices Thanks to Al Baron, Terry Hanstock, Daniel Brandt, Jane Affleck, Robin Whittaker (in particular), Tom Easton and Dr. David Turner for information since the last Lobster. An apology to David Guyatt not publishing his long and interesting reply to the criticism in ‘Feedback’ of his article on alleged US use of chemical weapons … Read more
Compromised Reporting Taking its cue from a powerful network of far-right radio commentators, the American press insists on noting only those financial scandals which don’t sully ultra-conservative politicians. Of either party. For example: Rush Limbaugh, who has become the Republican Party’s Goebbels, loudly applauded Clinton’s appointment of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, an appalling Texas (Democrat) … Read more
