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 […]

JFK, the FBI and the Cambridge phone call

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] the parlance of the contemporary government information worker. This was the anonymous call received by George Wigg, the Labour MP, urging him to forget about Vassall the spy and look instead at Profumo. Wigg always claimed it was anonymous but there is good circumstantial evidence he knew the identity of the caller – John […]

Inside ‘Inside Intelligence’

Lobster Issue 15 (1988)

[…] foreign correspondents at Kemsley included: Anthony Terry, Stephen Coulter, and Donald McCormick. Terry, in Army Intelligence during the war, was married to Sarah Gainham (nee Stainer), the spy novelist. Coulter was with Reuters and SHAPE staff officer in France and Scandinavia during the war. From 1945-65 Coulter was staff correspondent in Paris and then […]

The view from the bridge. Hidden Agendas. Jack Hill. Ghandi. Sinn Fein. Oswald

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] have to pretend that everything starts with them? Milner’s Kiwi Milner In car-boot sale near Scarborough I picked up a copy of the Australian-published The Rhodes Scholar Spy by Richard Hall (Random House, Australia, 1991). It is an account of Ian Milner, a pre-WW2 New Zealand Rhodes Scholar who became a Soviet agent in […]

Two views of Dorril: MI6: Fifty years of Special Operations

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Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

MI6: Fifty years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 hb   Harold Smith As I can testify from personal experience, having in 1960 been summoned to Government House in Lagos, Nigeria, to have my death sentence pronounced by the Governor General, MI6 is brutal, cruel, merciless and totally unforgiving. Dorril’s courage, … Read more

Defector Politics: or, grooving with Mr G.

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] supporting seventeen, were Bob Parry – and the aforementioned Bill Michie Les trois amis de Crozier concluded, somewhat obscurely, that, ‘None of this makes Mr Rogers a spy, or even an agent of influence. It simply serves to illustrate why agents of influence and fellow-travellers need fear as little opposition from the Security Service […]

Brothers

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

Brothers: The hidden history of the Kennedy years David Talbot London: Simon and Schuster, 2007, h/b, £20   Another Kennedy book? Yes, but a good one. Talbot may not have anything new of substance to tell us about the assassination per se but has much new material about events before and after it. Talbot’s JFK … Read more

Paranoia is what the other guy has

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] evidenced by its taste for conspiracy theories. While she recognises that conspiracies do happen, and cites the Catilinarian 2 and Cato Street conspiracies along with the Cambridge spy ring and Watergate as evidence of her breadth of historical vision, she is in no doubt that ‘…historical conspiracies are rare. The vast majority of apparently […]

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