Our Friends in the North West: The Owen Oyston Affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] Martin was currently using Sharon Denby to front his model agency business. She said Martin had worked as a private detective and had hired another detective to spy on Owen Oyston’s ex-wife Vicki Oyston. Melanie Hardy also claimed to Murrin that she had that morning noticed signs of an attempted forced entry on her […]

The Man from the FRU

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

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 Ultranationalist Right in Turkey and the Attempted Assassination of Pope John Paul II

Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££

[…] by Walde pp.79-105. The best sketch of Mossad’s structure and functioning is probably the CIA’s own leaked 1979 analysis, Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services in Counter spy (May-June 1982) pp.34-54. Most of the other works on the Israeli intelligence services are ‘hagiographic’. The NATO secret service is so secret that even its name […]

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 […]

Parapolitical bits and pieces

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

[…] Without knowing what his information is, a priori the problem with his story is that it hinges upon extraordinary incompetence by said British intelligence. Any reader of spy fiction would have been able to create a more plausible scene for the police to find than that left by ‘British intelligence’. Rather more plausible would […]

Notes on contamination

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997) £££

[…] Agency to be able to obtain details from the Inland Revenue, banks and building societies. An article in the Daily Mail 7 August 1996, ‘Benefits police may spy on your savings’, reported that while there was no legal prohibition on the Benefits Agency accessing building society and banks’ records, it was not done ‘by […]

How many divisions does the Pope have?

Book cover
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] materialised. In 1942 Gehlen had been unable to predict the time and place of the Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad.(5) In his new role running a major US-funded spy organisation, Gehl-en produced numerous reports claiming a Soviet invasion of the west was imminent, that the Soviets were building a fleet of flying wing jet fighters, […]

The final testimony of George Kennedy Young

Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££

The final testimony of George Kennedy Young Introduction When this was published we believed that it had been written by a close friend of his. Subsequently we learned that it had been written by Young himself. As far as we were able to judge, it is accurate. But this is by no means the whole … Read more

Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997) £££

[…] congressional commission in Costa Rica says something, doesn’t mean it’s true.'(18) (Before he joined the Post in the 1960s, Pincus traveled abroad on a CIA subsidy to spy on student leaders from other countries.(19) Unsurprisingly, Pincus was out in front of the pack of reporters that attacked the recent Mercury News story.) When the […]

Northern Ireland redux

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] it is impossible to tell whether the two women are 20 or 50, never mind whether they were attractive or not. Livingstone states in his column: ‘The spy master Peter Wright, of Spycatcher fame, makes no mention in his book of the extensive work he undertook in Ireland, yet he was the central figure […]

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