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 […]

Coach into pumpkin: some problems with Paget

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

Operation Paget, the investigation by the team led by Sir John Stevens into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, briefly tried to investigate a collision between a white Fiat Uno and Princess Diana’s BMW. The head-on collision happened on 22 March 1996, on Cromwell Road, Kensington, when a casino employee lost control of a … Read more

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 […]

JFK: Oswald? Which one?

Book cover
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

[…] who shot the President. In Alias Oswald (Manchester, Maine; GKG partners, 1985) Robert Cutler and W. R. Morris argued that the second ‘Oswald’, was not a Soviet spy but a US spy. In their analysis the switch from one ‘Oswald’ to the other took place in 1958 while Oswald was serving in the Marine […]

Sources: Spectre. CAQ, etc

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] of campaigns of official harassment; and a long piece by David Pegg which discusses a little known but very interesting book by Karl Marx, Herr Vogt: A Spy in the Workers’ Movement, which ought to raise an eyebrow or two out there on the British Left. Notes from the Borderland is £2.50 per issue […]

The CIA: A history of torture

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] also John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (New York 1988). See John McGuffin, The Guineapigs (London 1974) Peter Grose, Gentlemen Spy: The Life and Times of Allen Dulles (Amherst 1994) p. 393. McCoy, A Question of Torture, (see note 5) pp. 28, 29, 33, 44-45, 49. (On […]

Letter from America: CIA set for Pentagon buyout?

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] Coleman the Pentagon has never forgiven President Truman for turning OSS into a supposedly civilian entity, and is well on the way to running the entire US spy apparat. I don’t really believe this strict military-civilian dichotomy. CIA has long been full of military spooks – General Charles P. Cabell and Admiral Stansfield Turner, […]

Iraq

Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

Since issue 45, last June, there has been so much information produced on the events preceding the assault on Iraq it is impossible to keep track of it all. Here is my selection. For the powers-that-be, the war has been traumatic, not least because their various cover stories and deceptions have been exposed so rapidly, … Read more

Apartheid’s friends

Book cover
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

Apartheid’s friends: The rise and fall of South Africa’s secret service James Sanders London: John Murray, 2006, £11.99, p/b   This is a tremendously impressive piece of work; and it’s big: 395 pages of text, another 100 pages of notes and sources and a decent index. I imagine that most of it will be new … Read more

Persian Drugs: Oliver North, the DEA and Covert Operations in the Mideast

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] July 1989 (syndicated column) Memo from Acting Assistant Commissioner, Office of Enforcement, to Commissioner of Customs, 30 October 1985. Mark Perry, The Secret Life of an American Spy’, Regardie’s, February 1989 Testimony of Ambassador Oakley, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on Judiciary, hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency and Drug Trafficking, May 13-15 1985, […]

Accessibility Toolbar