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, […]

Trust no one: the secret world of Sidney Reilly

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Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

Richard B. Spence Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003 , $29.95, h/b   Boasting over 1800 footnotes and a magnificent bibliography (including texts published in Turkmenistan) this would be awarded A for Application if such a prize existed in academia. The author, Professor of History at the University of Idaho, appears to be something of an … Read more

Secrets from Germany

Lobster Issue 15 (1988) £££

GEHEIM (“SECRET”) is West Germany’s representative in the international stable of state research publications. Geheim has appeared three or four times a year since 1983, and its editors are experienced state research journalists in the Federal Republic – Rudolf Gossner, author (with Geheim contributor Uwe Herzog) of an exhaustive work on the undercover activities of … Read more

Joseph K and the spooky launderette

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] bothered using that particular channel. To date, Stuart-Smith hasn’t upheld any complaint about MI5’s activities. See Tom Bower’s recent biography of Sir Dick White, The Perfect English Spy, Heinemann, London 1995. According to David Shayler, the current favourite to succeed Stephen Lander as head of MI5 is Ms Manningham Buller, whose father prosecuted Blake. […]

Philanthropic imperialism

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

Democracy building or democracy assistance, is a putative socio-economic policy solution, which, because of the extent of the political and economic forces impacting on it, has become a contemporary socio-economic problem. Democracy building’s institutional formation rests upon a reconfiguration of Cold War positions that retain, what Dr. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky termed ‘such interference,’(1)so as to continue … Read more

Spooks

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

See also: Part 1: Forty Years of Legal Thuggery (Lobster 9) Part 2: British Spooks “Who’s Who” (Lobster 10) Intelligence Personnel Named in ‘Inside Intelligence’ (Lobster 15) Philby naming names (Lobster 16) First supplement to A Who’s Who of the British Secret State (Lobster 19) Below is a list of spooks, both dead and alive, … Read more

The Open Side of Secrecy: Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

Anthony Glees, Philip J. Davies, and John N. L. Morrison London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2006, £20, h/b   The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is a recent addition to the roster of Whitehall bodies; the motives of those who created it, as the authors show, are obscure and its role to some extent remains … Read more

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

Errors, corrections and updates

Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££

[…] and told me that his divisional committee of the party had once devoted a whole meeting to discussing whether Harry Newton was or was not a police spy. The general view was, apparently, that he was so obviously one, that he couldn’t be one in fact.’ From Eric Preston: Eric Preston, mentioned in Donald […]

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