The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe

Lobster Issue 18 (1989)

[…] Guardian 11/2/87 NOTE: The Lobster 17 article on the Pinay Circle contained several spelling errors of the names of Circle members. The correct versions are given above. The ‘Network’ book mentioned in the footnotes to Lobster 17 is more easily available under the republished title The General was a Spy, Hohne and Zolling, Pan, 1973.

Sources: Roundtable. U.N. Lockerbie, etc

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

Roundtable I get regular e-mail bulletins from an organisation called the roundtable – not the Round Table but somebody? some people? – trying to document the US ruling elite by the study of its organisations. Really they should be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – because it is the CFR they mostly write about; … Read more

My Granny Made Me an Anarchist: The Christie File: Part 1, 1946-64

Book cover
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

Stuart Christie Christie Books, PO Box 35, Hastings East Sussex, TN 34 2UX pb, £34 from www.christiebooks.com   I really enjoyed this account of his childhood from Christie, Britain’s most famous anarchist and celebrated radical publisher. But I’m not sure how many other people would. I may have enjoyed it as much as I … Read more

Crozier country: Free Agent: the unseen war 1941-1991

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

Brian Crozier HarperCollins, London, 1993 This is a very interesting book which greatly adds to our knowledge of the clandestine shaping of British politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is also a book which, like Chapman Pincher’s Inside Story, will repay repeated re-reading. But amidst all the new material a surprising amount of these … Read more

The CIA and Mountbatten

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] to check on our findings on some of your top people in the services and intelligence services. The computer couldn’t tell us who was or wasn’t a spy, but it could assess people as to what extent they were a security risk. Do you know who came top of our security risk list? None […]

Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] Embassy’.(19) In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already […]

The Irish War: The Military History of a Domestic Conflict

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] the SAS that played a major part in creating that regiment’s overblown myth. More recently, he published Brixmis: The Untold Exploits of Britain’s Most Daring Cold War Spy Mission, hardly a subversive work! His forte has been listening to covert warriors’ stories (including their complaints!) and turning them into popular history. It is this […]

How many divisions does the Pope have?

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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, […]

Updating and Ongoing

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] campaign against Greece in the British serious papers in 1984/85. At the time the Greek government of Papandreou was trying to reduce the size of its domestic spy apparatus and that seemed the likely proximate cause. I think I was probably wrong about that. In his Eclipse (reviewed in this issue) Mark Perry reveals […]

…MI5 goes on forever

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in […]

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