Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA Jim Hougan (Random House, US 1984) Those who read Hougan’s last book Spooks will know that the arrival of a new one is something of an event. As expected, his latest has so many trails to follow, intriguing little titbits to ponder that one read is insufficient … Read more

Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Research

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] Later I mentioned the idea that the spooks fed material into novels to Fred Holroyd, and, to my surprise, he told me that one of Britain’s leading spy fiction writers had cheerfully confirmed that the spooks did indeed send him material they wanted planting in his books. The perceptible increase in this country of […]

The accountability of the intelligence and security services

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

Accountability I will be discussing a non subject – the accountability of the intelligence services. By accountable we mean the ability to be brought to account, to be answerable for their actions, to be subject to scrutiny and ultimately to have their actions adjudicated upon in a court of law. I will be looking at … Read more

Miscellany

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] in the Observer (24 Feb. 1985) on the Belgrano business: “It’s pretty obvious that the information the Government claim is secret is the position of the American spy satellites.” This may be a pretty educated guess. As Jim Hougan reveals in his Secret Agenda (reviewed in this issue), Woodward had a very important job […]

Saddam Hussein on Trial

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] Al-Ani found employment at Baghdad University in 1973. He fell victim a year later to a Ba’athist dictat that barred professors married to foreigners. After refusing to spy on foreign companies operating in Iraq, Al-Ani voyaged in 1980 with his young family to Finland. Though strongly opposed to the Ba’athists, Al-Ani wondered how any […]

Feedback

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] plays amateur psychoanalyst at Roberts’ expense. It reminds me of the ‘skeptics’ who attack Lee Harvey Oswald as a psychopathological loner and ignore his connections to the spy world. As for Roberts alternating between ‘asking Nader for help and accusing him of being part of the Mafia’, that dynamic replayed among American voters in […]

Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] threaten the emerging Lloyd George corporate/military state. Hoare sketches the background against which this unfolded. Theatrical, social and sexual mores are analysed, as are both the enemy spy hysteria of 1915 and the belief of the time in a unique German /Jewish form of decadence (cue Krafft-Ebing and Freud). The grind of a nation […]

The Strange Case of Patrick Daly, MI5 agent

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] in…. and so was Pat Daly. In Long Lartin he was well treated and comfortable. He was in the cell next to Geoffrey Prime, the GCHQ Soviet spy. Prime had a copy of Soviet Weekly delivered to him, often by a nun! His divorced wife (who, after her conversion to a fundamentalist sect, wrote […]

The Secret War for the Falklands

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Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] though not in this detail. The other 80% of the book is little more than padding – on the Israeli commando raid on Entebbe, the SR 71 spy plane, the French intelligence service SDECE, the Chilean intelligence service DINA; ten pages on the career of the SIS officer Anthony Dival; eight pages on the […]

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 […]

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