Re:

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

[…] Patrick Wintour, ‘Getty money “helped finance breakaway miners” ‘, The Guardian, 23 September 1985. Martin Wainwright, ‘Families appeal heading for £500,000’, The Guardian 15 December 1984. Iris spy? There’s been a degree of scoffing by certain members of the literati at A. N. Wilson’s passing mention in his recent memoir that Iris Murdoch fed […]

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 […]

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

The Secret War for the Falklands

Book cover
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 […]

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

A guided democracy

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

[…] fact sheet on sovereignty was suppressed rather than admit that Parliament would have to accept European regulations that conflicted with its own statutes. Officials were encouraged to spy on the Labour Party’s plans to oppose the terms of entry and even drafted speeches for pro-European Labour frontbenchers to deliver at their party conference. 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 […]

Lobbying

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more

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 […]

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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