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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Apartheid’s friends

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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

Sex scandals and sexual blackmail in America’s deep politics

Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017)

[PDF file]: […] and transgressions by past American presidents. 5 See, for example, Phillip Knightly, ‘The History of the Honey Trap’, ForeignPolicy.com, 12 March 2010 at ; Christopher Beam, ‘The Spy Who Said She Loved Me’, Slate.com, 9 December 2010 at ; Jonathan Zimmerman, ‘Petraeus and the Blackmail Myth’, Los Angeles Times, 16 November 2012; Wikipedia, ‘Love, […]

Tokyo legend? Lee Harvey Oswald and Japan

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] Harvey Oswald 3 in which Epstein tries to prove that Oswald fell victim to an elaborate Soviet intelligence ‘honey trap’ while in Japan that led him to spy for the KGB. Shortly after Legend appeared in print, however, investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) interviewed some of Epstein’s purported sources. The […]

Olivia Jayne Frank, 1956-2023

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: Andrew Rosthorn Olivia Jayne Frank, alias Ruth Mayer, Ruth Alison Peacock, Rebekah Stern, Joanne Olivia Gold and Olivia Jayne Hart, a transgender spy for the Mossad, MI5 and MI6, died of pneumonia and kidney failure in the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital on September 11, 2023, 67 years after her birth at Crumpsall Hospital in Manchester. […]

Olivia Jayne Frank, 1956-2023

Lobster Issue

[PDF file]: Andrew Rosthorn Olivia Jayne Frank, alias Ruth Mayer, Ruth Alison Peacock, Rebekah Stern, Joanne Olivia Gold and Olivia Jayne Hart, a transgender spy for the Mossad, MI5 and MI6, died of pneumonia and kidney failure in the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital on September 11, 2023, 67 years after her birth at Crumpsall Hospital in Manchester. […]

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