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 […]

KO-ing the Kennedys: The Kennedys and State Secrets

Book cover
Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] anyone skulking in the undergrowth. The book ends on this unsatisfactory note. The Clough book, by contrast, is excellent. It provides a detailed demythologising of this particular spy case and relies on a review of all the literature in the case as well as primary research conducted by the author amongst recently released PRO […]

The Irish War: The Military History of a Domestic Conflict

Book cover
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 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] spat over “turgid” writing’, The Times, 24 October 2008; Jack Lefley, ‘MOD censors its censor’s history for being boring’, The Evening Standard, 24 October 2008. Anon., ‘Former spy wins first round of “son of Spycatcher” book publication battle’, Solicitors’ Journal, 152 (29), 22 July 2008, p. 5; Anon., ‘Tribunal does not have exclusive jurisdiction’, […]

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 […]

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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