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

Letter from America

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

Compromised Reporting Taking its cue from a powerful network of far-right radio commentators, the American press insists on noting only those financial scandals which don’t sully ultra-conservative politicians. Of either party. For example: Rush Limbaugh, who has become the Republican Party’s Goebbels, loudly applauded Clinton’s appointment of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, an appalling Texas (Democrat) … Read more

Kitson, Kincora and counter-insurgency in Northern Ireland

Lobster Issue 10 (1986)

Part 1 Issue 24 of the Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1985) is chiefly devoted to recent activities of U.S. government agents and agents provocateurs inside radical and labour organisations: the ‘sanctuary movement’, the Native American movement and one industrial dispute, are analysed as case studies. They are preceded by a long essay, “The New … Read more

Late breaking news on Clay Shaw’s United Kingdom contacts

Lobster Issue 20 (1990)

[…] interest he has for students of 20th century intelligence and espionage. While a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, he became the lover of Anthony Blunt, the Soviet spy, aka ‘The Fourth Man’. In the words of Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, ‘Most of their mutual gay friends assumed that they had begun as lovers […]

Euro-bound? Or: the same river twice

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] The move, proposed by Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, and President Jacques Chirac of France, is seen as the first step towards the creation of Europe’s own spy agency, based in Brussels. And in the Daily Telegraph of 28 February 2000, Alan Judd, the former (?) SIS officer Alan Petty (26) warned of plans […]

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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