Miscellaneous reviews

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] in the foreword, that in 1965 he was asked by a CIA officer if he would ‘volunteer’ to kill Fitzer. The CIA officer said Pitzer was a spy, a traitor. Marvin declined – but only because the CIA officer wanted it done in the US: Marvin wouldn’t kill at home, only overseas. (To my […]

Secrecy in Britain

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] them they should be returned to the National Archives. This leads to some peculiar situations. A contact of mine was researching a book on a particular Soviet spy. He found an interesting document written by said spy in a file at the National Archives. It was 12 pages – he copied 6 pages and […]

The Atlantic Semantic

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] claimed that in the 1970s Josef Josten, head of the Free Czech Information Service, had passed a list of KGB agents to him revealing a London-based Soviet spy circle. These came from Czech defector Josef Frolik.2 3 Teacher observed that in February 1979, two weeks after Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader, a House of […]

On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] by other historians, he eventually conceded, ‘I made some claims about facts which have turned out to be unwarranted’. Of his claim that Bruno was the embassy spy, code-named ‘Henry Fagot’, Bossy wrote, ‘I thought so at the time, but have turned out to be mistaken’. Bossy, however, had dragged a lot of fascinating […]

Beaumont novel copy

Lobster Issue

A Spy Alone Charles Beaumont London: Canelo, 2023, £9.99 (p/b) Robin Ramsay This is only the second novel I have reviewed in Lobster.1 The cover and the author blurb tells us that author Beaumont is a ‘former MI6 operative’. ‘Operative’? Why not ‘officer’? The author tells me the word was chosen by the publisher. […]

Pegasus: The Story of the World’s Most Dangerous Spyware

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, according to people familiar with its sales pitch. NSO Group’s flagship smartphone malware, nicknamed Pegasus, has for years been used by spy agencies and governments to harvest data from targeted individuals’ smartphones. But it has now evolved to capture the much greater trove of information stored beyond the […]

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