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. […]

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 […]

I helped carry William Burroughs to the medical tent

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] 1961, though, MacMillan seemed in serious disarray, badly behind in the polls and widely mocked by many of the UK intelligentsia. There is also evidence that the spy scandals of 1962-1963 caused many in the US to finally lose patience with their British allies.2 9 Coupled with the emergence of Wilson as the next […]

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 […]

Still thinking about Dallas

Lobster Issue

[…] the JFK researchers are coming – and Hunt was a right-wing cold warrior. Hunt’s naming of LBJ to his son was prefigured in his 2007 memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond, written before his ‘confession’, which contained this paragraph: ‘Having Kennedy liquidated, thus elevating himself to the presidency […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] of James Angleton’s CI/SIG Division where the mole was thought to have burrowed into. The hunt involved sending Oswald to Russia as a marked card dangling U2 spy plane secrets. The kicker is that the CIA molehunter, Bruce Solie, was in fact the mole who was in the perfect position to thwart the hunt […]

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