The Perfect English Spy

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, MI5’s agents were encouraged to disrupt subversive organisations, even impregnating lavatory paper with an itching substance at halls hired by communist organisations.’ This is the first time such operations have been acknowledged. Presumably they were not all so childish. This is a very good, important book, certain […]

Nexus: postmodernism or what?

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] in late 1956 on orders from William Casey……..Carone said that Paine was approached by the CIA to find and recruit an individual that (sic) was expendable, with communist ties and some type of anti-American background. Carone said that when Ruth Paine found the individual, she notified her CIA contact, identified as George de Morenschild, […]

Wallace: Information Policy in fiction

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] veteran Belfast reporters, which had omitted to inform his London colleague that McDowell’s imagination had already reinforced the Provisional IRA with cadres of Vietcong, Czechoslovakians, Lithuanians and Communist Frenchmen.’ Dowling understood, had correctly ‘read’ some of the Information Policy operations. Other ‘Irish hands’ certainly knew of the unit. Why have none of them come […]

Our Searchlight problem

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

Introduction The ‘Gable memo’ reproduced below originally appeared as the subject matter of a long and extremely interesting article, ‘Destabilising the “decent people”‘ by Nick Anning, Duncan Campbell and Bruce Page in the New Statesman on February 15, 1980. This is still worth digging out, particularly for its detailed account of the context in which … Read more

Death of the Strong Man

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] links to Nicaraguan Contra propaganda groups and right-wing organisations such as IGFM (right-wing rival to Amnesty International) and the Internationale des Widerstands (Resistance International), bringing together anti- communist ‘freedom fighters’. Following Swarup’s return from Geneva, the defence in the Gandhi assassination trial abruptly changed strategy and tried to depoliticize the case by passing the […]

The Rise of Political Lying

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] still felt in the 1980s) when the Tory right, briefed by a section of the British spooks, believed that the Labour Party and the unions were a Communist conspiracy and were thus ‘a legitimate target’. Oborne’s idea of ‘political’ simply does not encompass activities by the state, let alone the secret state. In one […]

Stalin’s granny

Book review
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] Burke’s research shifted its focus and this book is the result: partly the original study of the pro-Soviet exile left in Britain and the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and partly another go round the story of Soviet espionage in Britain, in which story Norwood is a minor element. Depending on […]

The 1953 Coup in Iran: an Iranian insider’s view

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] in Rome and arranged the trip back to Teheran. It was us who encouraged the Americans to go ahead with the coup. If we had delayed, a communist coup would have stolen the show. Therefore, in order to rescue Iran from the grip of communism we decided that Musadegh had to go and the […]

Deep Black: the secrets of space espionage (Book Review) & Journals

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

DEEP BLACK: the secrets of space espionage William E. Burrows, Bantam Press, 1988 P. N. Rogers The National Reconnaissance Office is the only ‘black’ US intelligence agency remaining. Formed in 1960, the US only conceded officially that they had reconnaissance satellites twelve years later, and to this day maintain that these are the responsibility of … Read more

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