The death of Italy’s military intelligence chief in Iraq and some examples of persuasion

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] state sector from the private; i.e. they could have come full circle……. The use of the word ‘handler’, rather than ‘case officer’, is pejorative. It diminishes the agent because it implies there is no equality in the relationship. As an experienced but relative minnow, Italy’s network is likely to have been a good one. […]

Historical Notes: Channel 4 SOE mystery. Venona Decrypts

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] and died in 1962 as a result of an air accident in South-East Asia. Faulks, in reporting this tale, suggested that Bodington may have been an MI6 agent before the war (he had been a journalist) and that the connection between him and Dericourt involved more than friendship. Curiously, Faulks left it there. But […]

Operation Black Dog

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] US B52 bomber launching from Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska, and flying a round-trip to the Persian Gulf. The bomber carried one bomb containing VX nerve agent, the most potent chemical weapon in the US CW armoury. The bomb was dropped on elements of the Republican Guard in Southern Iraq, I was informed. […]

After Iraq: some FCO/SIS issues

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] has linked his name to ‘saving’ Africa. Previously it was Palestine.) The ‘benefits’ of torture Meantime, Chief Scarlett is presented to the public as an expert in agent running and recruitment: i.e. the PR ‘legend’ being created is that his ‘strategy’ will be to put the demands of intelligence, rather than what can be […]

The DFS, Silvia Duran and the CIA-Mafia connection

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] 1985 drug scandals. (Jose Antonio Zorrilla, the ex-DFS chief arrested and indicted in 1989 for murder, was in 1963 private secretary to Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, the DFS agent whose signature attested to the validity of the most radically altered version of Duran’s statement.) At least two ex-DFS officers who were also former CIA agents […]

The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during World War 2

Lobster Issue 20 (1990)

[…] Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, after Munich. Throughout the autumn and winter of 1939-40 Goering encouraged these approaches. Through his friend Max von Hohenlohe-Langenberg’s negotiations in Switzerland with London’s agent Malcolm Christie, he led the British to believe that Germany did not have the food and raw material resources for a long war. Without going so […]

The Big C: Further notes on ‘conspiracy’

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] shah of Iran and Anwar as-Sadat lost their countrymen’s respect because both were (wrongly) seen as agents of Washington.’ Wrongly, huh? Depends on how he is using ‘agent’. Do I think either the shah or Sadat was an actual case officer-run U.S. intelligence ‘agent’ — no, I don’t. But neither, I’m pretty sure, do […]

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] conspiracy theories: Oswald was involved in the conspiracy to murder the President; and he was an FBI informant and a CIA or Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) agent; but he was also working for the communists as a double agent of the KGB or GRU! Russell proposes that, having been sent to the USSR […]

Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] North, and Felix Rodriguez, later became familiar names during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. More obscure was one Michael Hand, who had been a CIA contract agent in Laos. In 1973, Hand and his partner Frank Nugan established the Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney. A slew of top-level retirees from the CIA and […]

Cloak and Dollar, and, Know Your Enemy

Book cover
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] in Oswald’s demi-monde of KGB agents and Cuban exiles…..’ We’ve had supporters of Castro and now he gives us KGB agents! Which ones, Professor? The only KGB agent in the story that I can recall is the KGB officer Kostikov who was under diplomatic cover in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. Oswald – […]

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