Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
Boundaries to Freedom: the cultural cold war in Western Europe 1945-1960 A conference at the Roosevelt Study Centre, Middelburg, The Netherlands, 18-19 October 2001. See note (1) The impulse for this event came from Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid The Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, and the media coverage that it received … Read more
The killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in public view and for no apparent reason remains one of the most notorious murders of recent decades. For sixteen years there have been few signs of any serious attempts to locate and bring to justice the perpetrator of this outrage. Finally, this April, in an outstanding piece of … Read more
The Christic Institute’s allegations that there has been a ‘secret team’ of CIA and ex CIA personnel operating since the early 1960s right through to the present day have had a surprising amount of publicity in Britain considering that this is the kind of conspiracy theorising which is normally anathema to our straight media. It … Read more
Philip Hoare, Duckworth Press, London, 1997, £16.99 The opening of MI5’s archives up to and including 1919 gives historians and researchers the chance to exhume the genesis of the right in British domestic politics as well as the early activities of the secret state. Despite its title (Oscar died in 1900) Hoare dips quite a … Read more
An extraordinary claim in The Times by the Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, that Arthur Ransome has been identified in KGB documents as ‘the most important secret source of intelligence on British foreign policy’ for the Cheka, the terror organisation of Bolshevik Russia, has infuriated lovers of Ransome’s work. Unlike Michael Foot, similarly traduced, Ramsome … Read more
There have been several notable assaults on the good ship Lobster since number 24. On Thursday, 19 November 1992 a journalist researching a piece on MI6 rang me. He said had been to talk to the KGB defector, Oleg Gordiefsky, who told him that the KGB were big fans of Lobster. Since Gordiefky defected in … Read more
The Lobster is a journal/newsletter about intelligence, parapolitics, state structures and so forth. (The scope of our interests should be obvious from this first issue.) We welcome clippings, articles, letters, reviews, on these areas. Although we will exercise editorial control over any material sent to us, nothing will be cut without prior consultation with the … Read more
The Angolan hostages episode, and more … Although Unita’s capture of 16 Britons at Kafuno diamond mine in Angola received massive publicity, the intriguing titbits thrown up by the reporting were not pursued. In particular, there was the article by Stephen Glover (Daily Telegraph 16th May 1984) in which he stated that he had been … Read more
‘God Helps the Bad when they outnumber the Good‘ (Mexican proverb) Business brought me to Mexico City on the day Luis Donaldo Colosio, Presidential candidate for the PRI (Partido Revoluncionario Internacional), was assassinated in Tijuana. The TV coverage of the event was every bit as obscure and unhelpful as the TV reporting after the JFK … Read more
