Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] to achieve a rapid seizure of power in the name of the ‘National Will’, in senior ranks of the armed forces and sections of the security and intelligence services, on the Right of the Conservative Party, in business and financial circles and among sections of the media. The object seems to have been the […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] former Saudi defence employee called Omar al-Bayoumi, who had arrived in 22 the US in 1994. Even before 9/11 the FBI had al-Bayoumi down as a Saudi intelligence officer, noting his ‘extensive ties to the Saudi Government’ and his extravagant personal spending despite being officially unemployed. Al-Bayoumi had a close personal friend (another Saudi […]

TO CATCH A SPY: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold by Tim Tate

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] of Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery. It gets pretty complicated here because another senior retired MI5 officer, Arthur Martin, and James Angleton, former head of CIA counter- intelligence, were also talking to people — notably Jonathan Aitken MP — about Soviet moles in MI5. At this point the British state, in the shape of […]

We Were Lied to About 9/11: The Interviews by Jon Gold

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018)

[PDF file]: […] work of the victims’ families. 2 3 testimony – as does J. Michael Springmann, a State Department employee in Saudi Arabia who was pressured by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into giving visas to some of the alleged hijackers. Nafeez Ahmed was one of the first academics to question the Bush administration’s version of […]

The Plots Against the President, by Sally Denton

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] gone along with it in the first place. Nor is it any good to pin the blame solely on General MacArthur, for egging Hoover on with false intelligence about communist infiltration of the protests. Hoover had other and better sources of information available, but chose instead to rely on someone who drew out his […]

David Miliband: working for the man

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013)

[PDF file]: […] example, the IRC certainly ran ‘purely humanitarian programs’, establishing refugee camps, providing shelter, food and healthcare. But other areas of its activity ‘were directly tied to the intelligence community’. The IRC ran the camps while the CIA trawled them for intelligence sources and for recruits for the various paramilitary outfits it ran. And, on […]

The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy by Graeme MacQueen

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] it quickly became clear that the sophistication of the identified Ames strain of anthrax in the letters meant it could only come from within the military and intelligence apparatus of the US itself. So with al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein off the list of suspects, the FBI began the hunt nearer home. MacQueen recounts the […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] recommended that a ‘Home Desk’ should be ‘added to the Information Research Department . . . to act as the focus for the collation and dissemination of intelligence about communist activities on the home front’. McEvoy describes some of the later concerns of the Home committee – for example the historian Eric Hobsbawm and […]

Classified: Secrecy and the state in modern Britain by Christopher Moran

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013)

[PDF file]: […] story and the ABC trial in the 1970s; a detailed account of the hassles generated by the trickle of books which began in the early 1960s about intelligence during WW2, notably the Bletchley Park ‘ultra’ story; and the farcical events around Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. If the theme and the major incidents are familiar, much […]

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