South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] later I received a reply (on 1 See . plain A4 paper, signed with a wiggly line with no name beneath it) informing me that the Secret Intelligence Service has not disposed of human remains in the last 15 years. Encouraged, I wrote again, this time asking for the release of the Service’s internal […]

Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies by Morag G. Kerr

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] the plane? – and the British were reluctant to to investigate Heathrow, 1 This book arrived the day that Exaro published material showing (again) that the US intelligence people didn’t believe the Libya-dunnit story. See . so both fell with enthusiasm on the Malta solution; and, she concedes, both sets of investigators genuinely believed […]

Malcolm Kennedy: European Court of Human Rights judgement

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] took his complaint to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, to hear complaints relating to conduct by the intelligence and security agencies, and complaints about phone-tapping. It is also the only appropriate Tribunal for the purpose of certain proceedings under s7(1)(a) of the Human Rights […]

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] coup to seize power for himself. He ‘did little to hide his involvement in drug trafficking’ and, according to an interview with Col. Russell Thaden, the NATO intelligence chief, on one occasion he ‘blew his stack upon learning U.S. and British forces had jointly bombed a large drug lab in northern Afghanistan’. He calmed […]

LBJ: doubles and disinformation

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] disinformation concerning the Kennedy assassination, for whatever reason. As Mr Rocco-Rusk himself put it (on FaceBook in December 2013): ‘Honesty is not the job of the Central Intelligence Agency. Protecting our lives and serving our foreign policy is.’ On the other hand, Mr Rocco-Rusk’s previous CIA affiliations may be totally unrelated and he may […]

Romeo Spy by John Alexander Symonds

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] was not so tragic, and as I read and reread the The Mitrokhin Inquiry Report I was struck by one of the key items contained in the Intelligence and Security Committee’s central questionnaire, which was never answered. It was to be found in point three out of a total of five principal issues to […]

Explaining the Iraq War; Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence by Frank P. Harvey

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] level-of-analysis confusion. Paul Todd Paul Todd was editor of the monthly Gulf Report at the Gulf Centre for Strategic Studies in London. He has been an occasional contributor to Lobster since 1999 and is co-author of Global Intelligence (London: Zed Books, 2003) and Spies, Lies and the War on Terror (London: Zed Books, 2009).  

Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] being ‘woven together with some thin threads into a left-wing conspiracy theory in which Starmer is presented as an agent of the security state or even AngloAmerican intelligence organisations’. These are, he insists, ‘insidiously effective smears’. (p. 163) On the contrary, the argument that Starmer’s so-called ‘pragmatism’ lead to him wholeheartedly embracing the interests […]

Accessibility Toolbar