Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] was red meat for her base. As we know, the death penalty was not re-introduced. In fact, Thatcher had been briefed for some time by UK military intelligence that she could not realistically fight the IRA head–on (as Neave would have wished) and the likelihood was that high levels of violence would continue unless […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Kincora: Britain’s shame by Chris Moore

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] of them suggested giving Detective Caskey ‘false files’. He noted that ‘successive Police Ombudsmen reports have revealed such practices as ranging from the “slow waltz” of withholding intelligence from detectives or conducting sham interviews, or other efforts to disapply the rule of law to agents of the state. The obstruction of investigations through the […]

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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar