South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[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 […]

Hilda Murrell and the FOIA

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] holds any information which falls within scope of your request.’ However . . . exemption 23(5) can only be used when the information relates to fourteen specified intelligence, security and national policing bodies5 – only five of which were in existence at the time of Hilda Murrell’s murder: those five being MI5, MI6, GCHQ, […]

Kicora review

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

Newsinger on Strarmer

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[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 […]

Kicora review

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

The Secret War Between the Wars MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s by Kevin Quinlan

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] handling of the very significant Tyler Kent/Right Club events which might have had a serious impact on WW2, delaying American entry; and the careful debriefing of Soviet intelligence defector Krivitsky, the first of its kind. Versions of these events, based on the same files, are in Christopher Andrew’s Defence of the Realm and had […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] narratives are found wanting and counter-narratives (of varying plausibility) abound: from the suspicious deaths of government weapons experts, cryptographers and shadowy financiers to the covered-up connections between intelligence agencies and terror groups (see Curtis 2010). Criminologists should shrug off the stigma attached to theorizing that diverges from official accounts and carefully excavate the deep […]

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