Spy Wars

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] and deadly games Tennent H. Begley London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, h/b, £18.99   Begley was one of James Angleton’s allies in CIA counter intelligence and this book is the Angletonian view of the Nosenko case, one of the touchstones or causes célèbres of the CIA in the post-war era. Briefly, […]

Hess – the Fuhrer’s Disciple

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[…] and banal letters back to his family in Gemany. (3) Yet the KGB and State Department reports, based respectively on the testimony of Kim Philby, the Czech intelligence chief Colonel Moravetz, and Churchill’s personal link to the security and intelligence services, Sir Desmond Morton, all point to one fact: Hess came with Hitler’s backing […]

Politics and Paranoia

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] In the mid 1980s I was one of the few people in the Labour Party who were trying to educate themselves about the role played by the intelligence and security services in our democracy. In 1985/86 I was corresponding with my equivalents in New Zealand and getting material from them on the attempts being […]

Behind right-wing conspiracy theories

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] of real interest to researchers, such as the Council on Foreign Relations; and, thirdly, because some versions of ultra-right conspiracy theory have been not without influence in intelligence and government circles. When one attempts to analyse right-wing conspiracy theory it soon becomes clear that much of it is vacuous in the extreme, with little […]

More Notes on the Right

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] Major Edgar Bundy. In 1967 Major Bundy – “Major” from his US Air Force days – was director of the Church League of America (CLA), a far-right intelligence operation directed against America’s “subversives” -i.e. the left and the unions.(6) Remove the CLA’s veneer of Christianity (sic) and what is left looks rather like Britain’s […]

Secrecy and Power in the British State: A History of the Official Secrets Act

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[…] pp. 8-9: ‘The interplay between policy-making, political power and its expression in the different institutional frameworks of the British state — the Cabinet, Whitehall, the security and intelligence services and so on — gives rise to national security policies that exhibit identifiable characteristics based on social class and political beliefs …..British policy-makers have entrenched […]

Clippings Digest: August – November 1984

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

[…] national police force being organised piece-meal. Labour Research (October) notes that in 1983 report of Chief Inspector of Constabulary there is reference to establishment of Regional Criminal Intelligence officers in the police regions of England and Wales; and in April (1984) they all went ‘live’ on the Police National Computer. Phone-tapping In a piece […]

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and, The Haunted Wood

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] thought their codes unbreakable and chatted way in great detail about their agents. But by 1950 enough of the Soviet material had been decoded for the US intelligence community to begin piecing together the Soviet networks in the US. These intercepts – code named Venona – many of which remain unbroken to this day, […]

The rise of warfare capitalism

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. Where Naomi Klein has gone one stage further is in grasping how the drum-beat of still further wars is being fueled by poor intelligence derived from ‘interrogations’ (i.e. torture) carried out by private intelligence consultants in privately run torture centres outside the US. This complements the cherry-picking of the best […]

Clippings: The Lie Detector Story

Lobster Issue 3 (1984)

Clippings The Lie Detector Story In the wake of the Prime case, US intelligence has made polygraph (lie detector) introduction into GCHQ at Cheltenham a condition of future GCHQ-NSA cooperation. “At a meeting in July with Civil Service union leaders, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made it clear that Senior Whitehall officials were […]

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