The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] regime’s links to Al Qaeda and the existence of WMDs. Why did he believe claims which a large chunk of his colleagues and most of the world’s intelligence services didn’t, and which could be seen to be false by asking that nice Mr Google? ‘I took these stories seriously because they were corroborated by […]

The fiction of the state: The Paris Review and the invisible world of American letters

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] whose eccentric family reminded everyone of the Sitwells. His wife, Perdita, had, it turned out, been secretary to James Jesus Angleton, literary scholar and chief of counter intelligence at the CIA. (His deputy was the novelist, William Hood.) Ned Chase took me to the legendary Billy’s, watering hole to the literary world, and told […]

MacV-Sog Command History: Annexes A, N, and M (1964-66)

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] but a volume devoted to SOG alone remained a missing quantity until Charles F. Reske came along. Reske is one of those people who shift easily between intelligence and academe. During the Vietnam years, he served with the Naval Security Group, the U.S. Navy’s agency for signals intelligence (SIGINT), and he has collected degrees […]

Miscellany

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] the National Front, said the attack was because the Americans “were responsible for the continued situation in Cyprus.” “Previously unknown organisation” is usually a euphemism for ‘an intelligence operation’. Daily Telegraph (16 February 1985). US preparing contingency plans to remove its bases from Greece in 1988 when present leasing arrangements expire. Oh sure. Anybody […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] own website makes a “considerable contribution” to the “morale” of the armed forces.’ On-line free sources There are two wonderful free sources of news stories on geopolitics, intelligence etc. There is Mario Profaca’s ‘Spy News’ which sends out daily bulletins of up to 25 news stories from around the world. This can be accessed […]

Tell me lies

Book cover
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

[…] Chomsky and Herman is worth having and the Pilger pieces, written in the weeks preceding the invasion, stand up pretty well. There are interesting snippets on the intelligence services and disinformation, psy-ops, US propaganda and media behaviour. The material which has survived best is the essays on the workings of the media and state […]

North American Spies: New Revisionist Essays

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] ranges widely from the obscure ‘secret operations of Spanish consular officials within Canada during the Spanish-American war’ to the useful account of the ‘birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency’. In between are a number of good essays on American intelligence which are well-serviced with notes and bibliography. It is hardly revisionist, though in an […]

Brands and Britannia: Some aspects of national image and identity

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] sold to Spaniards who have no national interest in promoting London’s Heathrow as a gateway to Britain. See Private Eye 27 September 2007. It is possible the intelligence reform highlighted by Nick Clegg MP has been stood down. He was quoted in The Times 11 September 2007 with a plan ‘which would mean a […]

Eclipse: the last days of the CIA

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] the Reagan years when the in-coming Know-nothing administration decided they would impose their childish notions about the world onto the Agency and get it to produce ‘ intelligence’ to support their conspiracy theories about the ‘communist menace’. The very idea of attempting ‘the politics of the CIA’, let alone getting as close as Perry […]

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

Book cover
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, […]

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