MI5 and the threat from the left in the 1970s

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] ‘MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain’ Jimmy Burns reported in The Financial Times 29 December 2006 on a contingency paper by MI5, presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee on April 9 1976. That paper included this: `Throughout the seventies there has been a growth in the general public uneasiness about the current aims […]

Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] Office, annual seizures of 20,000 tabs means that ‘the use of LSD in Britain was restricted to a small number of people’. Lee approached the Central Drugs Intelligence Unit (CDIU), who ‘denied having any information which showed LSD to be a problem’. It would take Lee another three years to fully discover that ‘since […]

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 […]

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

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, […]

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 […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] blocs in the fifties. Brandt notes that the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded a series of feminist organisations in the 1970s and asserts that the ‘the intelligence community needed to balkanize the 1960s student movement, because students were starting to do research into the American power structure and connect the dots.’ The evidence […]

Overthrowing Whitlam

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] John Pilger the excuse to put out his version of the overthrowing of the Gough Whitlam government. The most interesting point he made was that the UK intelligence services were involved with the CIA. Extraordinary though this now seems, this had never struck me. The links between the US, UK, New Zealand and Australian […]

Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair

Book cover
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] without blushing and putting it in scare quotes. (Shayler’s complaints about MI5 can be seen in his submission to the Cabinet Office Review of the security and intelligence services, printed here as appendix 2: they are almost entirely bureaucratic and technical.) In a recent column of his in Punch – issue 93 in the […]

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