The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] Net. He appears to believe that he can negotiate with MI6 in some fashion. But as Phillip Knightley says in the Belfast Telegraph piece, they’re the Secret Intelligence Service and they will pursue him to the ends of the earth: pour encourager les autres, if for no other reason. In a posting at Cryptome […]

Acid: the secret history of LSD

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Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] Arabic and claimed to be ‘Khouri Ali’, a Palestinian revolutionary. The following year he was released on bail: the judge’s summing up described him as a US intelligence asset working under cover in the Middle East. Stark jumped bail and disappeared. In 1982 he was arrested in the Netherlands, once again on drugs charges. […]

The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion

Book cover
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] partner – to keep the people of Cyprus internally divided (Turks against Greeks) and thus incapable of challenging the presence of the British and American military and intelligence bases on the island. Having read nothing about Cyprus for over 20 years – and forgotten that – almost all of this was a revelation to […]

Blinded by the light: Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy Phillip Willan Phillip Willan’s Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, (Constable, London, 1991) is a detailed and interesting book, dealing in a thorough (if partially flawed) way with a fascinating subject. It covers a wide array of interlocking subjects including the infamous P2 … Read more

Still hazy after all these years

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] hinted that something might turn up from an unexpected quarter. Turner suspects that Farewell America was that something; that although the book was put together by French intelligence people, it was the contact with Kostikov which led to it. The pseudonymous writer of the book was Thomas Buchanan, author of the 1964 Who Killed […]

My encounter with George K. Young and Tory Action, 1979-1988

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] MI6 no. 2, George Kennedy Young, loomed large in the imagination of the section of the British left which was interested in the political activities of former intelligence officers. His activities with Unison in 1973-5 remain unclear but here John Andrews describes the group which succeeded it, Tory Action. Lobster 19 contained an autobiographical […]

Spies at Work

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] a quick skim across Massiter, Bettaney, Charles Elwell – and thence into British Briefing, David Hart etc. (And Colin Wallace was not ‘a former officer in Army Intelligence’; and has not, to my knowledge, suggested that the League had office space in MI5 headquarters . But since this, like most of the assertions in […]

Defending the Warren Commission:the line from Langley

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] Oswald would not have been any sensible person’s choice for a co-conspirator. He was a ‘loner’, mixed-up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] the Open Democracy web site, and Michael Maclay, the ex-Foreign Office man who became Mandelson’s colleague at London Weekend Television before helping run the MI6-linked Hayklut private intelligence organisation. Parliamentary Secretary in Derry Irvine’s Lord Chancellor’s Department, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, also joined the BAP in 1987. She now serves on its UK advisory […]

Wilson, MI5 and the rise of Thatcher

Lobster Issue 11 (April 1986)

[PDF file]: […] and the following week; Guardian 16 July 1976; Searchlight nos. 18 and 21. 7. Private Eye speculated that the documents had been leaked by “moderates” inside British intelligence, alarmed at the activities of some of the “wild men”. This view, attractive though it is, has no evidence to support it. 8. Best collection of […]

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