The former deputy Labour leader of Preston has been given legal aid to sue the Inland Revenue, two chief constables, two former Tory government ministers, two millionaires and a former fish and chip shop owner, for conspiring to steal his tax records. Frank McGrath was swept out of power in a Labour Party purge after … Read more
Morris Riley, writer on espionage and occasional Lobster contributor, died around 16 June 2001. I never entirely trusted Morris: he gossiped to me about things he should have kept to himself and for the most part I blanked his questions about Lobster and the people I was talking to. Under a pseudonym Morris wrote a … Read more
Blob of the month Hear the one about the supposedly spook-watching magazine whose editor misspelt the name of the head of MI5? Yep: Rimmington, I had in the last issue: Rimington it should have been. Searchlight News Their campaign against Larry O’Hara has reached new depths. In the March issue they published his picture and … Read more
Philip Agee died in January this year. Reading the obituaries I came across the allegations that he had gone to the KGB with his information about the CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence … Read more
Hugo Young Macmillan, 1998, £20 I cannot stand Hugo Young. He is a long-winded, pompous arsehole whose columns in the Guardian are mostly a waste of paper and ink. But he has his uses, notably as a mouthpiece for the Foreign Office. In this book he has revealed in infinitely greater detail than before the … Read more
Veterans of a notorious Miami-based CIA dirty tricks team have boasted that they were helped by British Intelligence officers to sink an East German ship loaded with British-built Leyland buses. Three years after the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the MV Magdeburg was hit by a Japanese ship in the River Thames. When … Read more
Most, if not all police forces already have, or are in the process of acquiring, information handling computers of some kind. The background to the present situation is best described in the pamphlet The Police Use Of Computers, parts of which were reproduced in State Research No 29, and were used by the National Computer … Read more
John Armstrong Arlington, Texas: Quasar Ltd., 2003 $40, plus postage, from <www.jfkresearch.com/armstrong/> This is a major publishing event in the JFK assassination world. Parts of Armstrong’s work has been on the Net and he’s spoken at some of the big JFK conferences. His work-in-progress became spoken of as ‘the John Armstrong research’; and finally … Read more
Books The Great Betrayal Nicholas Bethel (London 1984) This is either a ‘snow job’, designed to discourage further research in this area (British intelligence attempts to destabilise Soviet and communist influenced regimes), or is just a poor effort on Bethel’s part. One can’t deny that it is useful – after all, it is the first … Read more
Heather Brooke London: Pluto Press, 2005, £12.99 p/b This book is an invaluable guide for anyone thinking of using the new access laws chiefly the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or the Environmental Information Regulations to obtain information from public authorities. It tells you how to go about obtaining information and appealing, and … Read more
