Hitler’s spy chief: the Wilhelm Canaris mystery Richard Bassett London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005, £20 This is a full and very well researched biography of one of the great enigmatic figures of the spy world in the 30s and 40s. The author, former foreign correspondent of The Times in Berlin and Prague, provides … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
Are raw prawns pink? Fun and games Down Under where a great brouhaha developed over allegations that Australia’s most famous – and left-wing historian, the late Manning Clark, was a Soviet agent. It started when the Australian poet Sid Murray reported that 26 years before he had seen Clark at a dinner wearing the Order … Read more
The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 1 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Pan Books, 1998, £7.99 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 2 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Macmillan, 1999, £25 The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Vol. 3 ed. Sarah Curtis London: Macmillan 2000, £25 Woodrow Wyatt’s diaries are quite remarkable. Any normal persons would have tried … Read more
As a number of people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons. No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What … Read more
One of the aims of this column is to open up new lines of enquiry for parapolitical specialists. It might seem very odd to start with the name of Reinhard Gehlen, long-since dead founder of the BND, the German Security Service. Reinhard Gehlen, to over-simplify a very complex tale, bought his way into the Western … Read more
The Dirty War Martin Dillon, Hutchinson, London, 1990. The SAS in Ireland Raymond Murray, Mercier Press, Cork and Dublin, 1991 Martin Dillon is a freelance journalist in Northern Ireland with a long career behind him: editor and radio presenter for the BBC in Northern Ireland, co-author of the Penguin Special, Political Murder In Northern Ireland … Read more
In its own communications, evangelical Christianity exists in a delirious present but it has a rich and recoverable history. Evangelical religion can and should be explained in part in terms of the response of the millions of the faithful to the experience of modernity. But while secular intellectuals sometimes see it simply as a mechanism … Read more
This is the press release issued to the media with Lobster 11. (April 1986) Embargoed until 3pm, April 30th Something very strange happened in British politics almost a decade ago. A Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and the journalist with the closest links to the British intelligence services, Chapman Pincher, both said that elements of MI5 … Read more
Mark Felt is ‘Deep Throat’. Bob Woodward says so, and his word is law in this particular arena. No matter that Woodward had a dozen sources, some of whom may have been more important than Throat himself. The point is that ‘Throat’ is anyone Woodward says he is, and he says he is Felt. In … Read more
