The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the … Read more

Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network

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Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

Nicky Hager Craig Potton Publishing Box 555, Nelson, New Zealand $25 (New Zealand) 1996 Sample chapters at http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/sp/ This was mentioned briefly in the Guardian some months ago. Hager has done a Duncan Campbell and stitched together, in incredible detail, New Zealand’s contribution to the NSA-run global network of communications interception. But his work goes … Read more

Books and Pamphlets

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] Norton, London and New York, 1986) . This current CAIB also includes more from the splendid Herman and Brodhead on disinformation surrounding the “Bulgarian connection” and the best biographical essay I know of a super- spook, Frank Carlucci. CAIB – $5 (US) with $2.50 (US) for foreign airmail, from PO Box 50272, Washington DC 20004.

Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin?

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

‘They’re blanks!’ Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin? Barry Chamish Brookline Books, PO Box 1046, Cambridge, MA 02238, USA, $15.95 This is an interesting and important book. To its content I will return. But who is the author? Chamish is one of those names you cannot avoid if you potter around in the American conspiracy sections […]

The View From MI5

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] be called ‘right-wingers’, with Wall, Knight, Biggs-Davison, Churchill, Soref and Amery (and possibly others) being members of the Monday Club. (And Onslow, of course, was/still is a spook, having worked for MI6/IRD.) Other fragments of interest in these notes include: the story about Marcia Falkender refusing to be positively vetted; the story of the […]

The Big Breach

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] is the first detailed account of SIS recruitment, training and operations in the modern world. (Tomlinson conveys rather well what terrific fun it can be being a spook.). And it is indeed a big, big breach of the Official Secrets Act.(1) Notes But not the biggest, currently. That title must go to the on-going […]

A short history of Lobster

Lobster Issue

By Robin Ramsay See also: Lobster (magazine) at Wikipedia. Updated June 2022 The first issue of Lobster appeared in 1983. It was written by Stephen Dorril and myself. We met through the late Harry Irwin, who lived in Northern Ireland and was what Americans call a book scout: he bought and sold rare books. But … Read more

Feedback

Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

[…] Service. My gut feeling is that there exists almost a taboo against pressing home the need for continued Special Branch scrutiny or accountability. BOSS and our own spook services dropped a real clanger that truly rebounded at least on the Criminal Injustice System when Peter Hain was fingered for a bank snatch at his […]

Letters

Lobster Issue 10 (1986)

Letters From JIM HOUGAN, Washington, USA. (NB this letter was written between the reviews of Hougan’s book Secret Agenda which appeared in Lobsters 8 and 9) After reading No 8 I thought I’d share the following with you in re: Secret Agenda and, on another topic, Frank Terpil. Throat Secret Agenda is deliberately ambiguous on … Read more

Getting it right: the security agencies in modern society

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] magazine produced in Hull, England, came up. Don’t worry about Lobster, was the message, Lobster has been penetrated. That seemed absolutely hilarious to Hougan and me. Typical spook bullshit, we thought, claiming to have penetrated an organisation consisting of one man. We had a good laugh down the transatlantic phone line and I forgot […]

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