Our Friends in the North West: The Owen Oyston Affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] Martin was currently using Sharon Denby to front his model agency business. She said Martin had worked as a private detective and had hired another detective to spy on Owen Oyston’s ex-wife Vicki Oyston. Melanie Hardy also claimed to Murrin that she had that morning noticed signs of an attempted forced entry on her […]

Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

[…] what was then called the ‘silicon chip’. And Alec Guinness kept the nation spellbound with the television version of John le Carré’s 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It depicted the tempting of senior UK espionage moguls with a one-off, spectacular solution to Secret Britain’s ills, a Soviet super-spy who would get us back […]

Stalin’s granny, Christopher Andrew and the Cold War

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] second contributor to this issue to have been virused recently.) But I had on file this splendid polemic written at the time of the latest outbreak of spy mania to hit this country. Turner’s column proper will begin in the next issue. It must surely rank as one of the silliest ‘silly season’ stories […]

The Enemy Within (Whitehall)

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

It is a difficult time for Britain’s security and intelligence agencies. Not only have the old certainties collapsed with the Berlin Wall, Britain’s economy is in increasingly dire shape, and current levels of government funding for the agencies can no longer be taken for granted. (1) As a result, both the major agencies, MI5 and … Read more

Mark Felt, Jason Blair and ‘Misty Beethoven’

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

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 […]

Britain spinning in the Sibel Edmonds web

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

[…] sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets’, The Sunday Times, 6 January 2008, Sunday Times ,‘FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft’, 20 January 2008, and ‘Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe’, 27 January 2008, In an interview with antiwar.com’s Scott Horton – go to for the mp3 file. Alternatively a full transcript is available here: […]

The view from the bridge. JFK. Waco. Oklahoma. Timor. Moral Rearmament Movement

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] MRA was a CIA-funded operation? Although the book is well documented – there are 45 pages of notes – there is nothing to source this fascinating assertion. Spy mania The outburst of spy mania in September – Metrokhin Archive, the STASI stuff, ‘Stalin’s granny’ and all the rest of the piffle – opened the […]

Deadly Illusions

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Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] trying to keep buried here, I missed them. But I’m probably suffering from Secrecy Fatigue. Ever since Peter Wright’s Spycatcher every British publisher has tried to market spy books as “the book they tried to ban’. Alas, far from running the risk of breaking the Official Secrets Act, the only risk you run reading […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] a valuable source of information on US intelligence in particular, and the post-war US empire in general, with contributors such as John Kelly, former editor of Counter Spy, Ralph McGehee, Lester Coleman and David McMichael. With Covert Action Quarterly now with a much wider agenda than covert action, (1) Unclassified is now one of […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

McKinney/Africa/covert action Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sponsored a forum, ‘Covert Action in Africa: A Smoking Gun in Washington, D.C.’ And this isn’t just cold war history; this is names, people and companies doing it today. The text of the meeting is at www.copvcia.comand Red spiels The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) has now posted … Read more

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