Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££
[…] Embassy’.(19) In 1972 Hamilton Macmillan, an MI6 officer and nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister, recruited Howard Marks, his old chum from Balliol College, Oxford, to spy on Jim McCann, a hash smuggler whom MI6 believed was a Provisional IRA contact in Amsterdam. Macmillan gave no indication that he knew Marks was already […]
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££
[…] starvation, execution, slavery…..how can the world shy away from one of the deadliest wars yet?’ The Sunday Herald, 30 November 2003. 13 Jefferson Morley , ‘The Good spy: how the quashing of an honest investigator led to 40 years of JFK conspiracy theories’, Washington Monthly, 35 (12) (December 2003), pp. 40-59. On-line at The […]
Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££
[…] campaign against Greece in the British serious papers in 1984/85. At the time the Greek government of Papandreou was trying to reduce the size of its domestic spy apparatus and that seemed the likely proximate cause. I think I was probably wrong about that. In his Eclipse (reviewed in this issue) Mark Perry reveals […]
Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££
The collapse of Polly Peck in 1990 remains perhaps the single greatest British corporate mystery of modern times.(1) How did a multi-billion pound international conglomerate, which had risen from East End obscurity to become the exemplar of eighties British Capitalism, collapse within a period of weeks? How did a favoured son of the London Stock … Read more
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££
Since issue 45, last June, there has been so much information produced on the events preceding the assault on Iraq it is impossible to keep track of it all. Here is my selection. For the powers-that-be, the war has been traumatic, not least because their various cover stories and deceptions have been exposed so rapidly, … Read more
Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££
[…] also John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (New York 1988). See John McGuffin, The Guineapigs (London 1974) Peter Grose, Gentlemen Spy: The Life and Times of Allen Dulles (Amherst 1994) p. 393. McCoy, A Question of Torture, (see note 5) pp. 28, 29, 33, 44-45, 49. (On […]
Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££
How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet: ‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in […]
Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££
[…] mighty screed finally ends, Roberts takes us on an even stranger interlude: ‘EDITOR’S NOTE: This is all Joanie gave us on that date. However, we had a spy hiding behind a moosehead and he tells us that the psychiatrist came back into the room and Joanie handed him the notes quoted above and the […]
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££
[…] Patrick Wintour, ‘Getty money “helped finance breakaway miners” ‘, The Guardian, 23 September 1985. Martin Wainwright, ‘Families appeal heading for £500,000’, The Guardian 15 December 1984. Iris spy? There’s been a degree of scoffing by certain members of the literati at A. N. Wilson’s passing mention in his recent memoir that Iris Murdoch fed […]
Lobster Issue 17 (1988) £££
[…] and Herman Zolling (London 1972) and an interesting article by Sarah Gainham in the Spectator 9 November 1962. Robin Ramsay adds: Gainham is a writer of spy fiction. Her 1959 The Stone Roses (Sphere paperback, London 1971), a defector story set in Prague, carries the dedication ‘This story is for Friends in Prague’. […]