Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] Kemp and Christine Bott.(14) Lee discovered that an investigation as far back as 1971 had been getting near the truth but had collapsed when the gang under surveillance by the Thames Valley Squad and Customs were robbed of money and drugs by officers of the Met.! According to Detective Constable Martyn Pritchard of the […]

More Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] secret state. After an opening discussion of the philosophical basis of their analysis, they methodically work through the historical and legal background to the extant legislation on surveillance, vetting, secrecy, bugging, the status and (non) accountability of the security and intelligence services, and so forth. While the descriptive detail is overwhelming in itself, the […]

The Murder of Hilda Murrell: Conspiracy Theories Old and New

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] credentials and a long background in MI6. Zeus, then operated by ex-MI5 officer, Jeremy Wetherall, of another security firm, Lynx, was given the contract to organise the surveillance, which they sub-contracted to Sapphire Investigation Bureau, run by Barrie Peachman. The story of Peachman, his use of the unsavoury far rightist, Vic Norris, who claims […]

The Trouble With Harry: A memoire of Harry Newton, MI5 agent

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] a spy within the labour movement. (Tribune of March 1 printed a transcript of some of the programme.) Massiter said she was put in charge of the surveillance of CND: ‘It was perceived as more than ever necessary that we had to be able to answer very precisely whatever questions we were asked about […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] a collection of essays edited by Wesley K. Wark gets pretty short shrift from me. However, in one of the more abstruse essays, ‘Anti-diplomacy, Intelligence Theory and Surveillance’, under a sub-heading ‘Intertextualism and International Theory’, we read this: ‘An intertext, defined by the semiologist Roland Barthes as a “multi-dimensional space in which a variety […]

MI5: New Threats for Old? Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] to cause explosions, made a speech from the dock in which he noted that ‘MI5 claims to have had the alleged IRA active service unit under constant surveillance yet allegedly lost them every time a bomb was planted…..’ – from this concluding that ‘MI5 was willing to allow the devices to go off in […]

Joseph K and the spooky launderette

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] Pat and I were visiting. He made his excuses and left within minutes of Pat introducing me. I didn’t know that he was head of A4, MI5’s surveillance unit, at the time. I had assumed he was a spook – a ‘friend at the Home Office’, as Pat used to engagingly phrase it. The […]

Why are we with Uncle Sam?

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] are located, the British state tagged along with the Americans who did have the muscle to police the non-communist world. Third, as the US developed global electronic surveillance systems which the British state could not match, our secret servants came to rely on US-generated intelligence. The fourth reason is that a large part of […]

The murder of Hilda Murrell: ten years on

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] them, and excluding what Green actually does believe. In Otter’s case, Davies mocked him, saying that his ‘latest theory is that Miss Murrell was not only under surveillance before her murder but that on the day of the crime she attracted two different hit squads who turned up to kill her and ended up […]

Lying about Iraq

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] by Herman is at < http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/hermanmay 98.htm > . 49 This was ‘blow back’ on a grand scale. 50 See James Der Derian, ‘Anti-Diplomacy, Intelligence Theory and Surveillance Practice’ in Espionage Past, Present, Future? edited by Wesley K. Wark (London: Frank Cass, 1994) pp. 37-8. Der Derian is a post-modernist trying to apply his […]

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