The influence of intelligence services on the British left

Lobster Issue

A talk given by Robin Ramsay to Labour Party branches in late 1996This is an adaptation and massive compression of the pamphlet The Clandestine Caucus written and published by Robin Ramsay in 1996. In that the sources for most of the claims contained in this talk are to be found.  Dirty tricks and covert operations … Read more

Two Sides of Ireland (Book reviews)

Lobster Issue 13 (1987) £££

The Stalker Affair Frank Doherty (Mercier Press, Cork, Ireland, 1986) The Genesis of Revolution James Kelly (Kelly-Kane, Dublin,1976) Frank Doherty, whose reports in the Dublin Phoenix and the Belfast Sunday News have frequently featured in Lobster, has uncovered a fascinating mass of information relating to covert cross-border operations by the Ulster security forces, and the … Read more

Fire Magic: Hi-jack at Mogadishu

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

Barry Davies Bloomsbury, 1994, £14.99 The Lufthansa jet hi-jack and associated events of October 1977, of which this book purports to provide a first-hand account, have always worn a fulsome, fearful beard. This book leaves those events far from clean-shaven. What would help clear away quite a lot of the hair would be access to … Read more

SISies: MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations and A Life: A. J. Ayer

Book cover
Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 A Life: A. J. Ayer Ben Rogers Chatto and Windus, London, 1999, £20   Many books on intelligence matters simply rehash old ‘facts’, adding a new twist to – a slightly different interpretation of – well-known, if not necessarily well-understood, events. If … Read more

The limits of accountability

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

We know that torture is going on in secret and not so secret prisons. We know thanks to the excellent research done by <www.cageprisoners.com> that elements of the British government, be they MI5, MI6 or diplomats from the FCO, have been involved. Yet we seem unable to stop it. Civic society raises its voices in … Read more

The attack on the USS Liberty

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

During the 1967 Six Day War the Israeli air force attacked a US sigint ship, Liberty, which was monitoring the radio traffic of the war. The official story, that it was an unfortunate mistake in the ‘fog of war’, began to come apart after an article, ‘Mayday! Mayday! The attack on the USS Liberty’, by … Read more

Editorial

Lobster Issue 3 (1984) £££

A number of the obvious questions about an enterprise like this can now be answered. Can we do an issue every 2 months or so? Yes: the problem is the reverse. We actually have more material than we really know what to do with at the moment. Will other people begin writing for it? Yes. … Read more

Wallace: Information Policy in fiction

Lobster Issue 17 (1988) £££

Last year, in the search for independent corroboration of some of Colin Wallace’s story, I talked to a number of ‘Irish hands’, journalists who had been in Northern Ireland while Wallace was working there. One was Kevin Dowling, the Sunday Mirror correspondent there from 1970-74. Dowling was reluctant to talk much about that period of … Read more

Philip Agee, the KGB and us

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

Philip Agee died in January this year. Reading the obituaries I came across the allegations that he had gone to the KGB with his information about the CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence … Read more

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