Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££
Robert Whiting, New York: Pantheon Books, 1999. ISBN 0-679-41976-4. Sergeant Nick Zappetti first arrived in Japan during the late summer of 1945, one of the tens of thousands of US occupation troops who landed there after V-J Day. Unlike most of the others, Zappetti immediately went into business for himself and set up a … Read more
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££
Douglas Macleod Edinburgh: Birlinn; £9.99, p/b <www.birlinn.co.uk> Twenty years ago, before the current torrent of information about ‘the secret world of intelligence’, we were scratching about looking for clues to our secret history. One was given in the John Loftus book The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983) which contained a single reference to the Scottish … Read more
Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££
[…] Pincher in Too Secret Too Long says’Fedora’ was ‘definitely not Viktor Lessiovsky, as has been claimed. The most likely candidate seems to be Vladimir Chuchuken, a KGB agent at the UN in New York from 1962 to 1977’ (p609). Chuchukin is named as a KGB disinformation officer in Barron’s previous book The KGB (1974) […]
Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££
Book Reviews Gerry Healey: A Revolutionary Life Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman Lupus Books, PO Box 942, London, SW1V 2AR, £15.00 Ken Livingstone MP was given a large chunk of a page of the Guardian (tabloid section p. 13, September 6, 1994) to write a review of this book. The bit that caught my eye … Read more
Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££
A Covert Life. Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster Ted Morgan New York: Random House, 1999, $29.95 Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union Scott Lucas Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45 Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54 Nick Cullather Stanford (California): Stanford University Press 1999, £8.95 … Read more
Lobster Issue 13 (1987) £££
Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia J.K.Villiers (Croom Helm, London 1985) An expanded Masters thesis, full of descriptions of psychological operations by the Rhodesian forces (which failed utterly: and no wonder, they were useless), and rather less about pseudo-gang activities which, like their equivalents in the British operations in Kenya, were a success – i.e. they killed a … Read more
Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££
[…] Agency sponsored, subsidized, or produced 1,000 books… For example, a book written for an English speaking audience by one CIA operative was reviewed favourably by another CIA agent in the New York Times. Until February 1976, when it announced a new policy towards U.S. media personnel, the CIA maintained covert relationships with about 50 […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££
[…] Parks and Taylor, are both convinced that when Hakluyt served in the Paris embassy as Sir Edward Stafford’s secretary he was really there as the client and agent of Walsingham to gather geographical information; that is he was an Elizabethan spook. Trouble at t’Guardian? A worrying story concerning two journalists, the Met and the […]
Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££
From April to late June 1992, I spent some three months in a Dutch refugee camp, OC Zeewolde. I had applied for political asylum. The Dutch authorities had agreed immediately, to fully process the application. I gave them no reason for my application. The Bosnian war was beginning and the Dutch reception centres for refugees … Read more
