The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations

Book cover
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

Larry Tye New York: Owl Books, 2002, pb $16.00 ISBN 0 8050 6789 2   If Edward Bernays hadn’t existed, Edward Bernays would have invented him. And in fact this is more or less what happened. This is the long-awaited paperback edition of the first full-length biography of Bernays, who, like President Harry Truman, added … Read more

George Orwell and the IRD

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more

Western Goals: LA Police Settle For $1.8 million

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] LAPD had set up the Public Disorder and Intelligence Division and the Criminal Conspiracy Section (PDID and CCS) in the 1960s. In 1971 one of the CCS agent provocateurs, Louis Tackwood (a black), began exposing their activities. Tackwood later wrote a book, a fairly extraordinary book called The Glasshouse Tapes (Avon NY 1973) describing […]

Plotting for Peace and War

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] were abducted from Holland into Germany, is only mentioned in passing; and there is no reference to the simultaneous discussions between Max Hohenlohe and Malcolm Christie, an agent both for SIS and for Sir Robert Vansittart, despite the suggestive evidence that they might be connected.(3) Did Chamberlain back an attempt to assassinate Hitler, as […]

Peter’s friends?

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] August did not run the story but two other papers that day were dropping big hints. The Sunday Telegraph reported that ‘…a friend of the former MI5 agent told the Sunday Telegraph that there was “concrete evidence” that two senior ministers had worked for the security service…..the same source said that Mr Shayler’s girlfriend, […]

Recent JFK (and related) literature

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] of a President. HOSTY, James P., Jr. (with Thomas Hosty). Assignment: Oswald. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. viii + 328 pps. Illustrated, index. Hosty, the Dallas FBI agent who destroyed a note from Lee Harvey Oswald on the orders of SAG Gordon Shanklin, here tells his story. Few surprises, good on FBI procedure and […]

Iraq

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] French intelligence, as some kind of wheeze to plant dodgy documents on the Anglo-American alliance and then expose them as fraudulent. See, for example, Bruce Johnston, ‘ Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France’, The Sunday Telegraph 19 September 2004. 7. Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, HC 898, July 2004, […]

Who Owns Agca? Plots to Kill the Pope

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

The Time of The Assassins: The Inside Story of the Plot to Kill the Pope Claire Sterling, Angus and Robertson, London 1984 The Plot to Kill the Pope Paul B. Henze, Croom Helm, London 1984 These two books cover the same ground, more or less, and have the same thesis: the KGB used the Bulgarians, […]

Clippings Digest

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

Phone-tapping Phone-tapping of CND (Observer 9 December 1984; Daily Telegraph 10 December.) Telegraph piece includes claim that people phoning CND office have been connected to Ministry of Defence and local police stations. Police Review (15 February 1985) quotes “a source inside British Telecom” on the question of warrants for taps: ‘When it is a police … Read more

Like books we should have so many witnesses?: Some recent JFK literature

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] so much the story of Nagell as materials for a study of him. The book’s 800-odd pages leave nothing out. A massive work. Nagell, a CIA contract agent, went into an El Paso bank in September 1963, fired a couple of shots into a wall, and got himself intentionally arrested — thus ensuring he […]

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