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

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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

The Pinay Circle

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] of activity around current political questions. The success of Brian Crozier (transnational security) has already been discussed.” Der Speigel (Spring 1982) noted that Crozier was a CIA agent for several years. Moreover, none of his activities are unknown to the agency in Langley. He is acquainted with most important former members of western intelligence […]

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 […]

Big Boys Rules

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Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] with photocopied police and intelligence files on the IRA, and we have learned that the UDA’s ‘intelligence officer’ in the 1980s, Brian Nelson, was an Army Intelligence agent, this is a pretty stupid line to defend. Nonetheless this line is at the heart of both of the Bruce and Urban books. Urban is an […]

Why are we with Uncle Sam?

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] Americans did. After 1966 the counter-intelligence section of the CIA, headed by the loony James Angleton, came to believe that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent; and CIA counter-intelligence was the ultimate source of much of the disinformation and smears about him and those around him in the middle 1970s. This may […]

Letter from America

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] functioned as an army intelligence officer during Vietnam, turning to civilian spookery in the late 70s. In 1982 he met Oliver North, who posed as a CIA agent named John Cathey. North coveted Reed’s Piper turboprop airplane for use in the contra war. Reed was asked to give up the plane, report it as […]

Miscellaneous: Gemstone. Workers’ Revolutionary Party, MI5 and Libya

Lobster Issue 20 (1990)

Gemstone In Lobster 19, I noted the incremental addition of disinformation to the original Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File. As it turned out, the process was further down that road than I had imagined. From Owen Wilkes, New Zealand’s leading parapolitics researcher, comes the news that a version is in circulation there. Now described … Read more

Ultimate Sacrifice

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Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

[…] into another book. They rehearse the fragments known about an apparent assassination attempt in Chicago on 2 November (and the fate of the first black Secret Service agent, Abraham Bolden, who was framed on a counterfeiting charge after trying to tell the Warren Commission about the Chicago attempt). But how serious was the Chicago […]

Blood revenge: the aftermath of the assassination of Airey Neave

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

“The anomaly of going to war in your own country was not lost on Harry.” (Harry’s Game, Gerald Seymour, Fontana, London 1975) Airey Neave was killed in March 1979 by a bomb planted beneath his car just outside the Houses of Parliament. The then little known Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) soon claimed responsibility. The … Read more

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