New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain’s Spies Came In From The Cold

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Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

Michael Smith Gollancz, London,1996, £20 This is a curious and rather pointless book. In short chapters Smith attempts potted histories of MI5, SIS, signals and military intelligence. These are quite well done, but covering half a century in 20 pages, say, the chapters are barely more than sketches. (The Information Research Department gets a page!) … Read more

Britain’s Secret Propaganda War

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Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] largish chunk of their subject matter has, in effect, been covertly controlled by the British state. Which is more or less what Brian Crozier was telling us in his memoir, Free Agent, wasn’t it? Notes See Tom Easton’s piece in Lobster 36. Dodds-Parker was also busy in the 1960s peddling smear stories about Harold Wilson.

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 […]

Here, there and everywhere

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] of this book there are many raves; but continue on down through the second page and you come to a very destructive review by a former FBI agent, Delbert Hahn, who was interviewed by Hopsicker. Before buying this read that. Notes If the Zelig reference escapes you try On getaway styles, I prefer the […]

Web Update

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

Thanks to Terry Hanstock and Ian Tresman for contributions. Contributions, comments and info welcome. – My email address is Electronic Privacy/ECHELON The importance of taking advantage of the current debate about Echelon summarised by Nicky Hager: ‘…the lack of serious debate can protect the intelligence agencies from political accountability and control…..it is probably the … Read more

The KGB Lawsuits

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Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] with an alleged enormous Soviet disinformation offensive against the West. In this book Crozier reworks in much greater detail some of the sections of his memoir, Free Agent, describing three lawsuits in which he was involved which concerned alleged Soviet influence in Der Spiegel, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in the United States, […]

A (very) brief history of Christian politics in the United States

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

In its own communications, evangelical Christianity exists in a delirious present but it has a rich and recoverable history. Evangelical religion can and should be explained in part in terms of the response of the millions of the faithful to the experience of modernity. But while secular intellectuals sometimes see it simply as a mechanism … Read more

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, […]

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 […]

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