Behind right-wing conspiracy theories

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] can be judged from John Buchan’s famous novel The Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1920. In the first chapter, set in early 1914, Colonel Scudder, the secret agent, explains that behind every major company in Europe is “a Jew in a wheelchair with eyes like a rattlesnake”, and that the cause of the coming […]

Some Notes on Occult Irrationalism and the Kennedy Assassination

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

[…] one finds a review of a pro-Warren Commission book, The Scavengers: Critics and the Warren Report, by Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller. The reviewer, former FBI agent and Ramparts contributor, William Turner, is particularly annoyed (p. 163) over the way Lewis and Schiller take a cheap shot at Sylvia Meagher by pointing out […]

The Last Investigation, and, Deep Politics

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

The Last Investigation Gaeton Fonzi Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1993 Deep Politics and the Death of JFK Peter Dale Scott University of California Press London and Berkeley, 1993 With Dick Russell’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, reviewed above by Alex Cox, these books are the best of the post Oliver Stone wave that … Read more

Miscellaneous: James Angleton. British democracy. Nazis

Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££

[…] papers kept in locked metal boxes. Not so, writes David Northmore, referring us to the piece in the Independent (20 August ’88). From being a local election agent, I know that Winter’s account of the votes being put into bundles by party is true. But at the vote counting the ballot papers were put […]

Children and the Official Secrets Act

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

Some of the spook recruitment pitches in the media of the last two years have gone out of their way to impress upon prospective candidates the family-friendly credentials of the major state spook employers.(1) But such measures, no matter how sincere and/or necessary, are for the most part aimed at a parent’s convenience – and … Read more

The two Indonesias and the two Americas

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] battalion was at the center of massacre and torture operations in the 1960s as in the 1990s. Its chief then, Sarwo Edhie, has been called a CIA agent or contact. It was he who, while giving orders in Indonesia for the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party, used the American Army word, ‘psywar.’ ‘The […]

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

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

[…] its creation, it always seemed likely that Bilderberg was a British enterprise; and Wilford concludes this, citing a C. D. Jackson comment that Retinger was a British agent, an opinion ‘pretty well shared by some other people who are in a position to know better than I ’ – reference, presumably, to the CIA […]

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