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 Men with the Guns

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] A third version appeared in 1980, entitled Beyond The Gemstone Files. It claimed to have being ‘written’ by one Peter Renzo, who claimed to be an ex-CIA agent. (A story and excerpts from this appeared in the Boston Globe April 19 1980). Renzo was, of course, a bullshitter, and, as the excerpts show, all […]

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

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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

Morningside Mata Haris: How MI6 deceived Scotland’s great and good

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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

Vatican Connections

Lobster Issue 1 (1983)

[…] Calvi’s death.(City Limits 8th July 1983). Information on British Freemasons and their links to other Masonic organisations? John McCaffery, of Rorsburg, Scotland. A former war-time British intelligence agent, McCaffery died in February. Just before his death he made out an affidavit stating that he had plotted with Sindona in an attempt to overthrow the […]

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 […]

Wallace on Pincher on Wallace

Lobster Issue 21 (1991)

[…] the Directorate of Army Security at that time had joined the Directorate from Northern Ireland where he had worked closely with MI5. In particular, he ran an agent named James Miller, who infiltrated Tara, the Loyalist paramilitary group linked with the Kincora child sex scandal. Last year, the BBC’s Public Eye programme broadcast details […]

Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the news in an age of propaganda

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Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

Edward S. Herman (with illustrations by Matt Wuerker) South End Press, Boston, USA, 1992, $13.00 (USA). The passing of the Bush regime is a good time to pause and express thanks to one of those American writers who have tenaciously dug out the reality behind the business-sponsored counter-revolution that has largely formed the politics of … Read more

The Rape of Socialism

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] on politics around the end of the 19th century. He wanted to deal with the Greenwich explosion, used as the basis for Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, as well as the trials of the anarchists at Walsall and elsewhere. However, Harold Wilson’s administration did not want the repressive actions of a bygone age […]

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