Korkala, Terpil and Ireland

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] brother who had heard that his sister was the subject of police enquiries concerning a crashed BMW car which belonged to the wife of a fugitive ex-CIA agent. (This came about when Marie McCarthy and Gerrit used Marilyn Terpil’s car to visit McCarthy’s family in Cappoquin, County Waterford, in January 1983.) Magill claims that […]

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

The aliens on the grassy knoll

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

As Scott Van Wynsberghe has ‘outed’ himself as a transvestite let me ‘come out’ of the intellectual closet and admit that, like Sylvia Meagher, I also have some UFO books on my shelves. Over the last 20 years or so I also have acquired some books on ‘earth mysteries’ (though I never found a ley … 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

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

Smearing Wallace and Holroyd

Lobster Issue 15 (1988) £££

[…] staff we would be interested to hear from you. * * * In his Tribune attack on me (item 10 above) Ware says I called him an agent of the state in a letter sent to The Listener. Actually I didn’t, and have no reason to think this. Ware’s behaviour can be explained quite […]

The New Spies: Exploring the Frontiers of Espionage

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

James Adams Hutchinson, London, 1994. I first noticed James Adams when he began running some of the MOD’s disinformation lines about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd in 19867. For a while I collected articles by him which seemed to show the traces of Whitehall briefings. Then I stopped: what was I going to do with […]

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

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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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