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

Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK

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Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

[…] — and doubts about his credibility were immeasurably increased by the failure of his children to back up his alibi. Marita Lorenz, former lover of Fidel Castro-turned-CIA- agent, testified that she had been part of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy along with Hunt, another Watergate ‘plumber’ Frank Sturgis, and some Cubans. But her first-hand knowledge […]

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 […]

George Korkala’s address book

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

George Gregory Korkala was the ‘soldier’ in the activities of ‘lieutenant’ Frank Terpil and ‘leader’ Edwin Wilson. Wilson and Terpil are both ex-CIA, though when their relationships with the ‘company’ ended is not known. Korkala was arrested in February 1982 at a trade fair on security devices in Madrid. Spanish police carried out the arrest … 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 […]

Colin Wallace – an assessment

Lobster Issue 14 (1987) £££

[…] anyone not asleep at the wheel has taken for granted for years; some fragments on the MI5-MOD-Tory Party operations against CND; and one (conveniently dead) alleged MI5 agent, Harry Newton. Yet no journalist to my knowledge has ever got paranoid about her, seriously wondered if she was part of some wider operation. (I don’t […]

The Real Gemstone File

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] Jo’s Necrophiliac Mafia Montini in Rome? Necro Nader? Chappaquiddick Dickie’s handmaiden Graham? 33rd Degree Masons and Papal Knights – a la Alioto’s Swig? J. Mafia Hoover’s Ex-FBI agent group, featuring Maheu, the assassin at Dallas, Memphis & L.A.?’ Page 187 constitutes the masterpiece of the Gemstone File. Words cannot adequately describe its unsettling aura […]

The limits of accountability

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

We know that torture is going on in secret and not so secret prisons. We know thanks to the excellent research done by <www.cageprisoners.com> that elements of the British government, be they MI5, MI6 or diplomats from the FCO, have been involved. Yet we seem unable to stop it. Civic society raises its voices in … Read more

There’s no smear like an old smear

Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more

Peter’s friends?

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] August did not run the story but two other papers that day were dropping big hints. The Sunday Telegraph reported that ‘…a friend of the former MI5 agent told the Sunday Telegraph that there was “concrete evidence” that two senior ministers had worked for the security service…..the same source said that Mr Shayler’s girlfriend, […]

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