A review of the (bad) reviews of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] largely sympathetic feature. (Donald MacIntyre got very worked up about accusations that Tony Crosland could stoop to dirty politics and may well have been a CIA ‘ agent of influence’.) In response to the Ian McIntyre review I wrote a letter which included this. ‘I would have taken Mr McIntyre’s analysis more seriously however, […]

Acid: the secret history of LSD

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Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

David Black, Vision, London, 1998, £9.99 pb I enjoyed this book hugely, and I’d recommend it to anyone remotely interested in the politics of psychedelia – apart from anything else, there are stories here you almost certainly won’t have heard. However, overall it aspires to more than it can deliver. As the title implies, the … Read more

Brian Crozier, the Pinay Circle and James Goldsmith

Lobster Issue 17 (1988) £££

[…] chief of provisions Colonel Botha.’ ‘Gehlen, who was always interested in the undertaking, its figures, its personalities and its results, succeeded in recruiting Violet as a special agent and granted him 6000 DM a month for many years. He also claimed that this sum had been agreed with the former head of the SDECE, […]

The CIA and Mountbatten

Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££

[…] of money disputing this, and Goleniewski considered Mountbatten to be the leading opponent of his claims to the Russian throne. (On all this see Guy Richards’ Imperial Agent) A major Goleniewski supporter in the CIA was the late Herman Kimsey, a top assassination expert, who was also Associate Chief of International Intelligence for the […]

An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King

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Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] is what the truth is. It gets harder to swallow. Pepper has found apparent links to Dallas and Jack Ruby! After the assassination a young and FBI agent went to inspect a car, a white Mustang, which they thought might have been involved in the assassination. This is quite odd. Pepper doesn’t state that […]

Feedback

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

I don’t agree with the Bassett–Matthews line (‘War and peace plots’, Lobster 51) on (i) Chamberlain’s flight to see Hitler in the Munich crisis (it was to avert a war, not a coup) and (ii) Philby’s criminal responsibility for prolonging World War Two. The latter point credits far too much influence to one individual. The … Read more

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and, The Haunted Wood

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America James Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale University Press, London and Yale, 1999, £19.95 The Haunted Wood: Soviet espionage in America – the Stalin era Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev Random House, New York, 1999, $30.00 So now we know: most of what the Republican right in the US, … Read more

Politics and Paranoia

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] gave up on the Labour Party in 1992 with the arrival of John Smith as leader and my involvement declined from being branch secretary and local election agent to being just another inactive member, unable to cut the cord. I eventually resigned over Iraq. A conspiracy theorist? Much of the content of this book […]

Economic Fundamentalism: a Laboratory Experiment

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

Jane Kelsey, Pluto Press, London 1996, £14.99 Kelsey describes how a handful of bureaucrats in the New Zealand state, backed by some of the big New Zealand companies, seized control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional … Read more

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