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 […]

Wallace Clippings planted on Chapman Pincher

Lobster Issue 16 (1988) £££

Just for the historical record, these rather faded cuttings from the Daily Express are just two of the stories that Wallace planted on Chapman Pincher while working in Information Policy. By Chapman Pincher the man who gives you tomorrow’s news -today THE SECURITY forces in Northern Ireland are facing a serious threat from American ex-Vietnam … Read more

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

Book reviews

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] Pincher in Too Secret Too Long says’Fedora’ was ‘definitely not Viktor Lessiovsky, as has been claimed. The most likely candidate seems to be Vladimir Chuchuken, a KGB agent at the UN in New York from 1962 to 1977’ (p609). Chuchukin is named as a KGB disinformation officer in Barron’s previous book The KGB (1974) […]

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

Western Goals (UK)

Lobster Issue 21 (1991) £££

[…] Post. Expelled from his local Conservative Association after distributing racist leaflets in Bradford, but readmitted, apparently in 1991: in April 1991 he was acting as an election agent for the Conservative Party in Bradford. Member of Western Goals (UK) and their main contact in Yorkshire. Enjoyed close links with the BNP until they were […]

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 […]

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

Terror Within

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

Terror Within: Terrorism and the Dream of a British RepublicClive Bloom Stroud, Glos.: Sutton, 2007, h/bk, 297 pages, h/b, £20.00   This sets out to provide a narrative describing the range of ‘attempts’ to set up a republic in Britain from the time of the French revolution until the present day. (Although the bulk of … Read more

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