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

Book cover
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

Economic Fundamentalism: a Laboratory Experiment

Book cover
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

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

Behind right-wing conspiracy theories

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] can be judged from John Buchan’s famous novel The Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1920. In the first chapter, set in early 1914, Colonel Scudder, the secret agent, explains that behind every major company in Europe is “a Jew in a wheelchair with eyes like a rattlesnake”, and that the cause of the coming […]

Drugging America: a Trojan Horse

Book cover
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] in US history to be charged with a particular minor technical offence connected to ‘consensual searches’ and is sentenced to three years in prison; the FBI Special Agent in Charge of the New York office, who comes to the defence of this INS official, is suspended two months before he was due to retire. […]

Miscellaneous: James Angleton. British democracy. Nazis

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] papers kept in locked metal boxes. Not so, writes David Northmore, referring us to the piece in the Independent (20 August ’88). From being a local election agent, I know that Winter’s account of the votes being put into bundles by party is true. But at the vote counting the ballot papers were put […]

An Incorrect Political Memoir

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

This piece by Daniel Brandt began as a short letter commenting on my review of Right Woos Left by Chip Berlet (Lobster 23 p. 34). I wrote back and asked if he would like to expand it. And so he did, writing almost the whole thing at one long sitting. Anyone who joined the U.S. … Read more

Why are we with Uncle Sam?

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] Americans did. After 1966 the counter-intelligence section of the CIA, headed by the loony James Angleton, came to believe that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent; and CIA counter-intelligence was the ultimate source of much of the disinformation and smears about him and those around him in the middle 1970s. This may […]

Re:

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

Assassination or ‘targeted killings’? Joshua Raines of the University of Iowa College of Law argues that although assassination, ‘narrowly defined’ [sic], is illegal, ‘targeted killings’ could well be permissible under ‘just war’ criteria. The US should therefore pass legislation that allows for ‘…targeted killings under a very narrow range of circumstances with adequate checks built … Read more

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