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 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

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

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 […]

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, […]

Lundy, and, Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] for profit. In this hothouse atmosphere paranoia develops and conspiracies are everywhere, often inspired by supposed colleagues. Just as James Angleton was accused of being a KGB agent because of his overly close relationship to Golitsyn, so Lundy was smeared because of his working relationship with Garner. It is not a game for innocents […]

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

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 […]

Western Goals: LA Police Settle For $1.8 million

Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££

[…] LAPD had set up the Public Disorder and Intelligence Division and the Criminal Conspiracy Section (PDID and CCS) in the 1960s. In 1971 one of the CCS agent provocateurs, Louis Tackwood (a black), began exposing their activities. Tackwood later wrote a book, a fairly extraordinary book called The Glasshouse Tapes (Avon NY 1973) describing […]

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