Books and Pamphlets

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia J. K. Villiers (Croom Helm, London, 1985) An expanded Masters thesis, full of descriptions of psychological operations by the Rhodesian forces (which failed utterly: and no wonder, they were useless), and rather less about pseudo-gang activities which, like their equivalents in the British operations in Kenya, were a success – i.e. they … Read more

Philip Agee, the KGB and us

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

Philip Agee died in January this year. Reading the obituaries I came across the allegations that he had gone to the KGB with his information about the CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence … Read more

Web update

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] upon any sensitive operational techniques of the security and intelligence services, and in particular upon their sources of information, including the identity of any officer, contact or agent.’ After the House of Lords ruling (see below), Liberty is taking the issue of whether the Official Secrets Act 1989 is compatible with the ECHR to […]

Terrorism: how the West can win

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] including Kirkpatrick, Schultz, Meese and Webster of the FBI. The major themes here are: The Soviet Union is behind world terrorism; the PLO is a major Soviet agent in funding and encouraging world terrorism. The minor theme is, of course, that the Soviet Union was behind the attempted assassination of the Pope. But covertly […]

The Cecil King coup plot

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] Blair and Gordon Brown, have been Thatcherite. Cusack and McDonald, The UVF, (Dublin: Poolbeg, 2000) White, B., John Hume: Statesman of the Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1984) Ulster, October, 1986 The title of the article was ‘John Hume: CIA agent’. In Lobster 33. David Trimble savaged the Jonathan Powell memoir in a review in The Guardian

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 […]

Notes From the Underground: British Fascism 1974-92

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] Movement organiser suspected on the fascist right of having Special Branch connections. (21) Marriner was subsequently exposed as an infiltrator of some skill, having become the election agent of Labour M.P. Brian Walden and his successor John Severs at the time of the Birmingham Ladywood by-election in 1977. In early 1977 the British Movement […]

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