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, […]

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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

People

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] foreign policy establishments of the NATO bloc. Had he been on the Soviet side of the Cold War, he would have been long dismissed as an “ agent of influence’. Former Liberal MP Michael Winstanley (Lord Winstanley) died in July. A long obituary in the Daily Telegraph of July 19 failed to mention Winstanley’s […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

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

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, […]

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