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

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 […]

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 Rape of Socialism

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] on politics around the end of the 19th century. He wanted to deal with the Greenwich explosion, used as the basis for Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, as well as the trials of the anarchists at Walsall and elsewhere. However, Harold Wilson’s administration did not want the repressive actions of a bygone age […]

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?

Book cover
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 […]

Our Searchlight problem

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

[…] British state had been referred to again. Atkinson referred to International Times at that time ‘operating out of an office near Charing Cross, the set-up had an agent of the Somoza family hanging around’. (6) And the smear worked. Within a week I had received a letter warning me about Larry O’Hara from a […]

The Real Gemstone File

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] Jo’s Necrophiliac Mafia Montini in Rome? Necro Nader? Chappaquiddick Dickie’s handmaiden Graham? 33rd Degree Masons and Papal Knights – a la Alioto’s Swig? J. Mafia Hoover’s Ex-FBI agent group, featuring Maheu, the assassin at Dallas, Memphis & L.A.?’ Page 187 constitutes the masterpiece of the Gemstone File. Words cannot adequately describe its unsettling aura […]

Children and the Official Secrets Act

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

Some of the spook recruitment pitches in the media of the last two years have gone out of their way to impress upon prospective candidates the family-friendly credentials of the major state spook employers.(1) But such measures, no matter how sincere and/or necessary, are for the most part aimed at a parent’s convenience – and … Read more

The murder of Hilda Murrell: ten years on

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

Introduction Clear cut examples of political murder, or state assassination in the mainland UK have been virtually non-existent. It is that fact which has helped focus so much attention on the deaths of Hilda Murrell and, in Scotland, of Willie McRae. Lobster got into this area relatively early, printing in issue 16 a long report … Read more

Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S.

Lobster Issue 12 (1986) £££

[PDF file]: […] and flown to his home country, where he was almost certainly murdered by order of his political enemy, the dictator Trujillo. In this case, a former FBI agent, John Joseph Frank (who had worked for the CIA as well as a Trujillo lobbyist) pleaded nolo contendere for his role in chartering the kidnap plane; […]

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