The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] ‘He’s rattling the Americans’ cage,’ he said. A month later – it’s goodbye Tom Spencer MEP when the Customs just happened to search his bag and find drugs and porno in it. See ‘Named but not shamed’ by John Sweeney, The Observer Review 14 February, the only report of Spencer’s demise which even hints […]

Jonestown. The secret life of Jim Jones: a parapolitical fugue

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

Introduction What follows is an interim report about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones feared that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the … Read more

The CIA and the Culture of Failure

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

John Diamond Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008, h/b. No price is stated but it’s around $30 on-line. In The Guardian on 4 March 2009 William Dalrymple wrote: ‘Eight years of neocon foreign policies have been a spectacular disaster for American interests in the Islamic world, leading to the advance of Hamas and Hezbollah, the … Read more

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

  Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more

Re:

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] John Mulholland, was hired to ‘teach intelligence operatives how to use the tools of the magician’s trade – sleight of hand and misdirection – to covertly administer drugs, chemicals and biological agents to unsuspecting victims’ as part of Project MKULTRA.(19) Privates on the payroll The increasing use of PMSCs (private military or security companies) […]

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] California; and a little petty crime. This is the ‘alternative society’ of the time – or a version of it – but Blum’s obsessions are politics not drugs or rock music. Somehow Blum got a nasty – on the evidence of this book – a terminal dose of the desire to look the reality […]

The Open Side of Secrecy: Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] twenty years are spurious. Their account of the CIA is wilfully inadequate, even for a three page summary. They describe the funding of the Contras without mentioning drugs, even when the CIA itself has admitted getting permission from the US Attorney General to ignore cocaine dealing in return for donations to the Contras. You […]

The Conspirators: secrets of an Iran-Contra insider

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] a picture of him with Oliver North. I mean, he got very involved with us at one time. He liked the fast life. He liked to do drugs. He was big into racing cars. He liked women and he raised money for us among loyal Tories in England. That money would then get funnelled […]

The Pentagon’s Psychic Research

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££

[…] of his studies based on his participation in programmes carried out in 1950s.(23) He described biological and hypothetical possibilities regarding psi and also underlined the effects of drugs – consistent with the CIA’s mind control programs and findings of that era.(24) Puharich had a keen interest in parapsychology. In 1956, he brought Peter Horkus, […]

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