The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story by James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the hacking trials themselves. We learn that Mulcaire’s early career was as a ‘tracer’ for John Boyall who, among other things, carried out contract work for the intelligence services. When the NOTW and Boyall fell out, Mulcaire was the beneficiary and became ever more deeply involved with obtaining material by assorted means in support […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

British Counterinsurgency by John Newsinger

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] that disastrous campaign, we heard a fair bit of comment that the Americans should have listened to the Brits because the British state – its military and intelligence – is good at counterinsurgency.2 Newsinger’s account of British CI campaigns since 1945 shows that this is a delusion. With the exception of a couple of […]

The writer with no hands by Matthew Alford

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] a movie and fucked the writer. Would a script get you killed? Alford’s earlier book about Hollywood describes an entertainment industry in which the US military and intelligence are thoroughly integrated, a system in which a really radical script simply wouldn’t get made. So who would bother to kill the writer when a word […]

The Conspiracy and Democracy Project

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] or impacts upon democracy. It might, for example, examine all the state conspiracies which now exist within this society; and since the armed forces, police, security and intelligence services (and the big corporations) are almost entirely unaccountable, such research would be entirely apt. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the […]

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] coup to seize power for himself. He ‘did little to hide his involvement in drug trafficking’ and, according to an interview with Col. Russell Thaden, the NATO intelligence chief, on one occasion he ‘blew his stack upon learning U.S. and British forces had jointly bombed a large drug lab in northern Afghanistan’. He calmed […]

Estes, LBJ and Dallas

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] a third party buried in a book mixing fact with faction. But many of the witnesses in other versions of the story can be portrayed as unreliable: intelligence officers of one stripe or another, for example, or the anti-Castro Cubans, and assorted military and right-wing activists, all of whom have axes to grind. If […]

Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda by Nicholas O’Shaughnessy

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] disdain, as Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf: ‘We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and […]

lob61-parish-notes

Lobster Issue

[…] as though there has been some big shift; and in a sense there has been. I am no longer collecting every scrap of information about the British intelligence and security services in the way that I did once. Why not? A number of things have come together. Firstly, it no longer seems as important. […]

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