Welcome to Lobster

Lobster Issue

Welcome to Lobster, the journal that looks at the impact of the intelligence and security services on history and politics. From espionage to dirty tricks to conspiracy theories. What else is in Lobster? Check out the keywords in the box in the sidebar, right. Lobster issues are free. Over 80 issues of Lobster magazine […]

MacV-Sog Command History: Annexes A, N, and M (1964-66)

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] but a volume devoted to SOG alone remained a missing quantity until Charles F. Reske came along. Reske is one of those people who shift easily between intelligence and academe. During the Vietnam years, he served with the Naval Security Group, the U.S. Navy’s agency for signals intelligence (SIGINT), and he has collected degrees […]

Yo, Blair!

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] On both sides of the Atlantic, Iraq has demonstrated the primacy of politicians. We saw opposition to the attack on Iraq from sections of the Anglo-American military, intelligence agencies and diplomats, accompanied by the biggest campaign of leaks of classified information I can remember. Yet nothing happened. British participation in the invasion was not […]

North American Spies: New Revisionist Essays

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] ranges widely from the obscure ‘secret operations of Spanish consular officials within Canada during the Spanish-American war’ to the useful account of the ‘birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency’. In between are a number of good essays on American intelligence which are well-serviced with notes and bibliography. It is hardly revisionist, though in an […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] regime’s links to Al Qaeda and the existence of WMDs. Why did he believe claims which a large chunk of his colleagues and most of the world’s intelligence services didn’t, and which could be seen to be false by asking that nice Mr Google? ‘I took these stories seriously because they were corroborated by […]

The fiction of the state: The Paris Review and the invisible world of American letters

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] whose eccentric family reminded everyone of the Sitwells. His wife, Perdita, had, it turned out, been secretary to James Jesus Angleton, literary scholar and chief of counter intelligence at the CIA. (His deputy was the novelist, William Hood.) Ned Chase took me to the legendary Billy’s, watering hole to the literary world, and told […]

The dark side of Washington: Seymour Hersh and the Kennedy legacy

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] weaving in and out of graphic depictions of JFK’s colourful personal life. And Hersh presents a compelling picture of an almost seamless milieu of machine politics, off-the-wall intelligence operations and organised crime. So what’s new, then? The Castro assassination plots, for one, are viewed as actively driven by the Kennedys – Bobby in particular. […]

A note on Arthur Andersen and Co.

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] degree of involvement in a firm’s total business practice as opposed to just finance and accounting. This involved the collection and classification of both general and detailed intelligence on many hitherto peripheral matters. These included labour relations, availability of raw materials, plants, products, markets and the effectiveness of the organisation and its future prospects. […]

Eclipse: the last days of the CIA

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] the Reagan years when the in-coming Know-nothing administration decided they would impose their childish notions about the world onto the Agency and get it to produce ‘ intelligence’ to support their conspiracy theories about the ‘communist menace’. The very idea of attempting ‘the politics of the CIA’, let alone getting as close as Perry […]

Tell me lies

Book cover
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

[…] Chomsky and Herman is worth having and the Pilger pieces, written in the weeks preceding the invasion, stand up pretty well. There are interesting snippets on the intelligence services and disinformation, psy-ops, US propaganda and media behaviour. The material which has survived best is the essays on the workings of the media and state […]

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