The Conspirators: secrets of an Iran-Contra insider

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] National Liberty Press, 2001, $14.95, ISBN 0-97-10042-0-X Alexander ‘Al’ Martin is a retired Lt. Commander in the US Navy, a former member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle-ranking player in the thicket of scandals known as Iran-Contra. This might be the most startling book written about post-war American politics; and it […]

Agca: true confessions

Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££

[…] – which placed responsibility for the bombings on left-wing terrorists. As we now know, responsibility lay with those on the right-wing who had connections both to the intelligence services and Gelli. See Stuart Christie’s Portrait of a Black Terrorist, Refract, London 1984) SISMI had other links to Ali Agca in Ascoli prison as well […]

The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro

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Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] few years of American’s imperial twilight. As his investigations proliferated and he discovered the usual overlaps between the various threads he was working on – organised crime, intelligence agencies; what we might call, after Peter Dale Scott, deep politics – he began to perceive what he thought were signs of centralised control over large […]

Spooks – U.K.

Lobster Issue 1 (1983) £££

[…] tactic of officials will be to brief Ministers on what insiders call ‘reality’ as opposed to ‘gossip’ in the Party’s document.” (More Hennessy ‘gossip’ .) 4. Secret Intelligence (Richard Norton-Taylor, G., June 6th 1983) Thatcher Advisers Refuse To Face M.P.’s Questions. (Peter Hennessy T. April 21 1983) The new Select Committees attempted to monitor […]

House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

[…] a huge book elaborating Bosch’s thesis. Around that core are subsidiary themes. One is a personal memoir. The author’s father was General Carroll, head of the Defence Intelligence Agency in the 1960s, and as a child the author played in the corridors of the Pentagon, turning against American power and militarism during the Vietnam […]

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in […]

Like books we should have so many witnesses?: Some recent JFK literature

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] lam when he met Oswald in Texas and New Orleans. He saw him daily and got to know him well. Lewis claims Clay Shaw was Guy Bannister’s intelligence boss and that both Jack Ruby and Roscoe White were Camp Street regulars. Presents a convincing picture of the shadowy intelligence world in the Crescent City. […]

The 1953 Coup in Iran: an Iranian insider’s view

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] Officers’ College, and currently is serving in His Majesty’s Guard.’ According to a CIA report dated February 1976, ‘The Shah’s communication and relations with his military and intelligence organs are conducted through one of his oldest friends, who was the Shah’s classmate. Hossein Fardust and the Shah attended the same school, Le Rose, in […]

Spy Wars

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] and deadly games Tennent H. Begley London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, h/b, £18.99   Begley was one of James Angleton’s allies in CIA counter intelligence and this book is the Angletonian view of the Nosenko case, one of the touchstones or causes célèbres of the CIA in the post-war era. Briefly, […]

Politics and Paranoia

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] In the mid 1980s I was one of the few people in the Labour Party who were trying to educate themselves about the role played by the intelligence and security services in our democracy. In 1985/86 I was corresponding with my equivalents in New Zealand and getting material from them on the attempts being […]

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