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 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 […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] own website makes a “considerable contribution” to the “morale” of the armed forces.’ On-line free sources There are two wonderful free sources of news stories on geopolitics, intelligence etc. There is Mario Profaca’s ‘Spy News’ which sends out daily bulletins of up to 25 news stories from around the world. This can be accessed […]

Clippings Digest to May 31st. 1984

Lobster Issue 5 (1984)

[…] similar but not identical. Jurors for Bettaney trial vetted by MI5 Sunday Times 4th March “All post to and from the Eastern Bloc monitored by the UK intelligence services. Incoming mail from the USSR is … opened, sanitised (?) and the recipient’s name and address taken and passed on to MI5”. Computer Talk 5th […]

Who were they travelling with? SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] of the party which found its voice within the Labour movement through Socialist Commentary and, more widely, through Encounter magazine, one of the wide range of Central Intelligence Agency-funded activities fronted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom from the early days of the Cold War. His perspective is one wholly, almost perversely, absent from […]

Tell me lies

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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 […]

The Big Breach

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] new SIS recruits were briefed by the then SIS chief McColl. One of the new recruits put the obvious question: ‘ “Sir, why do we have an intelligence service at all? There are countries more important on the world stage, with much more powerful economies, who have only small or nonexistent external intelligence gathering […]

Stalker, Conspiracy?

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] inaction, claiming that they ‘had the most powerful interest in the tape’. On 15 May, Stalker saw another MI5 officer in Belfast, the Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (DCI), who, after consultation with Hermon, said that the way was now open to ‘complete consultation’ but subject to ‘unspecified safeguards’. MI5 were to be merely […]

The International Centre of Free Trade Unionists in Exile

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] the FBI and CIA. In many instances, these and other government agencies did everything possible to stop him, and others, from obtaining relevant information. Loftus commented: ‘ Intelligence agencies change their record-keeping procedures with astonishing rapidity. Only the file clerks who suffer through each of these reorganizations can track down and locate the cold […]

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 […]

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