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 […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] blocs in the fifties. Brandt notes that the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded a series of feminist organisations in the 1970s and asserts that the ‘the intelligence community needed to balkanize the 1960s student movement, because students were starting to do research into the American power structure and connect the dots.’ The evidence […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

The rise of warfare capitalism

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] recruiting sergeant for al-Qaeda. Where Naomi Klein has gone one stage further is in grasping how the drum-beat of still further wars is being fueled by poor intelligence derived from ‘interrogations’ (i.e. torture) carried out by private intelligence consultants in privately run torture centres outside the US. This complements the cherry-picking of the best […]

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 […]

Contemporary British History 1931-61: politics and the limits of policy

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] a part in the anti-Soviet operations of the early years of Cold War 1 — the small-scale British version of the conversion of the CIA from an intelligence agency into a covert operations adjunct to US foreign policy. (Aldrich is one of the handfuls of British academics who are trying to incorporate the activities […]

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