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

Book cover
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 […]

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. […]

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Book cover
Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] the history of the Agency, merely a history. Huge areas of the Agency’s activities have been ignored, as Jeffrey Richelson, one of the best informed historians of intelligence points out.(7) Richelson’s complaint is that the author has concentrated too much on the Agency’s covert operations. This is clearly true if we are to take […]

The Soviet ‘threat’: “Russia Puts The Brake On Military Spending”

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] over the estimates of Soviet military capability tends to get overlooked in favour of the more exciting aspects of US foreign policy and the work of US intelligence agencies. This is a pity, because those estimates form the basis for the official US government definition of ‘reality’. A low estimate of Soviet spending/capabilities makes […]

Is Libya still the prime suspect for the murder of WPC Fletcher?

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] sensational episode. Fairly quickly after this appalling crime, expressions of disquiet with official explanations were voiced. If guns had been taken into the Libyan embassy, surely the intelligence agencies would have known? If there had been a Libyan embassy plan to fire at the anti-Gaddafi demonstrators on that fateful day on 17 April 1984, […]

Trouble makers

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] gave an example of why the British state is willing to eat almost any amount of shit handed to them by the US. ‘The UK has no intelligence assets in central Asia. We are dependent on information given to us by the United States’ CIA and NSA.’ The British overseas lobby in Whitehall – […]

I am being slagged off, therefore I am

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[…] after this curious telephone call, I was sent a photocopy of the review of Smear! by Robert Cecil from the Winter ’92 issue of the Journal of Intelligence and National Security. To quote the biographical material on his book about Guy Burgess, A Divided Life (Bodley Head, London, 1988), Mr Cecil is a former […]

Great Northern? Was the author of Swallows and Amazons a Soviet secret agent?

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] claim in The Times by the Cambridge historian Professor Christopher Andrew, that Arthur Ransome has been identified in KGB documents as ‘the most important secret source of intelligence on British foreign policy’ for the Cheka, the terror organisation of Bolshevik Russia, has infuriated lovers of Ransome’s work. Unlike Michael Foot, similarly traduced, Ramsome is […]

The Terrorism Industry (Book review)

Lobster Issue 21 (1991)

[…] O’Sullivan, Pantheon Books, New York, 1989, $15.95. Since the revelation of the activities of Forum World Features in the mid 1970s, it has become apparent that Western intelligence services have used ‘research institutes’ and ‘study centres’ with impressive and neutral-sounding titles to put over their world view and create public antipathy towards the enemy […]

Plot elements in the Colosio Murder Mystery

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] Some sources within Mexico City report that Carlos Salinas is in fact still a visitor there, protected by a large bodyguard of military and federal police, with intelligence provided by the USA… 1993 24 May Cardinal JUAN JESUS POSADOS OCAMPO and six others are assassinated at Guadalajara International Airport, by members of the ARELLANO […]

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