Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] zealous control for the next twenty years’ — and never mentions it again. Mangold tries to explain Angleton’s enormous power wholly by his being head of Counter Intelligence. This is not convincing. Surely part of Angleton’s bureaucratic power came precisely from the “Israeli account’. The book is essentially an account of the disastrous effects […]

Spy Master: The Betrayal of MI5

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

[…] The facts are somewhat different. As early as mid-1961 Ward was being run by the Security Service officer, Keith Wagstaffe, then working for D1 (a), Operations, Counter- intelligence. The Service decided to try and ‘honeytrap’ Ivanov, for which Ward was most willing and eager to provide a suitable female – Christine Keeler. After things […]

Mrs Thatcher, North Sea oil and the hegemony of the City

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

Introduction I began writing this in the early 1980s. If you were then reading the Guardian or the Observer, and knew a little, simple economics, it didn’t take genius to notice that while the UK’s manufacturing economy was being decimated by Conservative Party economic policy, the City of London was booming. More interestingly, and less … Read more

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] drug and other criminal activities the Nicaraguan bishops had complained back in 1978. Equally disastrous was the initial decision to leave oversight of the Contras to Argentine intelligence officers, for whom the drug-financing of operations was a way of life. On March 16, 1998, in response to Webb’s allegations, the CIA Inspector-General admitted that […]

Empire and Superempire

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Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] In the case of why the Americans attacked Iraq, for example, our knowledge of the actual decision-making process is growing by the week as the military and intelligence bureaucracies leak in the great game of avoiding the blame for the disaster; and the knowledge that the actual evidence is increasingly available diminishes Porter’s discussion […]

Notes on contamination

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997) £££

[…] issue 2, for example, contains a long piece about the Bilderbergers, by Sir Louis Le Bailly, former Naval Attaché to Washington, and former Director-General of the Defence Intelligence Staff. It isn’t a very good piece: it contains banal errors, Le Bailly doesn’t bother with documentation, and it is xenophobic – Germanophobic – to a […]

Pinay 2: Jean Violet

Lobster Issue 18 (1989) £££

[…] its factory in Germany seized by the Nazis during the war. Violet resolved the problem and Pinay was so satisfied he recommended him to the new French intelligence organization, SDECE. Violet duly became an SDECE operative, utilizing a global network of contacts to assist that agency in its work.(2) Violet’s early post-war deeds also […]

Operation Mind Control

Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££

[…] vile vibes of any photocopy shop! The Jonestown section is very thorough, and Bowart makes a strong – if perhaps exaggerated – case for some sort of intelligence connection. Likewise for the horrific events in Waco, Texas. The mind control transmitter section, though, is disappointing. I too have read the articles suggesting we plant […]

John Maynard Keynes and the Anglo-American Special Relationship: a Reinterpretation

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] have been characterised by a special Anglo-American relationship, running in parallel with the strategic one based on collaboration in NATO and the UN, as well as in intelligence sharing and nuclear weapons policy. The ideological rationale for all this has been the defence of liberal capitalism (equated with freedom of speech and national self-determination) […]

The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East

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Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

Robert Fisk London: Fourth Estate, 2005, £25.00   This very fine book runs to more than 1,300 pages, is well footnoted, referenced and indexed, carries a helpful bibliography and is written by one of the most fluent, knowledgeable and thoughtful journalists of our time. That part of its dedication is to Fisk’s parents ‘who taught … Read more

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