A review of the (bad) reviews of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] (emphasis added) when even we had them over a year before, and No. 10 Downing Street, two years before. He attributed to us a ‘conviction’ (‘that disloyal intelligence officers were behind every humiliation that Wilson suffered’) which we don’t have, and announced, as if it were a revelation, that the rumours about Marcia and […]

Economic Fundamentalism: a Laboratory Experiment

Book cover
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] I know. On this generally, see Paul Landais-Stamp and Paul Rogers, Rocking the Boat (Berg, Oxford and New York, 1989). For a brief account, focused on the intelligence connections, see Robin Ramsay, ‘How the US tries to subvert Lange’, END Journal No. 26, February 1987. Between 1983 and ’86 seventeen employees of TVNZ went. […]

My encounter with George K. Young and Tory Action, 1979-1988

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] MI6 no. 2, George Kennedy Young, loomed large in the imagination of the section of the British left which was interested in the political activities of former intelligence officers. His activities with Unison in 1973-5 remain unclear but here John Andrews describes the group which succeeded it, Tory Action. Lobster 19 contained an autobiographical […]

CIA and Drug-Trafficking by Contra Supporters

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] including an important piece by Robert Parry, ‘Lost History: Contras, Dirty Money and the CIA.’ Another important background piece is Jack Blum’s testimony to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last year, which is reproduced in Covert Action Quarterly no. 59. However, in my opinion the two best pieces on the CIA-drugs issue which appeared […]

Way out West: a conspiracy theory

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

[…] be said, not a shred of evidence that Hollis ever passed a single piece of information to the Soviets, nor that he had any contacts with Soviet intelligence officers or agents. But this doesn’t hinder the conspiracy theorists who will seize on any scrap of evidence to bolster the Hollis theory. As history shows, […]

US General Accounting Office Reports

Lobster Issue 29 (1995)

[…] be required. Mission-critical systems: defense attempting to address major software challenges (27 pp.) GAO/IMTEC-93-13, December 1992. Billions of dollars in defense weapons and command, control, communications and intelligence systems depend on high-performance, correctly functioning real-time computer systems capable of withstanding severe stresses without failing. This report identifies the many software problems affecting weapons and […]

The crisis

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

In Parish Notices in the last issue I wrote ‘there isn’t much in this issue about the economic situation because there really isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said, for example by Larry Elliot in The Guardian every week.’ Well, I changed my mind about that and here are the bits I found … Read more

The Rape of Socialism

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] both the value of his work and his fatal flaw. Strange to say, whereas an IWW pamphlet contained a touching dedication to ‘our constant companions of the intelligence services’, Donovan Pedelty writes as if these political Peeping Toms of the State did not even exist. By accident, a letter I wrote more than 30 […]

A Game of Moles: the Deceptions of an MI6 Officer

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] contender for the prize for most inaccurate jacket ever written. It begins by stating that this is the first MI6 memoir (it isn’t), calls MI6 officer Bristow an ‘agent’, (the one thing which drives intelligence officers nuts), and then makes claims not to be found in the text. Of interest only to serious MI6 buffs.

Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan

Book cover
Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] probably most Japanese as well. This is a Japan, as Whiting describes in abundant detail, made up of ‘gangsters, corrupt entrepreneurs, courtesans, seedy sports promoters, streetwise opportunists, intelligence agents, political fixers and financial manipulators’. More to the point, he also traces the history of the complicated entanglement of the US government, or more specifically […]

Accessibility Toolbar