The view from the bridge. JFK. Waco. Oklahoma. Timor. Moral Rearmament Movement

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] (See the anodyne obit in Guardian 25 October). Expendables Two recent examples of the way HMG treats its employees when they become embarrassing. Peter Bleach, a former intelligence officer turned arms dealer, is in prison in India after an arms deal he was involved with went sour. The Indian court agreed to examine notes […]

Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

John McMurtry London: Pluto Press, 2002, pb £15.99   I shouldn’t be reviewing this. I haven’t digested it properly and it is going to take some time to do so. But I don’t want to leave this for six months without promoting it. I used to try and preserve books in good condition, didn’t write … Read more

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 […]

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.

The Citizen Smith case or the spy who came in from Oporto

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] he subsequently received. I suspect the evidence was exaggerated at a higher level in MI5 in order to ensure that Mr. Smith received a heavy sentence. The intelligence services depend on disproportionate sentences for breaches of the Official Secrets Acts to cultivate the mystique of the importance of their work. I believe Mr. Smith […]

Understanding EU Policy Making

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

Raj Chari and Sylvia Kritzinger London: Pluto Press, 2006, £16.99, p/b See note 4. The authors begin by noting how policies emanating from the European Union are of increasing importance to the citizens of the member states. They divide these policies into those which they describe as ‘1st order’, which include single market measures, competition … Read more

The view from the bridge. Hidden Agendas. Jack Hill. Ghandi. Sinn Fein. Oswald

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] party magazine of the Hindu nationalist party now in government in India, BJP Today, has suggested that the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was the work of British intelligence agents. The article, written by R. Chandrachundan, a close friend of Ghandi’s son, reports the presence of two men from the British consulate with cameras on […]

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 CIA and the Marshall Planks

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Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] for example, he talks of the CIA in its ‘great, early days ….. manned by the flower of American youth…. something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth.’ Ah, the self-confidence (and self-delusion) in ‘doing good in the world by stealth’. RR

Profits of Peace: The Political Economy of Anglo-German Appeasement

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

Scott Newton, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, £30 This is the book Newton was working on which produced the spin-off pieces published in Lobster: ‘The economic background to appeasement and the search for Anglo-German detente before and during WW2’ in Lobster 20, and ‘The Who’s Who of Appeasement’ in Lobster 22. As those essays showed, Newton … Read more

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