Defending the Warren Commission:the line from Langley

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] Oswald would not have been any sensible person’s choice for a co-conspirator. He was a ‘loner’, mixed-up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service. As to charges that the Commission’s report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that […]

A (very) brief history of Christian politics in the United States

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

[…] played an important ideological role in broadly speaking secular organisations. The John Birch Society was founded in 1958. It took its name from a Baptist missionary and intelligence officer who had been killed by the Communist Chinese and whom they described as the first casualty of the Cold War. The Birchers claimed that America […]

Feedback

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

From Tony Hollick A Response to David Guyatt’s Operation Black Dog, in Lobster 35. All aircraft and ordnance information is from Modern Warplanes, by Doug Richardson, Salamander Books, 1982. It would have been Saddam Hussein’s most heartfelt wish, to have the US attack Iraq with nerve gas during the 1991 Gulf War. He could then […]

Harassment by the state

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] was again: break-ins, pranks, things left in the house, nuisance calls – the familiar repertoire. Which is to say: we still have a secret state whose legal, intelligence and security wings are virtually unregulated. There are now elaborate procedures mimicking regulation – both Kennedy and Henderson are exploring these – but the state can […]

People

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] by Richard Hall mentioned that she wrote for the newsletters Africa Analysis, Africa Confidential and the Economist’s Foreign Report. The last two are frequently talked of as intelligence operations — Brian Crozier and Robert Moss, for example, have edited the latter — but is there any evidence about the former? Seth Kantor died in […]

The 1975 Referendum on Europe

Book cover
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] claimed to be confidential briefings “off the record”. The real reason which could not be told publicly for our entry to the common market was because our intelligence service had learned the Soviet Unions had plans to invade Western Europe and these would be carried out once the trade unions in Western Europe led […]

Secrecy and Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] him by launching the largest private sector political warfare campaign in history against him. But there are other factors. For an American politician, getting embroiled with the intelligence services or the military looks almost uniquely dangerous. There are also two more general reasons for the inertia. The Democrats are reluctant to criticise America, domestically […]

Don’t Mention The War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and the Media

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] Chris Ryder are treated as straightforward sources despite public knowledge about their disinformation roles. Alan Protheroe of the BBC is not described as a former Army TA intelligence officer. Still, these are minor criticisms of the best analysis I have read of the politics of news production in this country – and the best […]

What’s been did and hid

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

[…] agency in the covert alliance is simply doing what it is told. Nothing has changed in 20 years, the UN is still a prime target for US intelligence and, doubt-less, little old New Zealand is still doing its bit.'(3) Were an equivalent report on GCHQ to turn up in the UK, would any of […]

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 […]

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