Understanding others

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

[…] and error in Northern Ireland, involves the following: A comprehensive plan to alleviate the political conditions behind the insurgency; civil-military cooperation; the application of minimum force; deep intelligence; and an acceptance of the protracted nature of the conflict. Deep cultural knowledge of the adversary is inherent to the British approach.’ In his interesting short […]

Acid: the secret history of LSD

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Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] Arabic and claimed to be ‘Khouri Ali’, a Palestinian revolutionary. The following year he was released on bail: the judge’s summing up described him as a US intelligence asset working under cover in the Middle East. Stark jumped bail and disappeared. In 1982 he was arrested in the Netherlands, once again on drugs charges. […]

Cyberculture: Counterconspiracy

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

[…] Leftism; editor Thomas on ‘Reich and Little Rock’; a snippet on Cord Meyer, Mary Meyer, James Angleton et al; and a long extract from Charles Ameringer’s U.S.Foreign Intelligence: the Secret Side of American History. The first volume is the better of the two if you want information; the second contains a couple of long […]

Blinded by the light: Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy

Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy Phillip Willan Phillip Willan’s Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, (Constable, London, 1991) is a detailed and interesting book, dealing in a thorough (if partially flawed) way with a fascinating subject. It covers a wide array of interlocking subjects including the infamous P2 … Read more

Spies at Work

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] a quick skim across Massiter, Bettaney, Charles Elwell – and thence into British Briefing, David Hart etc. (And Colin Wallace was not ‘a former officer in Army Intelligence’; and has not, to my knowledge, suggested that the League had office space in MI5 headquarters . But since this, like most of the assertions in […]

Obituaries

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] Sunday Times 4 January 1998). Better known under his pen name Richard Deacon, McCormick was one of the post-war pioneers in the field of writing books about intelligence services and operations from scraps of real information. James Earl Ray died, aged 70. Harold Jackson devoted fourth-fifths of his long obituary in the Guardian (24 […]

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 conversation with Peter Dale Scott

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

[…] would sack a large number of ageing officers and have a smaller Washington headquarters working with a larger number of agents through third nations – use the intelligence forces of other countries rather than the CIA – which was implemented by Nixon in ’72 or so. But the whole idea, which involved the material […]

Acid: a new secret history of LSD

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] an unwitting part of the CIA’s MKUltra programme while a post-grad student at Oxford; and the section on the mysterious Ronald Stark, LSD entrepreneur and apparent American intelligence asset, has been elaborated. Most importantly, all the technical foul-ups which marred the first edition have gone. Vision were really crap when they first started out […]

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 […]

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