The corporate ex-spook business

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] security companies, give or take a few ex-KGB bods, are all Anglo-Saxon, with personnel institutionalised by specific national agendas, including the commercial. This not only conditions a mind set, which includes belief in racial and other dominance, but leaves them unable to cope in a market-place where: a) the ‘prestige’ (for want of another […]

Two views of Dorril: MI6: Fifty years of Special Operations

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Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] not only on the Labour Movement and his former allies, but in the words of his former wife Margaret, has sold his soul to the devil. Never mind, that ghastly conservative creep Blair tells us we should be proud of our MI6 boys and girls for they give us a cutting edge over the […]

The Last Investigation, and, Deep Politics

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] These are facts: what people think they saw or heard is inherently, and demonstrably, unreliable. Hence the centrality of the wounds on the body in the legal mind — and hence, in Lifton’s view, the centrality to the assassination of the same ‘best evidence’. For Fonzi the moment of illumination was the realisation that […]

Behind right-wing conspiracy theories

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] organisations. Their members included aristocrats and prominent people in many countries. Their popularity reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment when the hold of Christianity on the European mind was weakening and being replaced with occultism and a fascination with antiquity. Educated men believed in a vague human brotherhood and tolerance, to be brought about […]

USA & the CIA

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Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

A Covert Life. Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster Ted Morgan New York: Random House, 1999, $29.95 Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union Scott Lucas Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45 Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54 Nick Cullather Stanford (California): Stanford University Press 1999, £8.95 […]

Wallace on Pincher on Wallace

Lobster Issue 21 (1991)

[…] my personal view of the named politicians was. It is, therefore, nothing short of disinformation for him to claim otherwise. p. 171 ‘Evidence of Wallace’s state of mind is contained in an essay ‘Ulster — a State of Subversion’, which he admits he wrote himself. His own conclusion was that….’ The ‘essay’ to which […]

Acid: the secret history of LSD

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Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

David Black, Vision, London, 1998, £9.99 pb I enjoyed this book hugely, and I’d recommend it to anyone remotely interested in the politics of psychedelia – apart from anything else, there are stories here you almost certainly won’t have heard. However, overall it aspires to more than it can deliver. As the title implies, the […]

The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 $75.00 (US), £37.99 (UK), h/b   This is an interesting and timely book and it is a great pity it is so expensive. Put out as a paperback and maybe with a less academic-sounding title, this would sell. Little of it is intellectually taxing and any […]

The murder of Hilda Murrell: ten years on

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

Introduction Clear cut examples of political murder, or state assassination in the mainland UK have been virtually non-existent. It is that fact which has helped focus so much attention on the deaths of Hilda Murrell and, in Scotland, of Willie McRae. Lobster got into this area relatively early, printing in issue 16 a long report … Read more

Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and […]

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