Enduring Freedom

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Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

Global Intelligence: the World’s Secret Services Today Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, London and New York, Zed Books, 2003 h/back £32.95/ $55.00 p/back £9.99/ $17.50   ‘We lacked specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program’ – Vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Stuart Cohen, December 2003 With the spectacular failure of […]

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] most subtle and successful conspiracies…….to embroil us in a foreign war’ But, unknown to Aaronovitch, there was such a conspiracy (though not the one Flynn had in mind) – and it involved not just Flynn’s hate figure, Roosevelt, but the British government. Part of the conspiracy was a series of covert operations in America […]

Directory of British Political Organisations, 1994

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] of our civil libertarian position on immigration, victimless crimes, sexual freedom and tolerance, free speech and censorship, and threats to civil liberties, is hardly what comes to mind when the term ‘right-wing’ is used. Neither does the author mention that we have as many ‘links’ with libertarian socialists, anarchists, sexual minorities, other civil libertarians, […]

Rebranding SIS

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] 30 July 2000 The Punch story, in issue 117, October 2000, about Sir John Browne of BP, Prime Minister Blair and the Russian oil money comes to mind – unless the retired SIS officer that sits on BP’s board forgot to check out the latest news from Russia with his former SIS colleagues. It […]

Defrauding America: a pattern of related scandals

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press, USA, 1994 The first thing to be said is that this is a huge (650 pages), fascinating book; and I recommend it. It is really three stories interwoven. The first section describes the author’s experience of trying to alert the American civil aviation industry, then the politicians and then the […]

The Westminster Whistleblowers

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

The Westminster Whistleblowers: Shirley Porter, homes for votes and twenty years of scandal in Britain’s rottenest borough Paul Dimoldenberg London: Politicos, 2006, £12.99, p/b   The author was a Labour councillor in Westminster during Porter’s ‘reign of terror’ and was instrumental in eventually bringing her down. With an insider’s view he has written an immensely … Read more

JFK: Oswald? Which one?

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Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

John Armstrong Arlington, Texas: Quasar Ltd., 2003 $40, plus postage, from <www.jfkresearch.com/armstrong/>   This is a major publishing event in the JFK assassination world. Parts of Armstrong’s work has been on the Net and he’s spoken at some of the big JFK conferences. His work-in-progress became spoken of as ‘the John Armstrong research’; and finally … Read more

Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] were the other stories. Some were the horror stories with which we have become familiar: for example MK-Ultra and Ewen Cameron’s insane experiments with reprogramming the human mind which Hollings discusses. But also: by 1959 Cary Grant had taken LSD over 60 times as part of a Hollywood set who were using it with […]

Secret Contenders

Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££

[…] Russians. The KGB did the same with Russian students. The intelligence value was nil. In the early sixties the CIA placed a lot of hopes on ‘ mind control’, experimenting with drugs, hypnosis and programming a la ‘Manchurian Candidate’. The most bizarre episode in Beck’s book concerns an attempt by a CIA shrink to […]

Spy Master: The Betrayal of MI5

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

[…] (p. 222) (emphasis added) ‘Hollis had set up the entire operation, without the knowledge of his staff’ (p. 255) A one-man Hollis operation? Hollis the Superman? The mind boggles. According to West, ‘The only conclusion possible from all of this is that Hollis was personally responsible for the Profumo debacle from start to finish. […]

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