A guided democracy

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

A guided democracy The following appeared in the Daily Telegraph 23 June 2003. ‘Edward Heath created a secret government propaganda unit to persuade the British people to accept the Common Market. Civil servants were engaged in a dirty tricks department of the Foreign Office to cover up the threat to sovereignty and provide rapid rebuttal … Read more

A Note on MRA, CIA and L. Ron. Hubbard

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££

A Note on MRA, CIA and L. Ron. Hubbard In response to my snippet in issue 38 (p.22) on Moral Rearmament and the CIA, Daniel Brandt (1) sent me the following from Miles Copeland’s, The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA’s Original Political Operative (London: Aurum Press, 1989, pp. 176-177). This is a nice demonstration … Read more

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, […]

Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

Annie Machon Lewes (East Sussex): Book Guild, 2005, h/b, £17.95   It is hard to ‘see’ this book because a lot of the material, especially in the first half, is familiar, half-remembered from the press reporting of the Shayler-Machon drama and the book Defending the Realm by Nick Fielding and Mark Hollingsworth. Nonetheless, familiar or […]

Rolling Back Revolution: The Emergence of Low Intensity Conflict

Book cover
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55   In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more

Defrauding America: a pattern of related scandals

Book cover
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 […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

Horses for courses? Labour MP Denis MacShane used the hospitality of The Observer extended by his old Oxford pal, editor Roger Alton, to proclaim the virtues of Nicolas Sarkozy and confide, a week before the second vote, that his success in the French presidential election was greatly desired in Downing Street. The prospect of a … Read more

A Century of War: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order

Book cover
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

William Engdahl London: Pluto, 2004, £15.99, p/b   Google the author and you will find him listed as a senior member of the Lyndon LaRouche org in 1998, European Economic Editor of Executive Intelligence Review.() Although I have been told by his publisher that he is no longer with LaRouche, the book’s first edition was […]

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. […]

Accessibility Toolbar