The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie Giles Scott-Smith,(1) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38, has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher’s first visit to America in 1967.(2) Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department’s man in the … Read more

Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Media

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Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] breakthrough piece chronicling the links between the CIA; the Contras and the crack cocaine explosion in Los Angeles; through the CIA’s use of psychedelics, ex-Nazi scientists and mind control, into the murky worlds of Indo-China; and then, via a chapter on Afghanistan, back to the United States and the cocaine connections to Arkansas and […]

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

Afterword: the search for “Maurice Bishop”

Lobster Issue 10 (1986)

[…] of “Bishop”. “Bishop” was the only name to which she responded, and it stirred in her the memory of another name. “Bishop” is firmly linked in Fabiola’s mind with a second person – “Prewett”. For her, the two names are so definitely associated that at first she had difficulty remembering which was which. Fabiola […]

SAS: the Stiff Memoir

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] sweep him bodily to the window and throw him out head first.’ The inquest verdicts in such cases were invariably ‘accidental death’ or ‘suicide while of unsound mind’. (p. 187). He decided against on this occasion, but hints very strongly that Todd’s fatal fall from a window during the Lancaster House talks in London […]

Defending the Warren Commission:the line from Langley

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

Introduction In 1967 the CIA sent out to ‘Chiefs, Certain Stations and bases’ a briefing document, Dispatch Document 1035- 960, titled ‘Countering Criticism of the Warren Report’. This unintentionally very revealing and faintly comic document was reproduced in issue 2 of the now defunct newsletter, The Dorff Report in March 1990. In view of the … Read more

Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers

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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

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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

A note on the British deployment of nuclear weapons in crises – with particular reference to the Falklands and Gulf Wars and the purchase of Trident

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] seemed extraordinary to me that the ship, with all its wealth of unhappy information still available, had been deliberately sunk unless there was some other purpose in mind. One likely explanation would be a problem with nuclear weapons still on board, in which case an appropriate course of action would be to sink the […]

Philanthropic imperialism

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] On a general level there is no reason to suppose that much work has been done that examines and scrutinises democracy building to an adequate level, never mind penetrating the intrigue or following the money. Wersch & Zeeuw (themselves funded by Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs via the Clingendael Institute) state that apart from […]

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