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 […]

Cloak and Dollar, and, Know Your Enemy

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] behind US foreign policy…..was the defence of democracy’, is a joke. Or a lie. The ‘essential idea’ was to defend US economic and geopolitical interests and never mind how much (non-white) blood was spilt. It gets worse. I always look at the assassination of John Kennedy as a touchstone for academics writing about America […]

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

The Red Hand

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Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] beginning of the book he describes the UCA as ‘a completely fictitious left-wing loyalist paramilitary organization invented by British intelligence’. By p. 71 he has changed his mind and says ‘the British Army may not have been the inventor of the UCA.’ In fact, as the Information Policy briefing on the UCA reproduced in […]

In Brief. Libya. Syria and the Gulf oil war. Lester Coleman

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

[…] Talb. After lengthy sessions with CIA personnel, the Maltese shopkeeper who had previously recognised a photograph of Talb – a 35 year-old Palestinian – apparently changed his mind and fingered a Libyan airline official in his fifties. This identification, along with allegations – later disproved – that a Swiss-made timing device for the Lockerbie […]

007: a new theory

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

[…] it is reasonable to assume that the “safe on Sakhalin” message was a deliberate lie. It was a lie with far-reaching effects. Firstly, it set the world’s mind at rest about 007. At the time of the broadcast 007 was several hours late at Seoul – clearly a news story in the making. Moreover, […]

The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more

The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and post-war American hegemony

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

Giles Scott-Smith London: Routledge/PSA 2002, £55   This is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA-funded operation that ran for two decades after World War II of which Encounter magazine was the best-known British component. Giles Scott-Smith has added to the historical record well illuminated by Christopher … Read more

Coach into pumpkin: some problems with Paget

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] I might take this as a claim that Britain’s security and intelligence institutions have been involved in assassinations (the attempts to get Nasser or Lumumba spring to mind). Paget’s reply to Fayed’s assertion is: ‘It is important to note in the Stevens (Northern Ireland) Report that the term “agents” is used to refer to […]

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 […]

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