Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Media

Book cover
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 […]

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

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

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

Book cover
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 […]

Searchlight again

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] apparent when he insisted on trying to foist an unusable programme idea on colleagues of Gerry in television. A free lunch always at the forefront of his mind, Riley went off, leaving his unlocked briefcase in their office. Gerry promptly opened it and copied Riley’s rather uninteresting address book.(7) Watch this space. O’Hara cannot […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] have received no reply. The murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher Joe Vialls’ exploration of this murder – which he thinks he committed, while under some kind of mind control – has taken a significant lurch forward. In the Australian magazine New Dawn number 27 (GPO Box 3126FF, Melbourne, 3001), Vialls has a long analysis […]

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

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

The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe

Lobster Issue 18 (1989)

[…] with the resistance in Scandinavia. Reflecting on the Pinay Circle and its apparent role as European coordinator of media manipulation, several other avenues for investigation come to mind. The UK: the role of Arthur ‘Dickie’ Franks. Before the publication of the Langemann papers in 1982, Franks’ only known connection to the Wilson story was […]

Marching to the fault line: The 1984 miners’ strike and the death of industrial Britain

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] industrial trade union, led by CPGB members and ex-members, opposing government policy, was more than enough. The nonsense – the communist conspiracy theory – in Mrs Thatcher’s mind was of no relevance to MI5. But it surely is relevant to this story. Beckett and Hencke give us an expanded take on the received version […]

Accessibility Toolbar