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
edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1997, £15.00 pb There are two kinds of books about the CIA: there are those like William Blum’s, advertised in this issue, which see the CIA simply as part of the US post-war empire, the sharp end of imperial enforcement, somewhere between the […]
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
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
[…] experiments were discussed in conjunction with atomic bomb testings. The CIA’s human behaviour control program was chiefly motivated by perceived Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques. The CIA originated its first program in 1950 under the name of BLUEBIRD, which in 1951, after Canada and Britain had been included, was […]
[…] nation-wide occurrences.’ Bessie Braddock assured the reader that this ‘bears all the distinctive marks of a genuine Communist directive’. Although it is difficult to parody the Stalinist mind, I doubt that even the Cominform would actually have written that ‘new and concentrated effort must be made by specially suitable undercover activists to penetrate into […]
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 […]
Editorially First, most important, our thanks to those Lobster subscribers who responded to our appeal for money. Your response, and a bit of ‘consulting’ with Fleet St. on the content of Lobster 11, has halved our debts. We shall survive. It is tempting to say something about the developing crisis re the Wilson-MI5 story (Lobstergate?). … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] of Defense during the Kennedy administration because the work ‘disgusted’ him. One scientist who knew Stark says he claimed to have been attached to the CIA ‘ mind control’ project – later revealed as MKULTRA.(1) The Brotherhood of Eternal Love Stark had world-wide business interests in pharmaceuticals. Behind his various ‘legit’ fronts, by 1969 […]
