Who’s afraid of the KGB

Lobster Issue 6 (1984) £££

As a number of people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons. No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What … Read more

USA & the CIA

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Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££

A Covert Life. Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster Ted Morgan New York: Random House, 1999, $29.95 Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union Scott Lucas Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45 Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54 Nick Cullather Stanford (California): Stanford University Press 1999, £8.95 […]

Secrecy and Power in the British State: A History of the Official Secrets Act

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] that an effective analysis of the use of power “should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question who then has power and what has he in mind?” Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely investigated in its real and effective […]

The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006 $75.00 (US), £37.99 (UK), h/b   This is an interesting and timely book and it is a great pity it is so expensive. Put out as a paperback and maybe with a less academic-sounding title, this would sell. Little of it is intellectually taxing and any […]

Errors, corrections, apologies

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

[…] posing outside a synagogue.’ And so forth. (No wonder I got muddled….) In Lobster 25, (p. 11) I stated that some of the material for Julianne McKinney’s mind control report had come from Harlan Girard. Ms McKinney denies this. Harlan Girard says it’s true. I can’t tell which of them is telling the truth […]

Clippings Digest to May 31st. 1984

Lobster Issue 5 (1984) £££

[…] ‘strong state’ Changes in Queen’s regulations re service personnel and political activities. New rules extend to include participation in ‘movements’. Guardian 8th March ‘ CND clearly in mind. Leaked Ministry of Defence document suggests establishing a register of civil servants’ political beliefs if they are thought to oppose the government. Times 16th May (Isn’t […]

Conspiracy theories are go!

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££

[…] Clinton and Arkansas.(8) My faith in the author, Nicholas A. Guarino, is not heightened by the bizarre autobiographical spiel about him prefacing the piece. Headlined ‘The Fastest Mind on Wall Street’, this begins by telling us that he got a speeding ticket at the age of seven, has an IQ of over 200, and […]

Truth Twisting: notes on disinformation

Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££

[…] a ghastly, brutal, shambles, about as threatening to NATO as the CPGB is to the British state. This, clearly, wasn’t quite what his intelligence mentors had in mind at that stage of the re-launched cold war, and ‘Suvorov’ (or, perhaps, some wise-guys somewhere in the British state) quickly put out another book, Inside the […]

How to Fix an Election

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

Election time! Ah, the roar of the hustings; the pulse of democracy is about to be taken. The enduring worthiness of our political system is about to be proven yet again. But what’s that you say? Something’s not quite right with the result? You smell a rat? Be quiet. Such things only happen in tin-pot … Read more

Are spies useless? A Hack’s Progress

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] Cold War there have been occasions when the intelligence services, the CIA and SIS for example, actually did provide intelligence of substance. The first that springs to mind was the Cuban missile crisis, when the information from the Soviet intelligence officer Penkofsky about the actual accuracy of Soviet missiles did appear to play a […]

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