Eternal Vigilance? 50 years of the CIA

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

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 […]

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 […]

Books and Pamphlets

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

[…] new member of a very small category, the geopolitical conspiracy theory satire. (Only Report from Iron Mountain and the various books by Robert Anton Wilson spring to mind in this area.) For this reason alone it is worth getting. (How effective a piece of satire, and how good a piece of writing, is a […]

The CIA and radiation experiments on humans

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] 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 […]

The Westminster Whistleblowers

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

The Westminster Whistleblowers: Shirley Porter, homes for votes and twenty years of scandal in Britain’s rottenest borough Paul Dimoldenberg London: Politicos, 2006, £12.99, p/b   The author was a Labour councillor in Westminster during Porter’s ‘reign of terror’ and was instrumental in eventually bringing her down. With an insider’s view he has written an immensely … Read more

There’s no smear like an old smear

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] 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 […]

Enduring Freedom

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Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

Global Intelligence: the World’s Secret Services Today Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, London and New York, Zed Books, 2003 h/back £32.95/ $55.00 p/back £9.99/ $17.50   ‘We lacked specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program’ – Vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Stuart Cohen, December 2003 With the spectacular failure of […]

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 […]

Rebranding SIS

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] 30 July 2000 The Punch story, in issue 117, October 2000, about Sir John Browne of BP, Prime Minister Blair and the Russian oil money comes to mind – unless the retired SIS officer that sits on BP’s board forgot to check out the latest news from Russia with his former SIS colleagues. It […]

Operation Julie revisited: the strange career of Ron Stark, parapolitical alchemist

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] 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 […]

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