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 […]

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 […]

Friends of the British Secret State

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] to a reliable journalist to expose that charlatan please feel free to use it. Traitors do not deserve to get away with this kind of behaviour never mind to defame the reputation of a real hero like Airey Neave. I hope this note is of some use. Comments I am not going to rebut […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term and long-term memory…’ Next time you read about or hear about someone claiming that the CIA (or whoever) is controlling their mind or body, re-read this paragraph before dismissing them as a nutter. Gordon Brown is not gay – official One of the really comic episodes in the […]

The limits of accountability

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

We know that torture is going on in secret and not so secret prisons. We know thanks to the excellent research done by <www.cageprisoners.com> that elements of the British government, be they MI5, MI6 or diplomats from the FCO, have been involved. Yet we seem unable to stop it. Civic society raises its voices in … Read more

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America (Book review)

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Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall University of California Press, Cambridge (UK) 1991, £8.95. The basic rule of politics, domestic and international is that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. That rule ensured that the CIA adopted as allies the opium growers of the Golden Triangle in the 1960s and 70s, and the heroin producing […]

The view from the bridge. JFK. Waco. Oklahoma. Timor. Moral Rearmament Movement

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] fired some 400 Soviet experts, on the spurious ground that they were no longer needed. The relevant CIA department, known as Covert Action, ceased to operate.’ Never mind Crozier forgetting – and The Times subs missing – that it was Gerald Ford who succeeded Nixon, not Jimmy Carter, it was Crozier’s use of the […]

Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and […]

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 […]

The British Right

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

[…] to Mozambique. Perhaps the Foreign Office really does know that by these means Mozambique will be won for the West. But is that truly the aim in mind? If we stand back and look at southern Africa as a whole, and we consider British policy in the wider region, doubt rushes in.” She then […]

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