The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] chief constable rank or higher – has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.’ (4) Does this seem like a story to you? It did to me but not to the London media. Not a word of […]

My enemy’s enemy…: Museum Street

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

Introduction The mid 1970s was not a good time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New Zealand … Read more

Sources

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

Korean war biological warfare? Issue 11 of the Bulletin of Cold War International History Project contained what appears to be evidence that the allegations by North Korea and the Chinese that the US were using biological warfare during the Korean War were false – were in fact disinformation. Documents apparently from former Soviet archives seem … Read more

The Clash of the Icons

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

Political activist Daniel Ellsberg and Professor Alfred McCoy have something special in common. Based on their actions and accomplishments of nearly thirty years ago, they have achieved the status of icons within the subculture of what passes for the New Left. Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an … Read more

Miscellaneous Publications

Lobster Issue 21 (1991)

Miscellaneous Publications Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’, The CIA and American Democracy, (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1989, price not stated) is, with Blum’s The CIA: a Forgotten History, the best single volume on the CIA. Of particular interest is the author’s account of the political system’s response to the revelations of CIA archives in the … Read more

Disinformation: From Euros to UFOs

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] 23 by Christina Lamb, ‘Diplomatic Correspondent’ – a title once held by Coughlin – which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sent belly dancing assassins to London to murder his opponents there. Lamb sourced this to ‘a Foreign Office official’.(4)   Where are they now? Skimming through the e-newsletter NewsmakingNews of 18 September I had […]

An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King

Book cover
Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] correct, there were sections of the US military who had decided by 1968 that the domestic situation could not be left to the politicians and sanctioned the murder of the leading black opponent of their war in Vietnam. There’s a bigger story yet: the growth of the power of the US military in post-war […]

The rise and fall of the Bulgarian Connection

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Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

The rise and fall of the Bulgarian Connection Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead (Sheridan Square Publications, New York, 1986) When the Turkish Grey Wolves hold rallies they howl collectively. So, at times, do journalists of the ‘free press’. In 1979 Edward Herman wrote After the Cataclysm with Noam Chomsky in which they shredded Western … Read more

The fiction of the state: The Paris Review and the invisible world of American letters

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] it? I had been active in the anti-war movement. In the days of Richard Nixon, that could spell trouble. There was the coup in Chile and the murder of Allende. After Nixon’s fall, the national security state perpetuated itself under Henry Kissinger, who stayed on under Gerald Ford as secretary of state. William Colby […]

SISies: MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations and A Life: A. J. Ayer

Book cover
Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

[…] and one of the co-founders of the Social Democratic Party. An odd, occasional visitor to these circles was William Whitelaw, who became Margaret Thatcher’s fixer after the murder of Airey Neave. Through the influence of his wife, Dee, a close friend of Susan Crosland, Ayer was once again politically active in the sixties but […]

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