USA & the CIA

Book cover
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 … Read more

The View From MI5

Lobster Issue 13 (1987)

Colin Wallace and ‘Clockwork Orange 2’ In 1974, while working for the British Army’s Northern Ireland psy-ops unit, Information Policy, Wallace was asked (told) by an MI5 officer to work on a psy-ops project, ‘Clockwork Orange 2’. Wallace’s job spec. for CO2 was to produce a document, a first-hand narrative, apparently written by a supporter … Read more

Our Friends in the North West: The Owen Oyston Affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

The Oyston Affair appears to have been the longest and most expensive privately-funded political dirty tricks campaign in recent British history. The astonishing 15-year campaign waged against Owen Oyston by Michael Murrin, the owner of a fish and chip shop in the village of Longridge, Lancs, was backed by help and cash payments raised by … Read more

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

Robert Caro New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 2002, hb $35 (US) £35 (UK) (But in the UK only £22 from Amazon.com)   This is the third volume in Caro’s biography of LBJ. The first two volumes are wonderful pieces of work, the best biographies I have read; and in many ways this is their … Read more

9/11’s Trainer in Terrorism Was an FBI Informant

Lobster Issue

[…] to the Kahane shooting,” an F.B.I. agent said.”(20) In thus limiting the case, the police and FBI were in effect protecting Nosair’s two Arab co-conspirators in the murder of a U.S. citizen. Both of them were ultimately convicted in connection with the first WTC bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad. The 9/11 […]

The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners; GB84

Book cover
Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p/back, £12.99   On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more

Good-bye Tony

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

Lobster’s writers say farewell (in approximately 250 words or less) In alphabetical order: Richard Alexander: Good riddance. Dan Atkinson: Prediction is a mug’s game, but here is one forecast for the early, troubled years of the next decade: Tony Blair’s ten years in power will be widely seen as a golden age of cheap consumer … Read more

Rinkagate: The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Thorpe

Book review
Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)

[…] the higher management at the BBC to shut them up; the Peter Bessell version of events, the perambulations of Norman Scott – and the actual conspiracy to murder him. But in ignoring the psy-ops operations Freeman has served up an interesting snack rather than a main course. There is one absolutely wonderful comment from […]

Spook PR

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

Public relations, more usually referred to these days as ‘communications’, is a method used by organisations to explain themselves or issues, or sell a product/message/strategy. To create/manipulate their audiences’ various external environments so that these can prevail, sophisticated organisations firstly recognise competitor or negative PR; secondly, they counter it. The means by which they do … Read more

Dean Andrews’ testimony to the Warren Commission

Lobster Issue 20 (1990)

[…] after the war by J. Edgar Hoover into a covert FBI assassination squad. Just after the assassination ‘Milan’ claims he was sent by Hoover to Dallas to murder a taxi driver. Before dying the taxi driver confessed that he had been part of a (failed) Jack Ruby-sponsored assassination attempt aimed, not at Kennedy, but […]

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