Suffer the innocents? The Stevens inquiry into Britain’s state assassination policy in Northern Ireland in the 1980s began in September 1989. The police officers who signed up for it didn’t think it would take long to do. ‘We thought it was going to be a fairly routine investigation. We didn’t expect to find that there … Read more
Radio Enoch: the station you love to hate Radio Enoch (see Lobster 46) was one of a number of Free Radio stations operating illegally during the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike its more pop music oriented contemporaries, however, Radio Enoch’s output consisted solely of right wing political propaganda, albeit with a musical background. (1) Its origins … Read more
Two major American parapolitics journals closed at the beginning of this year. Both were primarily dedicated to the JFK assassination, though Probe also covered the King family’s landmark case and its successful outcome — establishing that Dr Martin Luther King was killed, not by a lone assassin, but by a conspiracy. This story was largely … Read more
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
Some reflections on the life, times and politics of Sir James Goldsmith The Clermont Set The Clermont Club was opened in 1962 by John Aspinall after the gaming laws had been liberalised by the MacMillan government.(1)During the 1950s Aspinall built up a personal fortune providing premises for exclusive gambling sessions in London, much of which … Read more
On 8 July the Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, announced that the Libyan Government accepted ‘general responsibility’ for the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and normal diplomatic relations with Libya were being restored. The media reporting of this accepted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spin that it meant the Libyans have admitted killing Fletcher. The … Read more
Introduction The ‘Gable memo’ reproduced below originally appeared as the subject matter of a long and extremely interesting article, ‘Destabilising the “decent people”‘ by Nick Anning, Duncan Campbell and Bruce Page in the New Statesman on February 15, 1980. This is still worth digging out, particularly for its detailed account of the context in which … Read more
Morris Riley, writer on espionage and occasional Lobster contributor, died around 16 June 2001. I never entirely trusted Morris: he gossiped to me about things he should have kept to himself and for the most part I blanked his questions about Lobster and the people I was talking to. Under a pseudonym Morris wrote a … Read more
Philip Agee died in January this year. Reading the obituaries I came across the allegations that he had gone to the KGB with his information about the CIA, something he had always denied. There is this section from the memoir of senior KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence … Read more
Peter Taylor has made more TV programmes about Northern Ireland since 1969 than other any British journalist. His most recent was the documentary, Loyalists, earlier this year, a series of interviews with Loyalist paramilitaries and politicians. This was followed by a book, Loyalists (Bloomsbury, 1999), which contained some of the interviews in that programme. Like … Read more
