The writer with no hands by Matthew Alford

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] America is always right, well-intentioned and frequently the victim. That this fantastic lie is in the films owes something (how much isn’t clear) to the Pentagon and CIA liaison operations with the studios. “Wanna borrow a submarine? Talk to the Navy guy.” If Alford isn’t quite describing the corporations and the state running joint […]

Newsinger on Patel

Lobster Issue

[…] blocked the appointment by threatening to resign. As far as he was concerned, Patel was totally unfit and unqualified. Similarly, when Patel was considered for a top CIA job, Gina Haspel, the Director of the Agency, threatened to resign if Trump went ahead. And then once he was appointed to the NSC, Patel had […]

Running Rings

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] activity would be just the kind of thing already privatised on the other side of the pond. Some have gone so far as to suggest the entire CIA should be privatised.4 One of the few books on the subject of privatised intelligence, Tim Shorrock’s 2008 Spies for Hire, made it very clear that the […]

Climbing the Bookshelves

Lobster Issue

Contents Lobster 58 Unless otherwise stated, reviews below are by Robin Ramsay. Books Climbing the Bookshelves Shirley Williams London: Virago, 2009, £20 Tom Easton I learned of this autobiography through catching the husky tones of Baroness Williams reading from its closing chapter on Radio 4. She was warning of the dangers of being ruled by […]

The assassination of Martin Luther King: the paper trail to Memphis

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018)

[PDF file]: The assassination of Martin Luther King: the paper trail to Memphis Garrick Alder It has already been proven in court that the 1968 assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was the result of a conspiracy involving elements of the US Federal Government.1 This essay is not going to re-hash the work that went into […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] op, A Rich Harvest Of Bitter Fruit, by Stephen Long, forthcoming from Icon Books. Long tells us in his introduction that he stumbled across 6,700 pages of CIA files on the op in the US National John Booth, while Labour Party Chief Press Officer, saw him drink an entire bottle of whiskey in an […]

John Stonehouse book reviews

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] nationalism, and was deported. The Czech StB defector, Joseph Frolik (who never met, let alone ‘ran’ Stonehouse) named him as one of the StB’s agents to the CIA in 1969/70 when he defected. Frolik also hinted at Stonehouse – without naming him – later in his book, The Frolik Defection (1975). This material is […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] quietly removed. One reading of this would be as follows: 10 Attlee, too, went full term in 1950, and almost lost. In 1963 the US (specifically the CIA) lost patience with the British old boy network running MI6, following the imprisonment of John Vassall, Philby’s defection and the news that John Profumo MP had, […]

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] by Guerber into running the story? Fourthly, Guerber was a respected journalist with well-placed sources. Andrew Rosthorn informs me that A serious book by Frederic Charpier (La CIA en France – 60 ans d’ingérence dans les affaires françaises, Paris, Seuil, 2008) on sixty years of CIA interference in France . . . cites an […]

TO CATCH A SPY: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold by Tim Tate

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] joining MI5, and thus condemning him to (relative) poverty in old age. As well as believing that Hollis was a Soviet mole, like James Angleton of the CIA, Wright believed that Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent. They believed this because a Soviet defector Golitsyn suggested that he was. There is a puzzle here, […]

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