Britain’s Secret Propaganda War

Book cover
Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been … Read more

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

James Jesus Angleton and the ‘Third Way’ The CIA counter-intelligence expert James Angleton has for years been regarded as one of the keenest of cold warriors, who turned the CIA inside out in the search for Soviet ‘moles’ and ultimately had to be retired to prevent further damage to the Agency. But interesting current research … Read more

The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more

Decoding Edward Jay Epstein’s ‘LEGEND’

Lobster Issue 2 (1983) £££

As Steve Dorril shows in his essay on Permindex, the lack of a satisfactory resolution to the assassination of Kennedy allowed Soviet intelligence to use the event to their own ends. The French also had a go with the pseudonymous book Farewell America which made public considerable information about the CIA’s activities while pretending to … Read more

The Rhodes-Milner Group

Lobster Issue 13 (1987) £££

This is an extract from a chapter called ‘Continuities of Empire’ from Pieterse’s forthcoming book Empire and Emancipation to be published by Praeger, New York. If the rest of the book is as good as this is, we are in for a treat. “So marked was the Anglo-American rapprochement that many informed people suspected a … Read more

Crozier country: Free Agent: the unseen war 1941-1991

Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££

Brian Crozier HarperCollins, London, 1993 This is a very interesting book which greatly adds to our knowledge of the clandestine shaping of British politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is also a book which, like Chapman Pincher’s Inside Story, will repay repeated re-reading. But amidst all the new material a surprising amount of these … Read more

No one ever suddenly became depraved

Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

‘Britain, 2005. Saddam Hussein, still the ruler of Iraq and possessor of a long-range nuclear missile, seeks revenge on the west. Warned by intelligence reports of Saddam’s plan, the United States deploys a space-based missile shield, which will catch the Iraqi rocket before it gets to Washington. The key installation is based in Yorkshire — … Read more

More views from the bridge

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

Crime fighting? There must many candidates for the title ‘The most damaging thing I have read about this government’. My current candidate is a piece by Simon Jenkins, ‘A Keep Police off the Streets Strategy Unit’ (The Times 2 February 2002). After reminding the reader that in the UK the police are a local service, … Read more

Weird/not weird

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

Yesterday’s loony tunes become today’s reality. Here are some recent examples. Gulf war syndrome, whose existence has been denied by the Ministry of Defence for over a decade, is now being admitted. As the Telegraph’s version of the story put it: ‘Soldiers sent to the 1991 Gulf war were given a combination of vaccines that … Read more

Accessibility Toolbar