Defector Politics: or, grooving with Mr G. The six months since the last Lobster have been the most interesting period in defector politics – the attempted political exploitation a Soviet defector – that I can remember. Oleg Gordievsky has really been having himself a time and putting himself about! Even I have a Gordievsky anecdote. … Read more
The Spycatcher’s Encyclopedia of Espionage Peter Wright Heinemann, Australia, 1991 The cover-blurb says this is ‘the rest of the story’. It feels more like the out-takes from Spycatcher spiced with a few more fragments of interesting gossip. And I do mean fragments: the interesting bits of 260 pages — largish print and much white space … Read more
The conspiracy trail is littered with unresolved leads, but few can be more important than Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico shortly before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What was the purpose of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City? Was it Oswald or an impostor who visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies? And what … Read more
Introduction In 1967 the CIA sent out to ‘Chiefs, Certain Stations and bases’ a briefing document, Dispatch Document 1035- 960, titled ‘Countering Criticism of the Warren Report’. This unintentionally very revealing and faintly comic document was reproduced in issue 2 of the now defunct newsletter, The Dorff Report in March 1990. In view of the … Read more
Peddlars Of Crisis Jerry W. Sanders (Pluto, London 1983) With this book research into clandestinism and Cold War revisionism take another big step towards meeting. It is the story of the Committee on the Present Danger, the Cold War think-tank that prepared the way for the election of Reagan and provided the administration with Jeanne … Read more
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Stephen Marshall (Guerilla News Network, $13.22. Available from <> and <amazon.co.uk>) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein, (London: Allen Lane, £25.00) ‘When new (forms of capitalism) emerged in the past …they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production … Read more
Let’s start with the easiest question: what do George Robertson, Chris Smith and Marjorie ‘Mo’ Mowlam have in common? They are, of course, all strong Tony Blair supporters in the new Labour Cabinet. And what about Peter Mandelson and Elizabeth Symons? Not yet quite Cabinet members, but both are key figures in the ‘modernising project’ … Read more
PART 1 See also Part 2 in Lobster 6 Most Western political scientists, following in the traditions of Marx or Weber, scorn the study of secret and occult societies as irrelevant to understanding the politics of the age. In their view, politics can best be understood as the working out, in public arenas, of bureaucratic, … Read more
Unfree press A recent release of previously undisclosed documents reveals that J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to carry out the illegal surveillance of newspaper labour activists during the 1940s. Also revealed is the fact that informants included journalists who wanted Communists removing from the leadership of the Newspaper Guild.(1) Only following orders Psychologist Stanley … Read more
In footnote 6 in his essay on the Bilderberg group in Lobster 32, Mike Peters noted that the US Left had lost interest in the study of the power elite because the subject had become ‘contaminated’ by the interest in it taken by the US Right.(1) I had never thought of it as that, but … Read more
