Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more
Peter Dale Scott Talk in Palo Alto, October 27, 2006 If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed to reconcile Dick Cheney’s conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true, of what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White House. But that … Read more
Searchlight again In the Daniel Brandt essay in this issue there is a section on the scandal in the United States resulting from the discovery that the Jewish organisation, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has been found to be collecting data on hundreds of political groups, both right and left, and trading data with agencies of … Read more
Part 1 Issue 24 of the Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1985) is chiefly devoted to recent activities of U.S. government agents and agents provocateurs inside radical and labour organisations: the ‘sanctuary movement’, the Native American movement and one industrial dispute, are analysed as case studies. They are preceded by a long essay, “The New … Read more
Timothy Evans Oxford and Providence (USA): Berghahn Books, 1996, £10, h/b Why review a book published in 1996? Well, I received this recently, assumed it was current and didn’t notice the publication date until I began to write this. In the early 1980s it began to dawn on people on the left of British politics … Read more
U.S. President Bill Clinton has made a number of public references to the impresssion made on him as a young student by Professor Carroll Quigley. (1) As Lobster readers will know, Quigley was the author of Tragedy and Hope (U.S., MacMillan, 1966) in which he described for the first time the role of the Round … Read more
Phone-tapping Phone-tapping of CND (Observer 9 December 1984; Daily Telegraph 10 December.) Telegraph piece includes claim that people phoning CND office have been connected to Ministry of Defence and local police stations. Police Review (15 February 1985) quotes “a source inside British Telecom” on the question of warrants for taps: ‘When it is a police … Read more
From David Hambling On the topic of the People Zapper (Lobster 41 p. 9), the new ‘Active Denial System’ is probably not the first microwave weapon to be deployed. There have been repeated rumours of cruise missiles with HPM (high-powered microwave) warheads being used in former Yugoslavia to knock out communications centres, though apparently the … Read more
Will the Illuminati arrive in black helicopters or Nazi-designed UFO’s? We are currently awash in dotty conspiracy theories. This is an interesting phenomenon even if the content of most of them is almost totally unreliable – at best. Some of this is the spin-off from the Oklahoma bombing and the media’s discovery of the militias. … 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
