The CIA and the Culture of Failure

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

John Diamond Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008, h/b. No price is stated but it’s around $30 on-line. In The Guardian on 4 March 2009 William Dalrymple wrote: ‘Eight years of neocon foreign policies have been a spectacular disaster for American interests in the Islamic world, leading to the advance of Hamas and Hezbollah, the … Read more

Conservative Radicalism: a Sociology of Conservative Party Youth Structures and Libertarianism 1970-1992

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] Soviet Union as ‘the evil empire’. They thus became useful, minor foreign policy propaganda assets for the Reagan administration. Supporting any movement which was perceived as anti-socialist/ communist, the FCS became cheerleaders for whichever bunch of murderous thugs happened to be getting support from Washington: Renamo and the Contras come to mind. About Mozambique […]

Wallace: Information Policy in fiction

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] veteran Belfast reporters, which had omitted to inform his London colleague that McDowell’s imagination had already reinforced the Provisional IRA with cadres of Vietcong, Czechoslovakians, Lithuanians and Communist Frenchmen.’ Dowling understood, had correctly ‘read’ some of the Information Policy operations. Other ‘Irish hands’ certainly knew of the unit. Why have none of them come […]

Our Searchlight problem

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

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

The Crux of the Matter

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] of the “Partnership for Peace Program”, which was established by NATO to strengthen ties with former Eastern Bloc and former Soviet states.‘ The courtship between the ‘ communist’ Shevardnadse and the capitalist James Baker from the days when the former was Foreign Minister and the latter Secretary of State would now end in wedlock. […]

Death of the Strong Man

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] links to Nicaraguan Contra propaganda groups and right-wing organisations such as IGFM (right-wing rival to Amnesty International) and the Internationale des Widerstands (Resistance International), bringing together anti- communist ‘freedom fighters’. Following Swarup’s return from Geneva, the defence in the Gandhi assassination trial abruptly changed strategy and tried to depoliticize the case by passing the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

[…] the various forgeries which were going around: Ted Short’s phoney bank account and all the forged leaflets and letters trying to link Wilson and others to the Communist Party and the IRA. And here is the core of my complaint: it wasn’t just a plot against Wilson; it was a plot against the Labour […]

Where’s Ware?

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] full access to its material, little of this was broadcast. Instead we get a lot of huffing and puffing about ‘Trotskyists’. This came, though, from an elderly Communist Party member, rather than anyone in mainstream politics. Ware says, ‘…. ten years ago, black parents warned that schools were failing their children….’ (i.e. in 1977 […]

The 1953 Coup in Iran: an Iranian insider’s view

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] in Rome and arranged the trip back to Teheran. It was us who encouraged the Americans to go ahead with the coup. If we had delayed, a communist coup would have stolen the show. Therefore, in order to rescue Iran from the grip of communism we decided that Musadegh had to go and the […]

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