The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] years or so ago. Viz: There are three items which suggest that Joesten was being run by the KGB. Joesten had been a member of the German Communist Party before the war and had his first book on the assassination published by a small New York outfit, Marzani and Munsell, subsidised by the KGB.15 […]

Newsinger Uproar

Lobster Issue

[…] 2023, £12.99, p/b John Newsinger In 2020 Aaron Leonard published his The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party USA 1939-1956. That outstanding volume chronicled the FBI’s surveillance, harassment and persecution of the likes of Peter Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Agnes ‘Sis’ Cunningham […]

Whole World In An Uproar: Music, Rebellion and Repression 1955-1972

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] 2023, £12.99, p/b John Newsinger In 2020 Aaron Leonard published his The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party USA 1939-1956. That outstanding volume chronicled the FBI’s surveillance, harassment and persecution of the likes of Peter Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Agnes ‘Sis’ Cunningham […]

Lob 82 View from Bits copy

Lobster Issue

[…] a dupe, rather than simple Soviet mischief-making. This disinformation was surfaced in Italy, a country about which the Americans were still paranoid, believing that it might go communist at the drop of a hat and dominate the Mediterranean. So from a Soviet point of view, they got two “hits” for the price of one: […]

Dangerous Hero, and, Boris Johnson

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] revolution was apparently very much on the agenda, way back in the 1960s and 1970s. Then the country was in the grip of ‘industrial anarchy organised by communist conspirators’ (p. xvi). This might seem somewhat perverse as he also considers Britain at this time to have had a ‘socialist economy imposed by Labour governments […]

Using the UK FOIA, part II

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] et de Contre-Espionnage. Following the WUCC meetings Colonel Mercier was posted to Berne, Switzerland, in 1952, under cover as Commercial Attaché. Whilst there, he ran operations against Communist North African Nationalists who were seeking asylum in Switzerland. Mercier collaborated with Swiss Federal Police (contrary to Swiss law). In late March 1957 his contact in […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] Richard Gott’s account (above) of the Guardian’s long-standing proAmerican stance made me wonder, for the umpteenth time, if the Guardian had been part of the NCL (non- communist left) supported/ penetrated/run by the CIA during the Cold War. In its attempt to regulate the entire Western media in those years, the CIA could take […]

Phil Shenon – a cruel and shocking twist

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] for Cuba and that people at this party had in the past talked openly about wanting to see President Kennedy dead.’ Others at the party included the communist writer Emilio Carballido, General 10 Jose de Jesus Clark Flores, who appears elsewhere in the story allegedly giving Oswald money at the Cuban embassy, and ‘two […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] centre of those events was the product of a conspiracy theory, propagated by members of MI5 among others – that there was a serious risk from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to what, for want of a better cliché, we might call the British way of life. The survival of the CPGB […]

Kelly Bond 007 essay

Lobster Issue

[…] Philby became the primary, if not only suspect as the ‘Third Man’. All three had attended Cambridge together in the 1930s, and Burgess and Maclean had expressed communist sympathies in the pre–World War II era, when it was fashionable to be anti-fascist and pro-communist. But being sympathetic with communists fighting fascism was not the […]

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