The Rise of Political Lying

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] psy-ops people in the state. The intimate relationship between a Peter Mandelson and certain journalists is a facsimile of the relationship that the state’s disinformation people – IRD most notably – had with journalists all the way through the Cold War. Oborne tells us that New Labour’s mendacity amounts to a ‘new epistemology’, a […]

If Truth be Told

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Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

[…] destroy each other) the (deliberate?) failure of the assault on Dieppe, civilian bombing by the RAF and so forth. After WW2 we get the CIA in Europe, IRD, and the Korean war (US biological warfare). From the 1950s we skip to the 1980s and Reagan-era disinformation about the Soviets (shooting the Pope etc); and […]

Don’t Mention The War: Northern Ireland, Propaganda and the Media

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)

David Miller, Pluto Press, London, 1994, £14.95 (paper) 40.00 (cloth) In his introduction Miller thanks his ‘colleagues at the Glasgow University Media Group’, from whence came the pioneering studies of the way the British media handle politically sensitive events, such as Bad News, More Bad News and Really Bad News. That, with the book’s title, […]

Miscellaneous: Cold war. Disinformation. Elite. Unclassified. G.K. Young, Unison

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] phone-calls to major newspapers in Washington and the U.S. from Intelligence sources, including the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy’. The latter is a kind of updated IRD, and ‘public diplomacy’ is a 1980s euphemism for disinformation and psychological warfare. Morgan found that ‘The same story was also being pushed by what the Pentagon […]

Demos

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] Socialism. In 1998 Mandelson eased Matthew Taylor into Holtham’s old IPPR job.(14) Manager of Norwich Union’s £106bn ‘socially responsible investment’ strategy,(15) Holtham took part in the Th ird Way Nexus debate. He advises: ‘accept the inevitability of free market Capitalism and ask whether and how a shrunken state should use its residual powers to […]

Wallace on Pincher on Wallace

Lobster Issue 21 (1991)

[…] the Army and the Information Research Department. During my time at HQ Northern Ireland none of the staff belonged to Defence Intelligence. Pincher’s failure to mention the IRD involvement is very interesting because of the key input the department made to the unit and the fact that its presence there has been widely reported […]

The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence

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Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] There are new accounts here of some of the major landmarks of British post-war decolonisation, Malaya and Cyprus; but, oddly, nothing on Kenya. The two chapters on IRD and the one on the covert support of the post-war European unity movement, contain both succinct and comprehensive syntheses of the extant material and a lot […]

Cold War stories 2

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] Retinger, van Zeeland, Averell Harriman, and Walter Bedell Smith in December 1952. But American interest was slight in the beginning and it was only at the th ird meeting in West Germany, September 1955, that the value of Bilderberg as a private forum for transatlantic exchange began to emerge. The collapse of the European […]

Spooks and the House of Commons

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] then (unpaid) researcher Neil Grant, new (1987) MP Ken Livingstone put down hundreds of written questions in the House of Commons about the war in Northern Ireland, IRD, and the cases of Holroyd and Wallace. In Lobster this was discussed in issue 16. But I also wrote about this in the now defunct magazine […]

The Clandestine Caucus

Lobster Issue Clandestine Caucus (1996)

[PDF file]: […] a more critical view see Peter Weiler, chapter 1. 18 6 loyally to keep an agreement. 19 In 1948, a member of the U.S. State Department, Th ird Secretary at the London Embassy, Herbert E. Weiner, reported from London on ‘Attitude of Trades Union Congress Towards World Federation of Trade Unions and American International […]

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