This arrived from David Guyatt, prefaced by the following message: ‘Robin: This is being published on a couple of Internet sites shortly. I’ve given up trying to sell it or get any responsible journo/editor to carry my work forward. They all have chickened out, mostly without an explanation or even a courtesy call/reply. Fuck ’em … Read more
Do they talk like this? At < www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings29.html > there is a very interesting piece by Richard Cummings about the CIA and publishing; agents and operations are named. At the top of the article is this quote. ‘We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose … Read more
A secret service? In the Guardian of 12 June 2000 David Leigh had an important piece on the relationship between our secret servants and the media. At the core of this was his account of the revelation, via a libel suit in London, of an MI6 operation to plant disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph about … Read more
Nicola Calipari’s death If the tragic death of ‘Nicola Calipari’, the international oper-ations chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, in March 2005, was, as has been alleged, a deliberate act rather than misadventure, it is one of the most recent examples of extreme PR ‘message management’ I can think of. ([1]) ‘Public relations’ is about … Read more
In Lobster 14 we printed a piece on the USA’s alleged role in the first Fiji coup, originally published in Wellington Confidential. Since then, due to the ill-health of Wellington Confidential’s editor/publisher, it has been cut back and is now being sent to a very restricted list of people. Fortunately, Lobster is still on its … Read more
Here are a few more web sites that may be of interest. Thanks for contributions to David Guyatt, Terry Hanstock, Daniel Brandt, Chris Atton and Tony Hollick. Further contributions and comments are welcome: my e-mail is Politics and government USA DoE Office of Human Radiation Experiments http://www.ohre.doe.gov/ ‘OHRE, established in March 1994, leads the … Read more
Definitions? Or Whoops! A paradigm An American magazine called Mondo 2000 ran an amusing piece called ‘The Conspiracy Top Ten’. In it ‘Zarkov’ offered this definition: ‘Conspiracies may be better understood as organizations pursuing their own ends, who desire no publicity as to their true objectives and methods.’ Which sounds interesting at first then dissolves … Read more
Dick Russell Carroll and Graf, New York, 1992 This is one of the most interesting JFK assassination books to have emerged from the movie and 30th anniversary tie-in crop. Given the vast amount of attention paid to Gerald Posner’s ‘Oswald did it after all!’ apologia, Case Closed, it is unfortunate that Russell’s book still hasn’t … Read more
Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland ([1]) includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited [by … Read more
This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis’s book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995) reviewed below. In August 1953 a coup overthrew Iran’s nationalist government of Mohammed Musaddiq and installed the Shah in power. The Shah subsequently used widespread repression and torture … Read more
