Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
Introduction Clear cut examples of political murder, or state assassination in the mainland UK have been virtually non-existent. It is that fact which has helped focus so much attention on the deaths of Hilda Murrell and, in Scotland, of Willie McRae. Lobster got into this area relatively early, printing in issue 16 a long report … Read more
The demise of Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London on 1 May was preceded by the publication of the latest account of his political career, Andrew Hosken’s Ken – The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone.(1) Although it contains some new and interesting material (but has no index), it is similar in many ways to … Read more
Why is a Portuguese journalist writing a book about an almost unknown British spy? Recently I had to answer this same question from Igor Prelin, my favourite ex-KGB officer whom I first meet in Cannes, France, during the Television Market Fair of April 1994. After I met Igor Prelin in Cannes, I travelled to Moscow … Read more
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave London: Verso, 2003, h/b, £17 The story in brief: before and during WW2 Japan stripped the countries it occupied of its transportable wealth — gold and other precious metals, diamonds, cash, bonds and so on. As the war turned against them this was buried in various locations, many of … Read more
Kevin Danaher (ed.) Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, U.S., 2001, $15.95 www.commoncouragepress.com This volume contains 27 short essays by everyone from Fidel Castro (rather impressive, if he wrote it himself) through Chomsky, and Naomi Klein to Margot Smith, whose essay is titled ‘Granny Goes to Washington and Goes to Jail’. So: this runs from … Read more
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
Dr Mary’s Monkey Edward T. Haslam Waterville (Oregon): Trineday, 2007 (www.Trineday.com) $19.95 (US), p/b The Kennedy assassination literature has produced some oddities over the years but this takes the biscuit. A sense of this is conveyed by what must be one of the longest subtitles in publishing history: ‘How the unsolved murder of a doctor, … Read more
BROWN, Walt. Referenced Index Guide to the Warren Commission. Wilmington (Delaware): elmax, 1995. 303 pps. An essential work of navigation for anyone sailing the seas of the Report and the Hearings and Exhibits. Supplements rather than replaces the search facilities on the Warren Commission CD-ROMs. COLLOM, Mark, and SAMPLE, Glen. The Men on the Sixth … Read more
