Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££
Official openings We don’t have a Freedom of Information Act, and are not likely to get one from any of the British political parties. Imagine a conversation in the office of the new Labour Prime Minister in a year or three: ‘FOI? Too much trouble, too much aggro with Whitehall. As if we need any … Read more
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££
[…] upon any sensitive operational techniques of the security and intelligence services, and in particular upon their sources of information, including the identity of any officer, contact or agent.’ After the House of Lords ruling (see below), Liberty is taking the issue of whether the Official Secrets Act 1989 is compatible with the ECHR to […]
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££
In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more
Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££
[…] brother who had heard that his sister was the subject of police enquiries concerning a crashed BMW car which belonged to the wife of a fugitive ex-CIA agent. (This came about when Marie McCarthy and Gerrit used Marilyn Terpil’s car to visit McCarthy’s family in Cappoquin, County Waterford, in January 1983.) Magill claims that […]
Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££
As Scott Van Wynsberghe has ‘outed’ himself as a transvestite let me ‘come out’ of the intellectual closet and admit that, like Sylvia Meagher, I also have some UFO books on my shelves. Over the last 20 years or so I also have acquired some books on ‘earth mysteries’ (though I never found a ley … Read more
Lobster Issue 15 (1988) £££
[…] staff we would be interested to hear from you. * * * In his Tribune attack on me (item 10 above) Ware says I called him an agent of the state in a letter sent to The Listener. Actually I didn’t, and have no reason to think this. Ware’s behaviour can be explained quite […]
Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££
[…] battalion was at the center of massacre and torture operations in the 1960s as in the 1990s. Its chief then, Sarwo Edhie, has been called a CIA agent or contact. It was he who, while giving orders in Indonesia for the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party, used the American Army word, ‘psywar.’ ‘The […]
Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££
James Adams Hutchinson, London, 1994. I first noticed James Adams when he began running some of the MOD’s disinformation lines about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd in 19867. For a while I collected articles by him which seemed to show the traces of Whitehall briefings. Then I stopped: what was I going to do with […]
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££
Larry Tye New York: Owl Books, 2002, pb $16.00 ISBN 0 8050 6789 2 If Edward Bernays hadn’t existed, Edward Bernays would have invented him. And in fact this is more or less what happened. This is the long-awaited paperback edition of the first full-length biography of Bernays, who, like President Harry Truman, added … Read more
Lobster Issue 8 (1985) £££
[…] can be judged from John Buchan’s famous novel The Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1920. In the first chapter, set in early 1914, Colonel Scudder, the secret agent, explains that behind every major company in Europe is “a Jew in a wheelchair with eyes like a rattlesnake”, and that the cause of the coming […]