Part 1 Issue 24 of the Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1985) is chiefly devoted to recent activities of U.S. government agents and agents provocateurs inside radical and labour organisations: the ‘sanctuary movement’, the Native American movement and one industrial dispute, are analysed as case studies. They are preceded by a long essay, “The New … Read more
Books High Times: the life and times of Howard Marks David Leigh (London 1984) Howard Marks was – who knows? maybe still is – a major British dope dealer who got famous, not for importing huge quantities of dope (15 tons of grass in one venture) but because he became embroiled with MI6. Having said … Read more
Colin Wallace On the Colin Wallace front, the big event since issue 17 has been Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989). With this book Paul Foot has re-researched and synthesised all the previous work and produced what is likely to remain the definitive account of Wallace’s biography, his allegations and – most … Read more
Olivier Schmidt Atlanta (USA): Clarity Press, 2005, $14.95, p/b www.bookmasters.com/clarity/currenttitles.htm Here’s a new name to me, the publisher Clarity; and a familiar one, Olivier Schmidt. In the 1980s Schmidt was producing a very good newsletter in Paris, Intelligence and Parapolitics. This got expensive, professionalised and eventually went on-line for subscribers as Intelligence.(1) This is … Read more
Books The Flight of KAL 007: evidence of conspiracy R. B. Cutler Cutler is the editor/producer of the Grassy Knoll Gazette, one of the JFK assassination journals. Over the years he has produced a great many books/pamphlets on the case. This is a 40 page pamphlet full of Cutler’s beautiful drawings and maps which argues … Read more
In this article I amplify and update my account of the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul which appeared in Lobster 37. Since it was written there have been a number of interesting developments – the publication of Trevor Rees-Jones’ book; James Hewitt’s impromptu recreation of the fatal car … Read more
A stranger harvest The best single volume on the alien abduction connundrum I have come across is C.D. B. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995). In it Linda Moulton Howe, the American film-maker who made A Strange Harvest about the ‘cattle mutilation’ phenomenon in the United States, describes to … Read more
Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the … Read more
As I write this in late May 1998, the world is watching two Indonesian traditions, locked in a dramatic struggle to determine that country’s future. One, representing one of the world’s most tolerant Muslim cultures, seeks a non-violent return towards the democratic civil society that prevailed in the early 1950s. The other apparently hopes to … Read more
The discussion of conspiracy in the mainstream media tends towards a very specific formula. The writer first notes with shock and disappointment the growing popularity of conspiracy theories and then goes on to provide explanations for this new popularity. This explanation almost always assumes that these theories about the ‘true’ nature of social reality exist … Read more
