9:11 Revealed. Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan London: Robinson, 2005; £8.99, p/b A declaration of a kind of interest: one of the authors of this book, Ian Henshall, is the Chair of INK, the Independent News Collective, to which Lobster belongs and whose leaflets Lobster has … Read more
The European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) has been in the forefront of encouraging further EU integration for over twenty years. However, many Eurorealists appear unaware of the ERT. Intended to increase awareness, this article will merely sketch the ERT and its activities. Making no claims to originality, ([1]) the article briefly examines the ERT’s … Read more
Dr. David Kelly The death of Dr David Kelly refuses to go away. Two groups of medical experts have expressed doubts about the suicide verdict. The International Toxicology Advisory Group have queried the conclusion that Kelly swallowed at least 20 co-proxamol tablets, which contributed to his death; (1) and a group of surgeons wrote to … Read more
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones London: Yale University Press, 2002, £22.50 Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Craddock London: John Murray, 2002, £25 Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book’s subtitle … Read more
This piece by Daniel Brandt began as a short letter commenting on my review of Right Woos Left by Chip Berlet (Lobster 23 p. 34). I wrote back and asked if he would like to expand it. And so he did, writing almost the whole thing at one long sitting. Anyone who joined the U.S. … Read more
One of the aims of this column is to open up new lines of enquiry for parapolitical specialists. It might seem very odd to start with the name of Reinhard Gehlen, long-since dead founder of the BND, the German Security Service. Reinhard Gehlen, to over-simplify a very complex tale, bought his way into the Western … Read more
From Mark Hollingsworth As the journalist, along with Nick Fielding, who first reported David Shayler’s revelations about MI5 in the Mail on Sunday in 1997, I would like to set the record straight on your piece in Lobster 36 (‘Peter’s Friends’?) I have remained close to David Shayler and Annie Machon, his girlfriend and also … Read more
William Blum New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15 www.softskull.com The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum – or me – are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to … Read more
Sallie Pisani, University of Edinburgh Press, 1992 (UK) University Press of Kansas, 1991 (USA) No price stated Pisani lays out her thesis on pp. 7/8. ‘My claim is that the emphasis on paramilitary operations in the literature has led to a distorted picture of covert operations in this seminal period. In fact, a recreation of … Read more
Who was who? The newly published Oxford Dictionary of National Biography not only surveys the lives of the great and the good, but also includes accounts of individuals in the murkier fields of human endeavour. Over fifty spies are listed, for example, including historical figures such as ‘Parliament Joan’ (c1600-1655?) and ‘Pickle the Spy’ (c1725-1761). … Read more
