Ken Silverstein Verso, London (£19.00) and New York ($25.00), 2000 Ken Silverstein is co-editor of CounterPunch, a very good radical – left radical – newsletter in Washington (http://www. counterpunch.org/). This book is a group of essays centred round a central theme rather than an attempt to encompass the whole area of the relationship between the … Read more
Barry and the boys The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History Daniel Hopsicker Venice (Florida): The Madcow Press, 2006, $19.95, p/b Barry is Barry Seal and ‘the boys’ are the CIA. There is a decent Wiki entry for Seal which conveys the outlines of his extraordinary life as a pilot, large-scale drug smuggler and, … Read more
This essay has been written using recently declassified records on Project Pandora released on 19 December 1994 to the author after a Freedom of Information Act appeal filed three years ago. The aim of Project Pandora was to study the microwave frequencies targeted on the US Embassy in Moscow by the Soviets during the 1960s … Read more
Kenneth De Courcy Kenneth de Courcy buffs will be pleased to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess … Read more
Hollis again What with the opening of the KGB archives and the testimony of Oleg Gordievsky, you might be forgiven for thinking that the question, Was MI5 Director-General Roger Hollis a Soviet spy? had been answered conclusively and resoundingly ‘No’. You would be wrong – or so says the doyen of British espionage writers, Chapman … Read more
Welcome to Lobster, the journal that looks at the impact of the intelligence and security services on history and politics. From espionage to dirty tricks to conspiracy theories. What else is in Lobster? Check out the keywords in the box in the sidebar, right. Lobster issues 58 and onwards are free. Earlier issues of Lobster … Read more
The attack on the USS Liberty The short piece in Lobster 45 on the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was curiously timely. Soon after it appeared Captain Ward Boston, senior legal counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the incident broke his silence and stated, inter alia: ‘There is no question in … Read more
The drip feed of information on the attempted assassination of President Nasser continues. In a recent episode of the Channel 4 TV series ‘The End of Empire’, Sir Anthony Nutting, former Minister of State at the Foreign Office, who later resigned over Suez, recalled that he had been “horrified” to receive a telephone call from … Read more
It now looks pretty certain to me that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a local Texas conspiracy on behalf of, and with the knowledge of, the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Most of the extant evidence for this can be seen on the web site ‘The Men on the Sixth Floor'(1) which advertises the … 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
