Cloak and Dollar, and, Know Your Enemy

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

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

Let my people go

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

Extracts from an address by John Allman, Secretary of Christians Against Mental Slavery, to the civil rights rally in Houston, Texas, on 30 July 2004. My name is John Allman. I am honoured to have been invited to come here from England to talk to you about a new danger facing all mankind. A favourite … Read more

Was the Director of Central Intelligence a Soviet agent?

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Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency Richard Helms and William Hood (New York: Random House, 2003) The Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby John Prados Oxford University Press: Cary [North Carolina], 2003 The Man Who Kept the Secrets Thomas Powers (New York: Knopf: 1979) Honorable … Read more

Portrait of a Terrorist State: A Summary of the Ordeal of Political Captives in Turkish Prisons

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

Garbis Altinoglu CL Publications, PO Box 24, Leeds, LS8 1UU ISBN 0-9540410-0-3, £8.25, p/b Online here: http://www.turkishmarxist.dds.nl/english/book/intro.html Though there are some sections in which Turkey’s role vis-à-vis the US and NATO are considered, for the most part this is a detailed account of the Turkish state’s murder and torture of its left and Kurdish opponents. … Read more

From roll back to blowback

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

Blowback: the cost and consequences of American Empire Chalmers Johnson London, Little, Brown and Company, 2000, £18.99 (hb) Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism John Cooley London, Pluto Press, London, 2000, £12.99 (pb) It has recently been revealed that the CIA inadvertently helped to create Soviet chemical and biological weapons by convincing the Soviets … Read more

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££

A Franco-German Bomb? A study by the German historian Werner Abelhauser casts new light on Franco-German efforts to provide the youthful European Economic Community with military capability.(1) The essay is notable because it adds another dimension to our grasp of how and why the EEC was formed. Most modern work follows from the thesis developed … Read more

The view from the bridge. JFK. Waco. Oklahoma. Timor. Moral Rearmament Movement

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

The big switch Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. … Read more

Secrets and Lies

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

Secrets and Lies: A history of CIA mind control and germ warfare Gordon Thomas JR Books (www.jrbooks.com) 2007, h/b, £20   Gordon Thomas has written a number of books on the intelligence services and this has a glossy cover, voluminous appendices and some admiring quotes. But it adds little to what we already know about … Read more

The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2001

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Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b   Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more

Wake Up Down There! The Excluded Middle Collection

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Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001) £££

Ed. Greg Bishop Adventures Unlimited, Kempton, Illinois 60946 $24.99 from Flatland   This has an introduction by Kenn Thomas of Steamshovel and shares much of its subject matter with Thomas’ magazine. That subject matter being UFOs; what I would call consciousness politics – drugs, mysticism, the paranormal, mind control, remote viewing; secrecy and conspiracy theories; … Read more

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