The CIA and the Culture of Failure

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

John Diamond Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008, h/b. No price is stated but it’s around $30 on-line. In The Guardian on 4 March 2009 William Dalrymple wrote: ‘Eight years of neocon foreign policies have been a spectacular disaster for American interests in the Islamic world, leading to the advance of Hamas and Hezbollah, the … Read more

JFK: The two Oswalds. One Hell of a Gamble

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

JFK: The two Oswalds Anthony Frewin Those of you who missed the two articles by John Armstrong on ‘the two Oswalds’ in recent issues of Probe magazine, don’t despair: Armstrong has rewritten and considerably enlarged them as a two volume DTP work. Armstrong’s finding may be the most significant research breakthrough in years. But we’re … Read more

United States foreign policy

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

Harold Pinter defined American foreign policy thus: ‘Kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in.’ William Blum counts the heads that have been kicked. United States foreign policy   In 1975, there was a committee of the US congress called the Pike Committee, named after its chairman Otis Pike. This committee investigated the covert … Read more

Spinning the Spies: Intelligence, open government and the Hutton Inquiry

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

Anthony Glees and Philip H. J. Davies London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2004, £30, h/b   This is a curious little book (112 pp.) in which two conservative intelligence academics wrestle with the realities of the events leading up to the attack on Iraq. But what manner of beast is a conservative intelligence academic? The … Read more

In Brief. Libya. Syria and the Gulf oil war. Lester Coleman

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

The Libyan connection Putting Libya in the frame has been orchestrated from Langley by Vincent Canestraro, head of the CIA counter-terrorist section. In his book On The Trail of Terror: the inside story of the Lockerbie bombing, published in October 1991, David Leppard tells us this while completing one of the most amazing somersaults in … Read more

A Century of War: Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

William Engdahl London: Pluto, 2004, £15.99, p/b   Google the author and you will find him listed as a senior member of the Lyndon LaRouche org in 1998, European Economic Editor of Executive Intelligence Review.([16]) Although I have been told by his publisher that he is no longer with LaRouche, the book’s first edition was … Read more

Christic’s version of Dealey Plaza

Lobster Issue 15 (1988) £££

The Christic Institute’s allegations that there has been a ‘secret team’ of CIA and ex CIA personnel operating since the early 1960s right through to the present day have had a surprising amount of publicity in Britain considering that this is the kind of conspiracy theorising which is normally anathema to our straight media. It … Read more

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

  Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more

Policing the Future

Lobster Issue 14 (1987) £££

Preface This paper was written for the History Workshop 20 in Leeds, during November 1986. In the workshop which I gave, I introduced the paper by pointing out that the arguments within it were very general and the paper itself entirely polemical. I explained that each of my last three books contain detailed case histories … Read more

The Open Side of Secrecy: Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

Anthony Glees, Philip J. Davies, and John N. L. Morrison London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2006, £20, h/b   The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is a recent addition to the roster of Whitehall bodies; the motives of those who created it, as the authors show, are obscure and its role to some extent remains … Read more

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