Disclosure and deceit: Secrecy as the manipulation of history, not its concealment

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] seen as either a challenge or a prerequisite for obtaining accurate data on the history of political and economic events. Yet at the same time high government intelligence officials have said that their policy is one of ‘plausible deniability’. Official US government policy for example is never to acknowledge or deny the presence of […]

Is a new ‘cold war’ coming?

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] love and peace Instrumental in the creation of a permanent war system – true to Orwell’s predictions, always called ‘peace’ – was the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although officially the purpose of the CIA was to coordinate all the national intelligence activities for the executive branch of the US regime, this begs […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Horse Guards Road , you’re likely to find that everyone but you is an investment banker!’ 3 Fixing facts, faking history I think that the phrase ‘the intelligence and the facts were being fixed round the policy’, which was in the 2002 memo from Matthew Rycroft to a section of those managing the UK’s […]

Misc reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] is still possible to navigate through this foggy, booby-trapped interior landscape; but he also shows how difficult the journey becomes once the mob begins to gather. * Intelligence Wars American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda Thomas Powers New York Review Books, 2002, £16.99, h/b S omewhere between an academic and a journalist, Thomas […]

View from Lob 73

Lobster Issue

[…] this current issue. Much of this was interesting to me. For one thing, NFB has continued doing what Lobster used to do: surveying published material on the intelligence and security services and producing synopses of it. There is a long essay about Lockerbie; and, while I am no expert on this subject, I didn’t […]

German links to the Hammarskjöld case

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018)

[PDF file]: […] only here, at least one night-time attack is reported.24 Fourthly, on the night of the attack, radio signals of the attacking plane were received by a British intelligence radio station in Cyprus.25 To reach this station, radio signals from Ndola had to cover 5,300 km. Only High-Frequency (HF) radio signals can cover such a […]

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] case with press releases and presentations (including one by the US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council) using collections of classified documents and intelligence assessments. The problem was that Iraq did not have any WMD. UN weapons inspectors did not find any before or after the 2003 war. US and […]

View from the Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] election.23 ‘Deep State coup’ theorists had been disputing the Russian hacking allegations since 2016, deploying two main lines of attack. The first was to reject the US intelligence community’s claims on the grounds they had a history of lying and they had failed to provide any evidence. The second line of attack was to […]

Divine Rascal: On the Trail of LSD’s Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead by Andy Roberts

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] now tarnished and forgotten. Occasionally there are allusions to a parallel narrative in the background. As early as page 14 the author states ‘. . . secret intelligence services, initially in America and Britain and latterly in former Iron Curtain countries, may have played a subtle but carefully-planned role in LSD’s discovery and penetration […]

The British Gladio and the murder of Sergeant Speed

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] Contingencies Unit the year before at Windscale; the ‘stay behind’ aspect was essentially a cover story. The context The mid-1970s was a turbulent period for the Anglo-American intelligence and security services. In the United States, in the wake of Watergate the CIA was under scrutiny by Congress and journalists as never before. CIA officers, […]

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