Friends of the British Secret State

Lobster Issue 16 (1988) £££

William Massie With Chapman Pincher retired from the Express group of newspapers, somebody had to take up his position as the spooks’ number one outlet. That person appears to be one William Massie. His name has appeared on some interesting material recently: viz: 14th February 1988, front page story in the Sunday Express based on … Read more

Our Friends in the North West: The Owen Oyston Affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

The Oyston Affair appears to have been the longest and most expensive privately-funded political dirty tricks campaign in recent British history. The astonishing 15-year campaign waged against Owen Oyston by Michael Murrin, the owner of a fish and chip shop in the village of Longridge, Lancs, was backed by help and cash payments raised by … Read more

Kincoragate: parapolitics

Lobster Issue 6 (1984) £££

Parapolitics: “Generally, covert politics, the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision-making but by indirection, collusion and deceit.” – Peter Dale Scott The Watergate tag is appropriate to Kincora because, like that epic affair, an initial minor offence was the key that unlocked many secret doors. As James Angleton noted: “A … Read more

Cold War Stories

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

US deception operation blowback The e-newsletter stuff (1) ran this fascinating piece around 15 March. ‘At the Princeton conference last Saturday, Raymond Garthoff, a distinguished historian now with the Brookings Institute and a former CIA analyst, mentioned that we had recently learned of an FBI-Army double agent operation that may have spurred the Soviets to … 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 Cecil King coup plot

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

The Cecil King coup plot as precursor to Gordon Brown’s ‘government of all the talents’ Students of parapolitics are divided as to the seriousness of the Cecil King coup plot of 1968 to establish what he called a ‘businessman’s government’, a permanent coalition government dominated by the right of the Labour Party but with unelected … Read more

Northern Ireland &; CIA, Nairac & Phone-tapping

Lobster Issue 4 (1984) £££

In this issue, as in No 3, we are recycling a lot of material from Irish newspapers, and one in particular, the Sunday News. One of our Irish readers describes the Sunday News as ‘almost wholly Catholic..Nationalist … moderately Social Democratic Labour Party rather than moderately Republican.’ We have no way of checking the veracity … Read more

Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft: book 1, The Nine

Book cover
Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

Peter Levenda Waterville (Oregon); TrineDay; 2005, h/b, $29.95   This has a foreword by Jim Hougan who describes it as ‘one of the darkest and most provocative books that you are likely to read’. I’m a big fan of Hougan’s but I didn’t get this book. Not that it isn’t an interesting read: it is. … Read more

Books and Pamphlets

Lobster Issue 13 (1987) £££

Counter-insurgency in Rhodesia J. K. Villiers (Croom Helm, London, 1985) An expanded Masters thesis, full of descriptions of psychological operations by the Rhodesian forces (which failed utterly: and no wonder, they were useless), and rather less about pseudo-gang activities which, like their equivalents in the British operations in Kenya, were a success – i.e. they … Read more

Re:

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

Bilderberg Originally given as a paper at the British Association for American Studies 2002 Annual Postgraduate Conference, this draws on newly available archival evidence to document the origins of the Bilderberg Group. It also considers the various conspiracy theories which have attached themselves to the Group. Is it a CIA plot to undermine socialism or … Read more

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