Was the Director of Central Intelligence a Soviet agent?

Book cover
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

Kitson revisited

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

The publication of Frank Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations in 1971 created a storm on the left.(1) An influential British army officer with considerable experience of colonial warfare was advocating that the army prepare for counterinsurgency operations at home. As far as Kitson was concerned there was a serious danger of revolutionary disturbance in Britain in … Read more

Kennedy assassination miscellany: Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

The Shadow Warriors Bradley F. Smith (Andre Deutsch, London 1983) The network of close personal connections established in O.S.S. (the fore-runner of the CIA) “helped bridge some of the widest gaps in American society and could be called upon in cases of need long after the war ended. For example, when in 1964 former British … Read more

The biggest of big lies?

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

The Dismantling of Yugoslavia Edward S. Herman and David Peterson Vol. 59, No 5 of Monthly Review (online) Price stated as $5.00, €3.00, £3.00; but e-mail <> to check postage costs. In almost every conflict since WW2 in which the Americans have taken part they have been on the side of exploitation, oppression, torture, and … Read more

Persian Drugs: Oliver North, the DEA and Covert Operations in the Mideast

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££

[…] State Department and NSC consultant who initiated the arms-for-hostages talks, fleshed out the alleged connection. “Drugs go to the bourgeois countries where they corrupt and where they kill, while the arms go to pro-Communist terror groups in the Third World.’ The DEA’s own deputy administrator, David Westrate, framed the ideological rationale for expanding his […]

Agreement! The State, Conflict and Change in Northern Ireland

Book cover
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

Beatrix Campbell London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2008, p/b, £14.99   ‘The rule of law is the cornerstone of democracy,’ a High Court judge said in February in relation to the case of alleged torture of a British resident held in Guantamo Bay. This book is solely about Northern Ireland’s recent history and it shows how … Read more

Where’s Ware?

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££

Where’s Ware? John Ware is one of the leading British TV journalists of our age. He has worked for World in Action and Panorama and is held in very high regard by his colleagues. Having produced a number of documentaries on the war in Northern Ireland he is now seen as an expert on the … Read more

Digging in the Oyston archive

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

Tons of documents and tape recordings recovered from an old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines … Read more

How to Fix an Election

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] vote for you in this age of instant phone-ins and under the watchful eye of the US media. So what you can do, instead, is effectively ‘ kill’ people who will vote for the other side, and then shrug your shoulders about it. No-one is hurt, no votes have been fraudulently cast, nothing to […]

Fifth Column: The decadence of our political system

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

One of the benefits of living in the West is the freedom to criticize our politicians. The fact that the electoral system rarely reflects considered criticism is not the point. We have always known that it is centred on political parties that are run by small groups more intent on newspaper opinion, and on that … Read more

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