Malcolm Kennedy believes his telephones, email and post are being interfered with. His attempts to obtain answers have met with brick walls, and his situation has been described as Kafkaesque. Soon his complaint will be one of the first to be heard by the recently established Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Background Last Summer, Lobster drew attention … Read more
One of the aims of this column is to open up new lines of enquiry for parapolitical specialists. It might seem very odd to start with the name of Reinhard Gehlen, long-since dead founder of the BND, the German Security Service. Reinhard Gehlen, to over-simplify a very complex tale, bought his way into the Western … Read more
See also: Part 2 in Lobster 38 ‘In any event, and whatever certain people in a certain department in the CIA may have been after, as far as the work of the Congress was concerned the perceived need to be perpetually “of the Left and on the Left” led sometimes to grotesque intellectual contortions.'(1) The … Read more
CIA: read all about it The most striking intelligence story since the last issue was Tim Spicer’s ‘CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US’.(1) It included this: ‘A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of ten CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the … Read more
This is an extract from a chapter called ‘Continuities of Empire’ from Pieterse’s forthcoming book Empire and Emancipation to be published by Praeger, New York. If the rest of the book is as good as this is, we are in for a treat. “So marked was the Anglo-American rapprochement that many informed people suspected a … Read more
British traditions in decline include a sense of the ridiculous as a weapon of state, jingoism and understatement. The last of these was always a brilliant British con: you only have to look at the gothic majesty of the palace of Westminster (Parliament) to realise we have never really done understatement. ‘A sense of the … Read more
Introduction The British press is pretty feeble, and much of the problem begins with its cosy relationship with the British state. At the heart of that relationship is the ‘lobby system’, that peculiar British institution formed to allow the state and its political mouthpieces to lie to the media off the record. The document reproduced … Read more
Parish Notices Thanks to Robin Whittaker (in particular), Peter Watson, Solomon Hughes, Phil Chamberlain, Terry Hanstock, Jane Affleck, Sukarai Haruhiko, Peter Watson, David Lee, John Burnes and Harry Irwin for information, material and advice. Correction In footnote 1 on page 28 of Lobster 35 I referred to Labour MP Tony Lloyd as a ‘moderniser’. My … Read more
1. Getting closer… Despite the recent publicity about Bill Clinton, the impact made on him by Carroll Quigley, and the Rhodes Scholars’ network (see Lobster 27 p. 19, for examples), the academic world remains almost wholly unaware of Quigley’s work. In their essay ‘The Limits of Influence: foreign policy think tanks in Britain and the … Read more
Srebrenica In Lobster 46 I noted that the publisher of Cees Wiebes’ Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 had declined to supply a review copy. Mr Wiebes subsequently informed me that the full report on Srebrenica, commissioned by the Dutch government, including the material which made up his book, is on-line, in English, at … Read more
