On 8 March 1985 an attempt was made to assassinate one of the founders of Hizbullah, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, by car bomb in Beirut. The attack failed in its objective, but there was some ‘collateral damage’. While Fadlallah was untouched, some eighty bystanders, men, women and children, were killed and over two hundred injured. … Read more
The view from the bridge Bilderberg and the EU The Diaries of former Liberal-Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, (volume one 1988-1997, London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2000) is a pretty uninteresting read with a couple of striking sections. Pages 42-46 contain his account of attending a Bilderberg meeting – by far the longest and most detailed account … Read more
MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called ‘myths and misunderstandings’, which features, among other things, ‘the Wilson Plot’. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright’s allegation that ‘up to 30 members of the Service had plotted to … Read more
There is one book not reviewed here that should have been. The reason is it wasn’t written and, indeed, it cannot now be. I am referring to Evelyn Lincoln’s autobiography. JFK’s executive secretary passed away on 4 May 1995 in Washington and with her have gone all of the secrets she shared with JFK. She … Read more
A secret service? In the Guardian of 12 June 2000 David Leigh had an important piece on the relationship between our secret servants and the media. At the core of this was his account of the revelation, via a libel suit in London, of an MI6 operation to plant disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph about … Read more
The story of the Ulster Citizens’ Army (UCA for the rest of this essay) is a tiny fragment in the intricate history of Protestant politics in Northern Ireland in the mid 1970s – so tiny that none of the general accounts I have looked at even mention it. But the UCA lingers on: it is … Read more
Introduction This, as some of Lobster‘s older readers will recognise, is a re-write of the essay I wrote on the JFK thing in Lobster 2, published on the 20th anniversary of the assassination in November 1983. This rewrite was written for the first issue of Casablanca, but it failed to appear. In JFK the Costner/Garrison … Read more
See note 1. Introduction We were as surprised as anybody at the furore over Oliver Stone’s movie. When we published the Dean Andrews material and the analysis of the Clay Shaw U.K. contacts in Lobster 20, in November 1990, we did so in the certain knowledge that hardly anybody was still interested in the JFK … Read more
Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism 1945-1948 David Cesarani London: William Heinemann, 2009, h/b, £20 On 6 May 1947 a British undercover squad, under the command of Major Roy Farran, picked up sixteen-year-old Alexander Rubowitz, a young Zionist activist. He was taken away for ‘interrogation’. After an hour of … Read more
Israel, the Jews, and the West: The Fall and Rise of Antisemitism William D Rubinstein London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2008, £10.00 The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from its Ashes Avraham Burg New York: Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99 A Time To Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity Edited by … Read more
