Barry Davies Bloomsbury, 1994, £14.99 The Lufthansa jet hi-jack and associated events of October 1977, of which this book purports to provide a first-hand account, have always worn a fulsome, fearful beard. This book leaves those events far from clean-shaven. What would help clear away quite a lot of the hair would be access to … Read more
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America James Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale University Press, London and Yale, 1999, £19.95 The Haunted Wood: Soviet espionage in America – the Stalin era Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev Random House, New York, 1999, $30.00 So now we know: most of what the Republican right in the US, … Read more
As a number of people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons. No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What … Read more
Mandy, The Independent and Europe As pictures of H’Angus the Monkey, the new elected mayor of Hartlepool, filled the news pages, it emerged more quietly that the other public face of that poor North-East town, Peter Mandelson, had joined the international advisory board of News and Media, the owners of The Independent and The Independent … Read more
The Dirty War Martin Dillon, Hutchinson, London, 1990. The SAS in Ireland Raymond Murray, Mercier Press, Cork and Dublin, 1991 Martin Dillon is a freelance journalist in Northern Ireland with a long career behind him: editor and radio presenter for the BBC in Northern Ireland, co-author of the Penguin Special, Political Murder In Northern Ireland … Read more
How public relations became the cutting edge of corporate power David Miller and William Dinan London: Pluto, 2008; £45 h/b and £14.99 p/b This is big stuff, ambitious and wide-ranging with an enormous amount packed into 180 pages of text (with 50 pages of notes, tables and index). Many books are too long: this is … Read more
This is the press release issued to the media with Lobster 11. (April 1986) Embargoed until 3pm, April 30th Something very strange happened in British politics almost a decade ago. A Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and the journalist with the closest links to the British intelligence services, Chapman Pincher, both said that elements of MI5 … Read more
Corinne Souza Edinburgh/London: Mainstream, 2003, £15.99, h/b This is an important and interesting book but rather hard to describe because it contains so much. At its heart is Souza’s father, an Iraqi Anglophile, who became SIS’s agent in Iraq, and later in London. Using her firsthand knowledge supplemented by her father’s papers, Souza has … Read more
Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press, PO Box 5, Alamo, CA 94507, USA $28 plus $4 shipping in the US. Outside the US inquire first at 1-800-247-7389 (phone) 925- 295-1203 (fax) This is the successor to Stich’s Defrauding America, reviewed in Lobster 34. As with the earlier work, it is impossible to verify and difficult … Read more
Pieces without an author’s name are by the editor Parish Notices For information thanks to Jane Affleck and Robert Henderson, in particular. I wasn’t going to add my 5p’s worth to the ‘Good-bye Tony’ feature in this issue. But since Our Great Leader announced he was slipping his moorings and was pushing off into a … Read more
