Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the … Read more
More, please In an account of his career as a writer of spy fiction (Guardian 16 November ’89) John Le Carré referred to the hostile reaction received by his (unnamed) second book, presumably The Looking Glass War: ‘Critics and public alike rejected the novel, but this time the spies were cross. And since the British … Read more
Alien Liaison Timothy Good Century, London, 1991 Please note: all the telephone conversations referred to by the author in this essay have been tape-recorded. Published in May 1991, the thesis in Good’s book is (a) that alien space craft have landed and/or crashed on earth; and (b) that the U.S. government is concealing this fact … Read more
Articles of note ‘Opium, tungsten, and the Search for National Security, 1940-52’, by Jonathan Marshall, in Journal of Policy History, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1991. (Published at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.) Marshall is the former producer of the wonderful Parapolitics USA, and, most recently that I have seen, co-author with Peter … 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
As I write this in late May 1998, the world is watching two Indonesian traditions, locked in a dramatic struggle to determine that country’s future. One, representing one of the world’s most tolerant Muslim cultures, seeks a non-violent return towards the democratic civil society that prevailed in the early 1950s. The other apparently hopes to … Read more
Donald Allen During 1987, when some of the London media were pursuing the ‘Wilson plots’ story, Colin Wallace, the only public source on the story at the time, was working with a Channel 4 journalist called Robert Parker. At one point disinformation about Wallace was being fed to Parker, through another journalist, from a former … Read more
A spook, moi? One of the formative experiences of my youth – and we’re talking early 1960s here, beatnik days, when wearing a narrow leather tie was pretty hip – was going to the Mound in Edinburgh on Sunday nights. The Mound is like Hyde Park Corner in London, a place where local by-laws allow … Read more
How MI6 and the CIA were involved in the death of Princess Diana Jon King and John Beveridge New York: SPI Books, 2002, £18.95 In the five years since the Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and Henri Paul, interest in Diana herself may have waned, (1) but the circumstances surrounding her … Read more
Parish Notices Thanks to Al Baron, Terry Hanstock, Daniel Brandt, Jane Affleck, Robin Whittaker (in particular), Tom Easton and Dr. David Turner for information since the last Lobster. An apology to David Guyatt not publishing his long and interesting reply to the criticism in ‘Feedback’ of his article on alleged US use of chemical weapons … Read more
