Definitions? Or Whoops! A paradigm An American magazine called Mondo 2000 ran an amusing piece called ‘The Conspiracy Top Ten’. In it ‘Zarkov’ offered this definition: ‘Conspiracies may be better understood as organizations pursuing their own ends, who desire no publicity as to their true objectives and methods.’ Which sounds interesting at first then dissolves … Read more
Why is a Portuguese journalist writing a book about an almost unknown British spy? Recently I had to answer this same question from Igor Prelin, my favourite ex-KGB officer whom I first meet in Cannes, France, during the Television Market Fair of April 1994. After I met Igor Prelin in Cannes, I travelled to Moscow … Read more
Colin Challen Vision Paperbacks, London, 1998, £7.99 It says something about this society of ours – and about the academics who make a living teaching what they call ‘politics’ – that this is the first book about the funding of the political party which has been in power for most of this century; and it … Read more
The conspiracy trail is littered with unresolved leads, but few can be more important than Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico shortly before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What was the purpose of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City? Was it Oswald or an impostor who visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies? And what … Read more
The Information Research Department Andrew Defty Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2004, £23.99, p/b Thinking about this book, I wondered why people like me have been so interested in IRD for the last 30 years. There are two reasons, I think. The first is that way back in the 1970s, when information about the British … Read more
Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more
In mid-November 1993, after six years of research, 42-year old Eileen Welsome produced a gripping series of articles examining the life and death of five people — a railroad porter, a house painter, a carpenter, a politician and a homemaker — used as human guinea pigs by the US Department of Energy. Appearing in the … Read more
Democracy building or democracy assistance, is a putative socio-economic policy solution, which, because of the extent of the political and economic forces impacting on it, has become a contemporary socio-economic problem. Democracy building’s institutional formation rests upon a reconfiguration of Cold War positions that retain, what Dr. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky termed ‘such interference,’(1)so as to continue … Read more
From: M. R. D. Foot Scott Newton’s footnote at the end of his piece on Hess, in your number tries to keep alive Dr Hugh Thomas’s tale that the pilot who reached Scotland could not have been Hess, because he bore no trace of the gunshot wound the real Hess had received in Roumania in … Read more
I invited David Turner to begin writing a regular column for Lobster. He agreed then rang to tell me his computer had been attacked by a virus and could not meet my deadline. (He is the second contributor to this issue to have been virused recently.) But I had on file this splendid polemic written … Read more
