Britannia’s Burden: the Political Evolution of Modern Britain 1951-1990 Bernard Porter Edward Arnold, London, 1994. Bernard Porter’s latest is a Marxist text-book. However it is Marxism with a difference. There is no happy ending nor even the promise of one. The argument is serious and absorbing. It does not observe the normal conventions of blandness … Read more
Robert Parry Arlington (VA): The Media Consortium, 2004; $22.95 (US); p/b Order from <www.secrecyandprivilege.com> This is the book I have enjoyed most since the last Lobster and it is one of the best books I have read on American politics and parapolitics. Robert Parry really is very good indeed: he has the serious investigative … Read more
Rob Evans, Nicola Butler, Eddie Goncalves Student CND, London 1991, £3.00 The contents list is reproduced here. This is not my field but Rob Evans of the Campaign Against Military Research on Campus (CAMROC) now has quite a track record in this area. This is available at £3.00 from Student CND, 162 Holloway Road, London … Read more
See note(1) By some standards, the loss of 269 souls aboard Korean Air Lines flight 007 on August 31, 1983, was a modest disaster. The Titanic, for example, claimed 1503 lives; the Lusitania 1198. But historians may come to believe that the political implications of the downing of the civilian 747 airliner by a Soviet … Read more
Here are two articles about the ongoing harassment of individuals by unidentified forces within the state. Malcolm Kennedy (see Lobsters 39 and 41 and 43) is being harassed by having his attempts to create a business sabotaged because some policemen are afraid of what he experienced. In another society he would be killed or disappear. … Read more
The 14th May 1988 issue of Middle East International carries an interesting article on the rise (but not yet fall) of a former high-ranking MOSSAD officer who, like Edwin Wilson, has turned his previous clandestine experience into profit through shady arms dealing. Mike Harari, leader of MOSSAD’s Munich revenge hit-squad exposed in 1973 after the … Read more
Extracts from what are claimed to be CIA analyses of Israeli intelligence services found when the US embassy in Iran was taken have been published in Imam, October 1983 through to May 1984. 17 pages in all. To this untrained eye they look genuine; ie dull enough to be genuine. There is nothing that strikes … Read more
A history of ASIO and National Surveillance Frank Cain Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, p/b, $39.95. ISBN 978 1 921509 322 Frank Cain was just a name to me but a little googling showed that he is Australia’s leading academic historian of intelligence and security history. This history of ASIO and its antecedents – more … Read more
Extracts from the memoirs of the late General Fardust on the Iranian Pahlavi dynasty, published in 1978. Translated from the Farsi and introduced by Armen Victorian. Hossein Fardust was perhaps the closest person to the late Shah of Iran, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. They went to school together and Fardust became the Shah’s closest friend — … Read more
The publication of Frank Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations in 1971 created a storm on the left.(1) An influential British army officer with considerable experience of colonial warfare was advocating that the army prepare for counterinsurgency operations at home. As far as Kitson was concerned there was a serious danger of revolutionary disturbance in Britain in … Read more
