How many divisions does the Pope have?

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina Uki Goni London: Granta Books, 2002, £20 If there was a category of work called Detective History, Uki Goni really ought to be awarded Book of the Year. Undeterred by the shredding and incineration of key documents, rebuffs from the supporters of Peron … Read more

Brainwash: The secret history of mind control

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

Dominic Streatfeild London: Hodder and Stoughton 2006, £20, h/b   One of the gaps in the parapolitical library has been a great pull-together of the material on ‘mind control’. And Streatfield has done it, and done it rather well. He is a documentary film-maker and some of the chapters here read rather like scripts. All … Read more

The Iron Triangle: inside the secret world of the Carlyle Group

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Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

Dan Briody Hoboken (USA): John Wiley and Sons, 2003, £17.50 (hb)   According to the Carlyle Group, once you ‘peel away the layers of factual errors and self-righteousness of The Iron Triangle, ‘… all you’re left with is baseless innuendo… [and]… this book should be exposed for what it is: a compilation of recycled conspiracy … Read more

Brian Crozier, the Pinay Circle and James Goldsmith

Lobster Issue 17 (1988) £££

In Lobster 11 we included a little appendix on ‘the Pinay Circle’. Lobster 11 was done at full-tilt, researched, written and produced in about 4 months, and there were a number of bits and pieces we didn’t evaluate which went undigested into the appendices. One was this Pinay Circle. At the time all we had … Read more

Everything You Know is Wrong: the Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

Russ Kick (ed.) New York: the Disinformation Company, 2002, pb, $24.95. Distributed in the UK by Turnaround () £17.99 in the UK   Another massive anthology from the Disinformation people. This is 11″ by 9″ – roughly A4 sized – 345 pages, weighing in at 2 lbs and 11 ounces. Picking it up probably counts … Read more

Notes from the Underground: British Fascism 1974-92. Part 2

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992) £££

See also: Part 1: British Fascism 1974-92 (Lobster 23) Part 3: British fascism 1983-6 (Lobster 25) Part 4: British Fascism 1983-6 (II) (Lobster 26) The 1986 National Front Split (Lobster 29) Introduction In the first part of this essay, in Lobster 23, after reviewing the strategies adopted by significant British fascist parties in the period, … Read more

Acid: a new secret history of LSD

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

David Black London:Vision Paperbacks, 20001, £9.99 This a revised edition of the book which was reviewed in Lobster 35. I’m not sure how new it is. I no longer have the original edition but this seems pretty similar to it. What is new is some material on the activities of Steve Abrams, one of the … Read more

Weird/not weird

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

Yesterday’s loony tunes become today’s reality. Here are some recent examples. Gulf war syndrome, whose existence has been denied by the Ministry of Defence for over a decade, is now being admitted. As the Telegraph’s version of the story put it: ‘Soldiers sent to the 1991 Gulf war were given a combination of vaccines that … Read more

The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence

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Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

Richard J. Aldrich London: John Murray, 2001, £25   Another huge book, 645 pages of text and 70 pages of index, bibliographies and notes. How do you review something this size? I simply don’t know. Short of doing a London Review of Books-sized job and working through it chapter by chapter, all I can really … Read more

Echelon

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

Echelon The piece below arrived, through the magic of e-mail forwarding, via the following: Jane Affleck, Terry Hanstock, and Julian Assange. The report referred to is a companion to Nicky Hager’s book Secret Power (review in Lobster 32 at p. 47). See also ‘The Technology of Political Control’, Robin Ballantyne, in Covert Action Quarterly, Spring … Read more

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