Letters From JIM HOUGAN, Washington, USA. (NB this letter was written between the reviews of Hougan’s book Secret Agenda which appeared in Lobsters 8 and 9) After reading No 8 I thought I’d share the following with you in re: Secret Agenda and, on another topic, Frank Terpil. Throat Secret Agenda is deliberately ambiguous on … Read more
[…] is the first detailed account of SIS recruitment, training and operations in the modern world. (Tomlinson conveys rather well what terrific fun it can be being a spook.). And it is indeed a big, big breach of the Official Secrets Act.(1) Notes But not the biggest, currently. That title must go to the on-going […]
[…] Service. My gut feeling is that there exists almost a taboo against pressing home the need for continued Special Branch scrutiny or accountability. BOSS and our own spook services dropped a real clanger that truly rebounded at least on the Criminal Injustice System when Peter Hain was fingered for a bank snatch at his […]
[…] magazine produced in Hull, England, came up. Don’t worry about Lobster, was the message, Lobster has been penetrated. That seemed absolutely hilarious to Hougan and me. Typical spook bullshit, we thought, claiming to have penetrated an organisation consisting of one man. We had a good laugh down the transatlantic phone line and I forgot […]
Operation Julie, a nation-wide police investigation of LSD production, was launched in 1976. Two years later, although some 60 members of the British ‘microdot conspiracy’ had been convicted, Detective Inspector Dick ‘Leapy’ Lee was dissatisfied. The operational commander of ‘Julie’, Lee was interested in the international connections of the network, but was blocked from probing … Read more
See note (1) David Phillips, the former CIA officer considered by the Select Committee on Assassinations as a possible candidate for the true identity behind the cover name ‘”Maurice Bishop” -(2)- reacted strongly when this book was published in the summer of 1980. He contacted top executives in newspapers and television, making himself available to … Read more
Mandy’s place in things On 12 June 1999 The News, Portugal’s weekly English-language paper, ran this comment on the Bilderberg meeting which had then just taken place in Portugal. The 47th Bilderberg Conference has come to an end. Members and one-off participants have departed as discreetly as they arrived. Lines of black limousines, unmarked except … Read more
[…] are included in Geller’s section of The Geller Effect which he co-authored with Guy Lyon Playfair. (Jonathan Cape, London 1986; Grafton 1988, paperback) ‘Hey, Uri’, says the spook, ‘Let’s see if you can project an idea into President Jimmy Carter’s mind’. And worse. Though there is no evidence of Geller being a fake, there […]
By Robin Ramsay See also: Lobster (magazine) at Wikipedia. Updated June 2022 The first issue of Lobster appeared in 1983. It was written by Stephen Dorril and myself. We met through the late Harry Irwin, who lived in Northern Ireland and was what Americans call a book scout: he bought and sold rare books. But … Read more
Christopher Simpson, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994. This is the Simpson who wrote Blowback. This is hard to describe. From the cover blurb: the author demonstrates how the government-funded psychological warfare programs of the Cold War years under-wrote the academic studies that formed the basis for much of modern communication research.’ I … Read more
