Is your journey really necessary? The Guardian ‘Weekend’ section of August 13, 1994, carried a piece called ‘The Seeds of Madness’, about Mark Purdey, the dairy farmer who has opposed the British agro-chemical industry, believing that the so-called ‘mad cow disease’, BSE, was the result of organo-phosphate poisoning. Life became complicated for him and the … Read more
MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations Stephen Dorril Fourth Estate, London, 2000, £25 A Life: A. J. Ayer Ben Rogers Chatto and Windus, London, 1999, £20 Many books on intelligence matters simply rehash old ‘facts’, adding a new twist to – a slightly different interpretation of – well-known, if not necessarily well-understood, events. If … Read more
During the 1967 Six Day War the Israeli air force attacked a US sigint ship, Liberty, which was monitoring the radio traffic of the war. The official story, that it was an unfortunate mistake in the ‘fog of war’, began to come apart after an article, ‘Mayday! Mayday! The attack on the USS Liberty’, by … Read more
There have been several notable assaults on the good ship Lobster since number 24. On Thursday, 19 November 1992 a journalist researching a piece on MI6 rang me. He said had been to talk to the KGB defector, Oleg Gordiefsky, who told him that the KGB were big fans of Lobster. Since Gordiefky defected in … Read more
GEHEIM (“SECRET”) is West Germany’s representative in the international stable of state research publications. Geheim has appeared three or four times a year since 1983, and its editors are experienced state research journalists in the Federal Republic – Rudolf Gossner, author (with Geheim contributor Uwe Herzog) of an exhaustive work on the undercover activities of … Read more
Tom Bower London: Fourth Estate, 2001, £6.99 After tackling the Paperclip Conspiracy, Klaus Barbie, Nazi medical experiments, looted cash from holocaust victims in Swiss banks and various tycoons (Rowland, Maxwell, Fayed) the latest target for a thorough Tom Bower investigation is Sir Richard Branson, though this is a tale on a smaller scale than … Read more
On July 23 the Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of Noel Molland, Steve Booth and Saxon Wood (the GAndALF 3). The three had been convicted at Portsmouth Crown Court in November 1997 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for conspiring with two others to ‘unlawfully incite persons unknown to commit criminal damage’ by reporting … Read more
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Stephen Marshall (Guerilla News Network, $13.22. Available from <> and <amazon.co.uk>) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein, (London: Allen Lane, £25.00) ‘When new (forms of capitalism) emerged in the past …they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production … Read more
Editorially In this issue we are running the first half of something not originally written for the Lobster. It’s not that we’re short of copy, just that there is a lot of US material which we would like to recycle in this country, and this Marshall piece seemed like as good a piece as any … Read more
The CIA’s LSD testing program was part of its larger MKULTRA Program, which remains very much a mystery, primarily because its chief operating officer, Dr Sid Gottlieb, destroyed the majority of MKULTRA documents in 1973 during the Watergate scramble to plug leaks and obliterate history. Helping Gottlieb destroy these documents was the then Director of … Read more
