See note (1) James ‘Bo’ Gritz, linked to the US Army Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), was detained with Lance Corp. Edward Trimmer whilst trying to enter Thailand. (Guardian 23rd September 1983) They were apparently on another mission looking for American POWs. In December, for the first time since 1975, American troops were in Laos investigating … 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
Maurice Tugwell/Centre For Conflict Studies More on the good Mr Tugwell and the Centre for Conflict Studies mentioned in issue 16. An article in the Canadian magazine New Maritimes (June 1986) describes CCS as ‘on the edge of the campus of the University of New Brunswick … the Centre staff is not, however University faculty, … Read more
Noam Friedlander London: Conspiracy Books/Collins and Brown, 2005, p/bk, £8.99 Apart from being an anagram of Oedipus, Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organisation, which has grown from beginnings in Spain in the 1920s, led by José Maria Escriva, to being an evangelising force within the Catholic Church, aimed as much at the lay … Read more
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave London: Verso, 2003, h/b, £17 The story in brief: before and during WW2 Japan stripped the countries it occupied of its transportable wealth — gold and other precious metals, diamonds, cash, bonds and so on. As the war turned against them this was buried in various locations, many of … Read more
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
Efraim Karsh Yale University Press, 2006; 276 pp. For anyone who believes that ‘imperialism’ is an exclusively Western phenomenon, that Islam has only been the victim of it, and that 9/11 was simply a reaction to that (‘blowback’), this book will come as a bit of a shock. Karsh argues that aggressive imperialism was … Read more
Europe Inc: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power Belén Balanyá, Ann Doherty, Olivier Hoedeman, Adam Ma’anit and Erik Wessselius Pluto Press, London and Sterling (Virginia, USA) 2000, £14.99 Blowing the Whistle: one man’s fight against fraud in the European Commission Paul van Buitenen, London: Politicos, 2000, £12.99 In his memoir, In … Read more
The Shadow Warriors Bradley F. Smith (Andre Deutsch, London 1983) The network of close personal connections established in O.S.S. (the fore-runner of the CIA) “helped bridge some of the widest gaps in American society and could be called upon in cases of need long after the war ended. For example, when in 1964 former British … Read more
The Craft – a history of English Freemasonry John Hamill (Guild Publishing, London 1986) The author is the librarian and curator of the United Grand Lodge of England. The book is 191 pages and contains 23 black and white illustrations, appendices containing the historical record of the Grand Masters of England, the structure of the … Read more
