Books
Author of books on the secret state, terrorism and crime
Forthcoming book. Multimedia Journalism. Co-author with Steve Hill (Solent University) Sage Publications. Due publication Sept 2013. This book is a synthesis of theory and practice and includes interviews with practitioners.
"Britain's Secret Cold War Propaganda", co-authored with James Oliver, published Oct 1998 by Sutton Pub Ltd.Britain's Secret Propaganda War is the first book to be written about The Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) an important chapter in the history of the Cold War. The narrative is driven by actual accounts of IRD covert operations and includes a number of "exclusives." The IRD was set up under the Labour Government in 1948 and clandestinely financed from the Secret Intelligence Service budget. A large organisation with close links to MI6 -- with whom it shared many personnel -- it waged a vigorous covert propaganda campaign against Eastern Bloc Communism for nearly thirty years using journalists, politicians, academics and trade unionists -none of whom were "unwitting."
Such famous names as George Orwell, Denis Healey, Stephen Spender, Bertrand Russell
and Guy Burgess helped or backed the work of IRD. Parliament, had it known of the true purpose of IRD's existence, may well have rejected an anti-Communist propaganda offensive, but it was simply not informed.Using a vast array of techniques to influence world and domestic opinion IRD's activities mirrored and complemented similar CIA covert propaganda operations.
Read reviews of Britain's Secret Propaganda War
"Spyflights of the Cold War", published Sept 1996 by Sutton Pub Ltd. Now in paperback and in a wide range of translations.
Here for the first time is the full story of the Cold War's secret but very real war in which hundreds of combatants lost their lives. Long before Gary Powers' U-2 spyplane ws shot down over the USSR in 1960, an undeclared war was being fought in the stratosphere. This was the aerial espionage war between the West and the Soviet Union.
Author Paul Lashmar's research has incovered top secret missionns flown by US Air Force and Royal Air Force crews, depp into the Soviet Union. He has interviewed USAF and RAF participants, and the Red Air Force pilots that tried, sometimes successfully, to shoot them down.
He has also discovered evidence of an alraming 1950s USAF plan to use these spy flights to provoke a nuclear World War Three which would have wiped the Soviet union and China from the face of the earth.New evidence, both documentary and interview, from the former Soviet Union reveals the full extent of political tension created by the spyplane war. From 1950 over 40 western aircraft were shot down and hundreds of air force officer died or remain missing. The book documents the hunt today for these Cold War MIAs (missing in action), Spy Flights of the Cold War represents an important contribution to our knowledge of the deadly espionage war.
Read reviews of "Spy Flights of the Cold War"
"Scotland Yard's Cocaine Connection" with Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson. Published by Jonathan Cape. Hardback June 1990. Paperback 1991.
"Information is Power" chapter in "Nineteen Eighty Four in 1984: Autonomy, Control and Communication", Crispin Aubrey and Paul Chilton (eds), Comedia, 1983"Siege - Seven Days at the Iranian Embassy" - credited researcher on Observer writing team. Published by Macmillans (1980).
