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Starting August 1st, 2025, you will need a subscription for new content at CovertAction Magazine (CAM).

While we have maintained an “open garden” for 7 years since the online relaunch in 2018, this new requirement is now necessary to generate the revenues needed to sustain our work.

As you know, CovertAction Magazine is not funded by Lockheed Martin, BlackRock, Pierre Omidyar, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros or CIA-linked foundations.

Rather, it is reader-supported and independent; this enables us to sustain our radical edge exposing the covert activity of the U.S. government and plutocrats worldwide, while spotlighting dissidents and whistleblowers.

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Everyone can still access all past articles for free, and those without a subscription will still get 4 free articles per month.

For those of you who have been readers without a subscription: now is the time to step up!! Since you all are by far the majority, take action and get your subscriptions now; your new subscriptions will be crucial for us to continue this work.


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CAM was founded in 1978 as CovertAction Information Bulletin by the late CIA whistleblower Philip Agee, along with a group of civil rights attorneys, investigative journalists and political activists, with the purpose of exposing the CIA’s nefarious covert operations and highlighting the political-economic underpinnings of U.S. imperialism.

Philip Agee [Source: nytimes.com]

During its first decade, CovertAction Information Bulletin published important exposés on CIA operations all around the world and included a “Naming Names” column that outed individual CIA officers deployed under diplomatic cover in American embassies across the globe using public source documents. (See our archive here)

Today, CAM publishes five articles per week with a similar emphasis and focus as the original publication. Since CAM was relaunched as a webzine in 2018, we have broken many important stories and have also published historical pieces that are designed to illuminate the CIA’s dark history with the hope of building a broad movement to counter the CIA. Additionally, we celebrate anti-imperialist and other social movements that have stood on the right side of history.

CAM is urgently needed today at a time of existential crisis for investigative journalism. The rise of Donald Trump and the extreme right in the U.S. is symptomatic of a breakdown in civil discourse in the country and corporate takeover of media, education and government.

The late Professor Robert McChesney’s work detailed how a few large corporations own all of the major TV networks and that local newspapers are also owned by large corporations.[1]

Six major corporations own a significant portion of the media landscape in the United States: they include Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Paramount Global, Warner Bros. Discovery, and National Amusements. These companies control a vast number of broadcast networks, cable channels, film studios, and other media outlets. A turning point was Bill Clinton’s signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which effectively ended the controls on how much media any one organization could own.

A group of logos in a circle

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[Source: sutori.com]

Among the biggest media corporations in America today is General Electric (GE), an integral part of the military-industrial complex, which sells military products pertaining to aviation to the Pentagon. GE’s media holdings include NBC, MSNBC, Bravo and 26 other television stations.

A jet fighter jet flying in the sky

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Another major media conglomerate, News Corporation, which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who has had long connections to U.S. intelligence.

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Rupert Murdoch [Source: ejumpcut.org]

News Corporation and other media giants like WarnerMedia (which owns CNN) and Disney (ABC) are not only global corporations but are also invested in other million-and billion-dollar industries, including the financial and extractive industries, which profit from overseas military and covert interventions designed to pry open foreign markets.

The media giants rely on advertising dollars from war-profiteering industries and have interlocking directorates, revolving doors of personnel and financial stakes and holdings connecting with the Pentagon, defense and arms manufacturers and the oil industry.[2]

According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, Wall Street investment houses BlackRock and Vanguard—which bankroll the two dominant parties in the U.S.—are “the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, and News Corp.,” which are “four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. media landscape.”

Dr. Mercola stated that, “if you have control of this many news outlets, you can control entire nations by way of carefully orchestrated and organized centralized propaganda disguised as journalism.”

A logo on the front of a building

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[Source: yourstory.com]

Most if not all media outlets today have come to function as little more than an echo chamber of the U.S. State Department and the CIA, ridiculing or marginalizing dissenting voices while helping to condition the public to support highly destructive wars and genocide.

Politico at one point was publishing war propaganda masquerading as journalism that was openly sponsored by the premier arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin. One fear-mongering Lockheed-sponsored article appeared directly below two advertisements for the F-35 jet that it manufactures.

The so-called alternative media have often been little better than the mainstream media.

This is in large part due to the fact that it has become reliant on donations from CIA-linked foundations, the NED or billionaires like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, who drive what the alternative networks can and cannot report or say.

Consequently, many alternative media outlets have come to function much like the mainstream media: as cheerleaders for U.S. regime-change operations in countries like Syria, Libya, Belarus and Ukraine.

Their main trick is to use a professed concern for human rights which ultimately facilitates support for larger U.S. geopolitical objectives.

The same networks rarely offer probing investigations into the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies and how they work to manipulate public opinion in the service of the U.S. ruling class.

CovertAction Magazine is a unique outlet that neither seeks nor receives any corporate or mainstream foundation money and has stuck true to its original mission of trying to educate the public about the evils and consequences of U.S. imperialism.

Many of our articles have sought to spotlight the false narratives pervading the mainstream and alternative media regarding foreign policy interventions and forever wars, and to expose the corrupting influence of dark money in American politics.

In our own conception, we are not just a magazine, but an outlet that can help provide the intellectual fuel for a real social and political revolution in the U.S. that is so urgently needed.

So get your subscription now for just $4 per month. Even better, get the annual subscription for a discounted annual fee of $40 per year. This latter choice is better for you, and better for us.

Thank you in advance for supporting independent, investigative journalism. Your subscriptions and donations go directly to supporting the development, production, editing, and dissemination of CovertAction Magazine.



  1. See Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).



  2. See Helen Johnson, “The unprecedented consolidation of the modern media industry has severe consequences,” The Miscellany News, April 29, 2021.



CovertAction Magazine is made possible by subscriptionsorders and donations from readers like you.

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1 COMMENT

  1. How do I get the coffee to you? Do you want cream and sugar? I only have light roast, is that acceptable. Oh, I see that you want $4, not a cup of coffee. I have never spent anywhere near $4 on a cup of coffee in my life. Not “middle” income. Maybe I’ll be able to afford it later.

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