On September 18th 1947, the main provisions of the National Security Act of 1947 went into effect. One of these was the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, perhaps the most infamous part of the US national security state. While we pay a lot of attention these days to digital surveillance and the agencies that focus on signals intelligence like the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance office, the CIA has and continues to play a crucial role in establishing and maintaining global US hegemony via human intelligence as well as through its covert actions, including coups, terrorism and sabotage...
Just over a year ago we reported on Chanda Creasy, a courageous yoga coach, who had previously managed to work with militants in Africa, making her way up to the position of special assistant to CIA director on global operations. Recently, we found new details of Chanda’s trip to...
The CIA rivals the Vatican in covering up sex crimes against children and then protecting the members of its organization who commit them
Buzzfeed reported early this month that, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the CIA revealed that 10 employees and a contractor had committed sex crimes against children—but only one was ever...
Part 6 in our Biden Series: A Company Man?
On May 9, 1981, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism was debating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (S. 391). Their goal: criminalize the unauthorized identification of U.S. intelligence agents.
Then-Senator Joe Biden rose to his feet to denounce my...
Dusko Doder’s case has ominous reverberations in the era of Cold War 2.0
Late one February night in 1984, Dusko Doder, The Washington Post’s Soviet correspondent, noticed hundreds of lights blazing at the Soviet Defense Ministry and KGB offices in Moscow.
He surmised that the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, who had...
Disinformation artists have repeatedly misled the public in order to demonize American enemies and support more war
President Donald Trump on his first day in office revoked the security clearances of all 51 former CIA officers who had signed an open letter in 2020 claiming that the contents of the...
Eartha Kitt was a magnetic singer, songwriter and actress who starred as Catwoman in the 1967 season of television’s Batman and was known for her 1953 Christmas song “Santa Baby.”
In the early 1950s, Kitt recorded six top-30 songs. Orson Welles once called her “the most exciting woman in the...
Evidence Suggests that the CIA Murdered One of Its Staunchest Critics in the mid-1970s and then Covered It Up by Blaming Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple Cult
.
I. Intel Turned On Its Head
I am Laurie Efrein Kahalas, survivor of the Peoples Temple. I never lived in Jonestown, but I held a key...
In early September, Dr. Thomas Alter II—author of the well-regarded book Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press, 2022)—was fired from his tenured position teaching history at Texas State University after he gave an online talk at a socialist conference.
Alter’s...
Part 3: “Subversion.” "On Company Business" is an in-depth look into the origins, history, and inner-workings of one of the world’s most powerful, but least understood, covert intelligence gathering organization: the Central Intelligence Agency.
