James B. Wells is a retired criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University who was nine years old on September 27, 1965, when he received the terrible news that his father Jack had died in a small plane crash in Bao Tri, some ten kilometers southwest of Cu Chi,...
In the 1980s, Samuel K. Doe was the CIA’s boy. He was one of Africa’s worst rulers, who provided bases used for subversion campaigns across Africa and upheld the interests of Firestone Rubber. When Doe lost his utility, the CIA supported Charles Taylor who helped trigger Liberia’s ruinous civil war in the 1990s.
Between 1975 and 1989, the primary U.S. intelligence agency leveraged various financial assistance programs to shape Portuguese democracy and prevent the country from falling under Soviet influence. Here’s how. The involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Portugal is widely acknowledged. In fact, it was primarily thanks to...
In early 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the CIA to provide secret campaign funds to Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and other select members of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which favored close integration with the U.S during the Cold War. According to historian Michael Schaller, between 1958 and 1960...
Over the past half-century, I have been engaged in research, lectured and worked with social movements and leftist governments in Latin America.  I interviewed US officials and think tanks in Washington and New York.  I have written scores of books, hundreds of professional articles and presented numerous papers at...
It’s been sixteen years since Gul Rahman died of hypothermia, beaten and left half-naked and short shackled to a bare prison floor at the CIA-run Salt Pit “black site” prison in Afghanistan. It is not known what the CIA did to his corpse. His body was never turned over to his family. According to...
The CIA has been implicated in many of the murkiest incidents of the latter half of the 20th century. From the Kennedy assassination and Project MK-ULTRA, to what Wikipedia dubs the “alleged” Operation Mockingbird, a clandestine program which recruited prominent American journalists into a CIA propaganda network funded by...
No Wonder They Have Betrayed the Legacy of Frank Church  The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was established in 1977 as a consequence of post-Church Committee reforms intended to prevent the perpetuation of CIA abuses that were exposed in the 1975/76 Church Committee.  The first chairman of the HPSCI (1977-1985), Edward Boland (D-MA),...
In the 1990 movie, Air America, Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr., play two Air America pilots who smuggle heroin while supporting U.S. proxies in the Vietnam War. Air America was an airline run by the CIA previously called Civil Air Transport (CAT), which had been formed by General Claire...
There is strong evidence to suggest that both Juan Guaidó and the U.S. government were intimately involved in a botched weekend insurrection. The government of Venezuela is celebrating after thwarting another foreign-backed coup attempt Sunday, just two days after another coup attempt by self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guaidó ended in...