Current CIA director Gina Haspel described graphic acts of deliberate physical torture including the waterboarding of a suspected Al-Qa’ida terrorist under her supervision when she was chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, according to declassified CIA cables – most of which she wrote...
David W. Conde set the groundwork for Philip Agee’s 1975 whistleblowing account, Inside the Company.
In 1970, David W. Conde, an American journalist working in Japan, who had served with the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Branch in World War II, published a now-forgotten book in New Delhi, CIA—Core of the...
Danny Casolaro’s Death in August 1991 Was Ruled a Suicide But Overwhelming Evidence Indicates That He Was Murdered—Likely by Rogue Elements of the CIA in Collaboration with the Kuwaiti Royal Family
When a housekeeper at the Martinsburg, West Virginia, Sheraton Hotel entered Room 517 on the morning of August 10,...
Ramparts magazine was a beacon of the 1960s social movements: an anti-establishment muckraking magazine that published important exposés of the CIA, including its involvement in the murder of Ché Guevara, its infiltration of the National Student Association (NSA), and its support for clandestine police training programs in South Vietnam...
The arch neo-conservative wants the CIA to become “bolder and more innovative in covert action”
The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was established in the late 1970s as a watchdog designed to ensure greater transparency for CIA operations in the wake of the 1975-76 Church Committee hearings.
The Church Committee...
The 2024 Netflix documentary American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders has been nominated for three Emmy Awards. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) nominated the four-part series in the following categories:
Outstanding Lighting Direction
Outstanding Investigative Documentary
Outstanding Documentary
The Emmy Awards for News and Documentaries are scheduled to be held...
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...
The CIA likes to fashion itself as a heroic agency that helps to protect national security and uphold democracy around the world.
However, Hugh Wilford’s book, The CIA: An Imperial History (Basic Books, 2024), shows that the CIA draws directly from British and French colonial precedents, and adopts the same...
April 5 marked the 32nd anniversary of former Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain’s death, supposedly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
This past year, an unofficial private sector team of forensic scientists that put fresh eyes on Cobain’s autopsy and the crime scene material concluded that Cobain’s death actually resulted from...
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...
