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...
Editors compromised integrity as independent news organizations by sending dispatches from foreign correspondents to CIA The CIA is known to have enjoyed a close relationship with the mainstream media during the Cold War and to have recruited dozens of journalists to help advance CIA propaganda. An article in the November 2024...
Vance’s top funder, Peter Thiel, co-founded the data-analytics company Palantir, which has the CIA as a client, and was an early investor in Facebook, the CIA’s “wet dream.” Surging in the polls after surviving an assassination attempt, Donald Trump boosted his prospects of becoming the next president by nominating J....
On March 17, William H. Blum, the feisty investigative journalist who (literally) wrote the book on CIA crimes and coverups – and who passed away on December 9 at age 85 – was remembered and celebrated at a public memorial in Washington, D.C. The event, which took place at...
Facing years behind bars, Robert M. Sensi might now be compelled to reveal state secrets that would help expose what martyred journalist Danny Casolaro termed “The Octopus” In early December 2025, a former CIA agent named Robert M. Sensi was arrested on narcoterrorism, narcotics distribution, and money-laundering charges. Sensi stands accused,...
On April 6, The New York Times ran an article under the headline “CIA’s Deception Plan Helped Divert Iranians from Missing American” by Julian Barnes. The article noted that, when two American pilots ejected from their plane after it was shot down and took refuge in the mountains, the CIA...
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...
CIA operative Donald Rickard admitted to role in capture of African hero On August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was apprehended by South African authorities while driving with Cecil Williams, a white Communist theater director, from Durban to Johannesburg. At the time, Mandela, a leader of the military wing of the anti-Apartheid...
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...
Billy Waugh Says He Wrote Recommendation to Drop Them on Mu Gia Pass Along Ho Chi Minh Trail on the North Vietnam-Laos Border He and other Special Forces operatives planned to parachute a nuclear device into area behind enemy lines and then detonate it Told General Vo Nguyen Giap’s son in...