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...
Danny Casolaro Was Planning to Meet with Key Figures in Nugan Hand Bank and Members of Australian Government Commission Before He Was Murdered On August 10, 1991, Danny Casolaro was found lying dead in a tub of bloody water in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The...
Appointment of Abrams to Public Diplomacy Commission Shows President Biden’s Close Ties to the CIA In September 1998, Desiree A. Ferdinand gave a sworn deposition, in a case filed with the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, detailing the career of her father, Colonel Albert V. Carone, an army intelligence officer...
Try Mark Wilding’s Wildly Funny, But Razor-Sharp, Satirical Dramatization of the CIA-Backed Fascist Coup in Chile. You may think you know what happened, but you’ll never guess how it happened Most Americans do not remember the “other” tragic 9/11 event, which took place in 1973, when the CIA helped overthrow...
Part I in a two-part series In December, the rapid fall of the Syrian government to Western-backed jihadists stunned the world and sparked a wide range of reactions amid the fallout. Unsurprisingly, the collective West was quick to celebrate the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, a long-time U.S. foreign policy objective...
The March 8, 2026, issue of The New York Times Magazine featured an article by Matthieu Aikins and Wesley Morgan entitled “America’ Secret Veterans: They Fought For the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. Now, 10,000 Former Zero Unit Soldiers Are in the United States and Living in Fear.” The article focused on...
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....
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...
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...
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...