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...
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...
Listen to the Mockingbird. Let early birds catch worms, but Mockingbirds sing catchy ear worms.
Tone-deaf historians and criminologists continue to neglect music and thereby ignore an important soundtrack to events. Even if our frustration has now reached a boiling point as we long for information that makes sense, dubbing...
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...
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....
During the Vietnam War era, peace activists compared American war planners like Robert S. McNamara and Henry Kissinger to Albert Speer, Hitler’s Minister of War Production and Armaments who stood out for his lack of ideological zeal in supporting the Nazi cause. What motivated Speer, rather, was a cold...
With the confirmation of Gina Haspel as CIA director, there’s rightfully great interest in her record regarding torture. Contrary to the rhetoric--and with barely a word about the utility of torture in rigging the case for the Iraq invasion--the actual ends of torture are incredibly worse than the gruesome means.
Of course, there...
Heidi Boghosian: In 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act, which led to the formation of the National Security Council and, under its direction, the CIA. Its original mandate was to collect and analyze strategic information for use in war. Though shrouded in secrecy, many CIA activities such as...
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...
The New York Times and other obituaries predictably left this out
Richard Armitage, the number two official at the State Department from 2001 to 2005, died on April 13.
The New York Times and other obituaries emphasized that Armitage was a Naval Academy graduate and Bronze Star recipient...
