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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
I had the great fortune recently of addressing a gathering of Greek parliamentarians in Athens and with meeting members of the European Parliament to discuss national security whistleblowing. The European Union has drafted, and will soon release, a new whistleblower protection law that would be the finest and most comprehensive...
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...
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...
For over two years we have been told Putin’s Russia has interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. We now find the U.S. government has decided it can unilaterally invalidate the actual presidential elections in Venezuela and recognize a person of its choosing as president. This is one more...
