A decorated hero in WW II, he ran death squad operations in North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the Cold War; and was fired by Jimmy Carter for challenging civilian authority over the military. When Philip Agee resigned from the CIA in the late 1960s, he embarked on a...
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...
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...
Disinformation artists have repeatedly misled the public in order to demonize American enemies and support more war President Donald Trump on his first day in office revoked the security clearances of all 51 former CIA officers who had signed an open letter in 2020 claiming that the contents of the...
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...
Like the proverbial cat, some concepts have several lives. Or, like the mythological phoenix, they can be reborn from the ashes. This is certainly the case of the Intermarium, a geopolitical concept that envisaged an alliance of countries reaching from the Baltic Sea over the Black Sea to the...
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...
William J. Burns’ appointment offers little more than an image makeover for the agency. As a diplomat, Burns supported U.S. military interventions in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and is now stoking the coals against Russia and China. William J. Burns was confirmed by a unanimous vote in the...
Chances are Slim as Political Cowardice Reigns Supreme in America’s Second Gilded Age Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) last week asked the CIA for information related to a Yahoo News report that the Agency in 2017 had planned to kidnap or kill Wikileaks cofounder Julian Assange outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in...
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...