In early September, Dr. Thomas Alter II—author of the well-regarded book Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press, 2022)—was fired from his tenured position teaching history at Texas State University after he gave an online talk at a socialist conference.
Alter’s...
On a cold November night some time in the late 1980s, CovertAction Information Bulletin founder Philip Agee was sitting in the back of an auditorium at the University of Rhode Island listening to a debate between Arthur Hulnick, a representative of the CIA, and a member of the American...
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...
In October, John Brennan, CIA Director from 2013 to 2017, will release a memoir titled Undaunted: My Fight Against America's Enemies, at Home and Abroad.
Early excerpts from the book, published in The New York Times on Thursday July 30, quote Brennan expressing outrage that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell...
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...
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...
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...
Following the Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on January 3, the Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed an indictment alleging that Maduro “moved loads of cocaine under the protection of Venezuelan law enforcement” and that profits from the illegal activity “flowed” to...
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...
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...
