James B. Wells is a retired criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University who was nine years old on September 27, 1965, when he received the terrible news that his father Jack had died in a small plane crash in Bao Tri, some ten kilometers southwest of Cu Chi,...
David Giglio of Our Hidden History interviews Louis Wolf on the relaunch of CovertAction Magazine.
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...
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...
The name Allard Lowenstein (1929-1980) may not mean too much to political activists today, but in the 1960s and 1970s he was a well-known liberal figure associated with many of the progressive causes of the day. For this reason, it would come as something of a shock to many of...
David Wise--the prize-winning journalist and author who in 1964 co-wrote one of the first best-selling history books critical of the CIA--passed away on October 8th, 2018, in Washington, DC. He was 88. Co-written with fellow journalist Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government became a best-seller with its revelations of --...
In March 2018, Patrick Martin of the World Socialist Web Site published a political pamphlet entitled “The CIA Democrats.” In it, he wrote that “an extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department” were “seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for...
While thousands of people languish in the ICE gulag under abhorrent conditions and are kidnapped off American streets and subject to deportation, a CIA-linked foreign terrorist is being given preferential treatment in a stark reflection of the double standard and corruption of the U.S. criminal justice system. On July 16,...
The arch neo-conservative wants the CIA to become “bolder and more innovative in covert action” The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was established in the late 1970s as a watchdog designed to ensure greater transparency for CIA operations in the wake of the 1975-76 Church Committee hearings. The Church Committee...
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...