Cia
Story Stream
When the C.I.A. Turned Writers Into Operatives May 22, 2024
Benjamen Walker, the creator and host of “Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything,” is a pod-maker of the mad-scientist variety: he cooks up projects using his own zeal, research, and audacious notions, then unleashes the results on the world. “Theory...
The Deep-State Virus April 26, 2024
Every American concerned about the dismal state of the nation’s intelligence agencies should read J. Michael Waller’s riveting book, Big Intel. A fine writer with extensive experience in information warfare and foreign subversion, Waller explores the...
Communism and the Writing Life March 01, 2021
There is something elegiac in Duncan White’s Cold Warriors, originally published in summer 2019 but released in paperback this past August. The book, a “group biography” of over a dozen literary figures who were involved on one side or other of the C...
Carter Page: 'I Was a Pawn in the Democrat Crusade' August 31, 2020
Not until lurid headlines damned Carter Page as a traitor to his country in September 2016, six weeks before the presidential election, did he realize someone was using him to play a dirty political trick.Reporters had been hounding the energy invest...
Strategic Long-Term Propaganda June 08, 2020
In the opening lines of Cold Warriors, Duncan White notes that “between February and May 1955, a group covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency launched a secret weapon into Communist territory”: balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s ...
From Sorority Girl to Spy February 23, 2020
Tracy Walder arrived at the University of Southern California in 1996, and rushed Delta Gamma soon after. For the studious yet bubbly Southern California native, the Greek system provided a built-in social life and a place where she happily “blended ...
When Novels Were Weapons December 24, 2019
It is said that Russia’s imaginative writers are safe from the attentions of President Putin because he believes that literature (unlike TV or the internet) is entirely unimportant. Meanwhile, President Trump’s vision of the US as the world’s greates...
The Sinister Scientist Behind the CIA's Mind-Control December 03, 2019
Stephen Kinzer has written books about civil wars, terror attacks, and bloody coups, but his latest might be his most alarming. “I’m still in shock,” Kinzer says of what he learned about the appalling experiments conducted by a government scientist m...
Are Spies More Trouble Than They Are Worth? August 30, 2019
Is intelligence intelligent? This is the question that runs or, rather, leaps through the mind of the reader struggling with Christopher Andrew’s encyclopedic work “The Secret World: A History of Intelligence” (Yale). Andrew, who is a longtime histor...
The Cold War of Words August 30, 2019
Known as the Cold War, the clash of interest between the United States and the Soviet Union played out on several fronts, and culture was one of them. On both sides, the leadership had to do what it could to persuade the public that its values were s...
Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties July 10, 2019
In the fetid, druggy summer of 1969, Charles Manson, a hippy messiah who claimed to be the spawn of Christ, Satan and Hitler combined, dispatched his besotted apostles on killing sprees throughout Los Angeles.For starters, they obscenely butchered Sh...
The CIA, Asleep at the Wheel October 12, 2018
About the same time Bob Woodward's Fear began grabbing public attention, another, similar book hit the newsstands. Like Fear, it too is heavily based on the accounts of a select few government insiders, though in this case their allegations aren't ma...
War of Error: The CIA in Afghanistan & Pakistan June 29, 2018
On April 14, 2011, at a meeting in The Hague, I was much impressed by the impassioned speech of Amrullah Saleh, a former Head of the Afghan National Directorate of Security and a future government minister. His chief message was that Afghanistan, bei...
