Sometimes the problems facing intelligence agencies–and those who report on them–seem insoluble. For example, what caused U.S. diplomatic official to experience a host of strange symptoms after being posted in Havana? Science does not yet offer definitive answers about the “Havana Syndrome.” Are the symptoms caused by a “directed energy attack,” mounted by a foreign...
Category: Articles
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RIP: Janine Brookner, Ousted CIA Officer Who Challenged Agency in Court
Yet Ms. Brookner was among the most skilled and admired case officers in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations — the clandestine service that infiltrates foreign countries and recruits agents to provide secrets to the United States. She was among the few women to ascend the ranks of the department, until her career was derailed in...
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Sidney Gottlieb: Mastermind of MKULTRA
“He was creator and destroyer, an outlaw who served power, a gentle hearted torturer… above all he was an instrument of history,” writes Stephen Kinzer of Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA’s mind control program notoriously known as MKULTRA. The revelations of Kinzer’s fascinating and disturbing biography, Poisoner in Chief, are unsettling enough. Kinzer, former...
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The Five Eyes: The Global Spy Network You Never Heard Of
[Inside the Five Eyes: a Five Part Series: Part 1 [below] | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 ] The Netflix thriller series, “Pine Gap” takes place on a sprawling, top-secret signals intelligence facility in the Australian Outback. On the screen, Pine Gap is depicted as a cockpit of drone...
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RIP Fred Hampton, Black Panther Assassinated by the FBI
[This piece was first published in Counterpunch, Dec. 4, 2019. I’m republishing it for Black History Month 2021] Fifty one years ago, a squad of Chicago police officers killed Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a pre-dawn raid on the apartment where they were sleeping. In the decades since, a revealing body...
