My story about Gina Haspel’s education, “The Girl Who Became Spymaster” has generated a furry of comments from Lakenheath alumni. Several took exception to some or all of my description of Haspel’s experience there as “insulated, demanding and militarized.” So let’s hear what they have to say. Was the school demanding, ie., did it have...
Category: United States
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How Trump Got the Upper Hand on the Secret Agencies
Max Blumenthal is nothing if not provocative. When the independent journalist was scheduled to give a book talk earlier this month at Politics and Prose, Washington’s premier book chain, the prospect of a public discussion of his relentless new book, The Management of Savagery, provoked the Syrian-American Council to protest so vociferously that the event...
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Tulsi Gabbard’s Crusade Against ‘Regime Change’
When it comes to issues of war and peace, no 2020 Democratic presidential campaign is more impassioned or articulate than Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. To be sure, other 2020 Democrats are beginning to speak out on war and peace issues. Elizabeth Warren seeks the mantle of JFK, the insider as reformer. Bernie Sanders puts...
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The Girl Who Became Spymaster
When Gina Haspel, director of the CIA, gave her first public speech last fall at the University of Louisville, she mentioned in passing that she had gone to boarding school in England. Where? I wondered. The formative years of spies can illuminate the trajectory of their otherwise shadowy careers. James Angleton, the legendary chief of...
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JFK Confronted Israel Over Its Secret Nuclear Program
Avner Cohen and Bill Burr are two of the best historians on the secret Israeli nuclear program of the 1960s, which made Israel the Middle East’s first nuclear power. It almost didn’t happen. In a brief for the non-profit National Security Archives and an article for Haaretz.com,Cohen and Burr explain that the program was almost...