“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...
Category: <span>Diary</span>
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The Undercover Mission of the New International Spy Museum
The new International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. is, not surprisingly, an institution in disguise, an undercover operation executed in plain sight. The museum’s beveled glassy front is more stylish than its neighbors–the bland façade of the Post Office to the west, the neo-expressionist face of the General Services Administration to the north. Yet the...
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Jamaica’s Lashana Lynch Becomes 007 in the Next James Bond Movie
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service is diversifying, at least fictionally. Actress Lashana Lynch, whose parents are Jamaican, has a leading role in the next James Bond movie, due out in April. The British actress, who starred as pilot and proud single mother Maria Rambeau in “Captain Marvel,” is shaking and stirring up the Bond legacy as...
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The ‘Deep State’ Isn’t a Conspiracy. It’s a Political Faction
[This story was first published in The New Republic as “‘The Deep State’ Is a Political Party,” November 8, 2019)] It was, in the eyes of Trump World, the very clubhouse of the Deep State: the plush, blue-carpeted, wood-paneled 13th floor auditorium of the National Press Club, located in the heart of the Washington swamp,...
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What do Journalists Owe the National Security State?
Not sure I agree with this take, but that may be easy to say in the comfort of Washington. The perspective of journalists in Sweden, a small country in the neighborhood of Russia, makes me think twice. Whether or not they like it, today journalists are part of national security. Source: Russia Has Started Using...