Former Newsweek correspondent and best-selling author Elaine Shannon tries but doesn’t quite succeed in taking down Amazon’s series “The Last Narc.” In an extended take out for SpyTalk, Shannon quotes an impressive series of former U.S. officials who scoff at the premise of the series. But neither she nor her sources mention the story of...
Category: Reviews
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SpyTalk Review of Books and Movies
In SpyTalk, veteran intelligence reporter Jeff Stein reviews a diverse slew of recent books in the realm of espionage and national security. Three recommendations A Hollywood feature on The Trial of the Chicago Seven, coming October 16, starring Eddie Redmayne, Alex Sharp, Sacha Baron Cohen and Frank Langella, among others, as the colorful anti-Vietnam War defendants, their lawyers and...
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COUP 53 Sheds New Light on How CIA and MI6 Brought Tyranny to Iran
The coup that toppled a democratically elected government in Iran in August 1953 and replaced it with a tyrannical monarchy that lasted 25 years was an intelligence operations whose effects are still felt to this day. A new documentary recounts the crime with special attention to the often-overlooked role (at least in the United States)...
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The End of the Affair: JFK and Mary Meyer
“JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story” is a most unusual thing: a novel with footnotes. In the 1960s, the New Journalists adopted the techniques of novelists to spice up their reporting. Author Jesse Kornbluth offers a 21st century variation. He imports the apparatus of academia to give ballast to the true tale of a...
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Barton Gellman on Edward Snowden and the Threat of ‘Turnkey Authoritarianism’
I recently spoke with Barton Gellman, former Washington Post reporter and author of “Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State.” The book comes seven years after Gellman was one of three reporters whom Snowden entrusted with a trove of NSA documents about the inner working of dozens of top secret U.S. surveillance operations....
