Imagine the indictment of a former national security official in the Obama administration for violation of the Espionage Act. Imagine James Clapper or Sally Yates facing the same charges as Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning. That dream of right-wing media (and some left-wing critics) came one step closer to reality Sunday, when President Trump announced...
Category: Articles
Post
Post
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...
Post
The Russian Connection to the Seth Rich Conspiracy Theories
The conspiracy theory that DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed for political reasons in the summer of 2016 originated with a Russian intelligence service, according to Yahoo News, and was spread through alt-right media outlets and promoted by Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Julian Assange, much to the dismay of prosecutors and Rich’s family. “To...
Post
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...
Post
A Primer on U.S. False Flag Operations
A “false flag operation” is a time-tested technique of intelligence services. It is the propagation of a vicious lie–the false attribution of a deed to the enemy–so as to justify war. From the explosion on the Maine battleship in Havana Harbor in 1898 to the supposed attack on U.S Navy ships in Vietnam’s Gulf of...