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...
Category: Articles
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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...
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‘Special Ops’: A RAW Story in a New Format
There are almost as many cable series about intelligence agencies as there are intelligence agencies. There’s “Pine Gap,” which takes you inside the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. There’s “Mossad 101” about Israel’s famed intelligence service. And now there’s “Special Ops” a streaming hit in India about the once-ignored Research & Analysis Wing. But “Special Ops”...