Palantir is Silicon Valley startup, founded by Peter Thiel, that benefitted from early CIA investment. The company went public this week with unimpressive results. The company’s clientele in the national security and immigration agencies has made it politically controversial. One former CIA official turned Joe Biden adviser scrubbed her work for the firm from her...
Category: CIA
Post
Post
Why Snowden Agreed to Give Up $1 Million
While this may look like a legal victory for the government, it also formalizes a negotiating process between Snowden and the U.S. government. Snowden has long said that he would come back to face trial on Espionage Act charges, if he could mount a “conscientious objector”-type argument in court. The government has never allowed that...
Post
Inherit the ‘Whirlwind’: A Podcast on Russian Political Warfare
The docuseries project builds on Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner’s new book, The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare: 1945-2020. Weiner wrote and hosts the show, which over 10 episodes will feature interviews with former CIA directors Robert Gates, John Brennan and Leon Panetta, former KGB officers Alexander Vassiliev and Oleg Kalugin...
Post
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)...
Post
SpyTalk: How Chinese Intelligence Penetrated the CIA
In SpyTalk, a new email newsletter, veteran journalist Jeff Stein leads off with a report on the recent indictment of Alexander Ma, a former CIA officer who allegedly spied for China’s Ministry of State Security, and a relative who allegedly helped him. The secrets the two Ma’s spilled included the identity of five CIA agents,...