When I first started reporting on the CIA in the 1980s, I learned early on Bill Blum was a good source for stories. He wrote for Covert Action Information Bulletin (later Covert Action), a notorious publication in Reagan’s Washington. The CAIB that had the feel of samizdat, the underground publications of dissidents in the Soviet Union....
Category: Diary
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The Legacy of Bush’s CIA Pardons
When I first came to Washington in the 1980s, one of the first stories I reported on regularly was the Iran-contra scandal. As vice president, the late George Bush was in the thick of it. In the fall of 1986, while working as an editor at The New Republic magazine, I commissioned a story by...
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Behind the Khashoggi Coverup, the Pursuit of Proxy War With Iran
If you watch close up in Washington, you can sometimes see the secret sector of the U.S. government in action. This doesn’t require a security clearance or inside sources. Sometimes you can see it happening in public in the presentations of the capital’s think tanks. After Jamal Khashoggi disappeared, I wrote that the case of...
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7 Bogus Trump Tweets about the ‘Deep State’
People may ask about THE DEEP STATE news blog, is this a platform for President Trump’s conspiracy theories? The answer is no. Trump has tweeted about the “deep state” seven times since June 2017. They show that the president’s complaints about the “deep state” have little to do with the legitimate reasons people fear secret intelligence...
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Elissa Slotkin for the Democratic Defense
If Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has a certain New York panache that drives conservatives batty, Rep. Elissa Slotkin does Midwestern Nice in a way that will irritate no one. And I mean that as a compliment. Slotkin, a former CIA officer and Pentagon policymaker, was just elected from Michigan’s 8th District, a diverse swath of central...