CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces

At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in [...]

CIA Lithuanian torture site located

The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA

Through interviews with former narcotics agents, politicians, and bureaucrats, this exposé documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) up until the present day. Written in [...]

Occupiers involved in drug trade: Afghan minister

The Afghan minister of counter narcotics says foreign troops are earning money from drug production in Afghanistan.
General Khodaidad Khodaidad said the majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces controlled by troops from the US, the UK, and Canada, Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Saturday.
He went on to [...]

UN says US drone strikes may violate international law

US unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) strikes against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be breaking international laws against summary executions, the United Nations top investigator of such crimes said.
“The problem with the United States is that it is making an increased use of drones/Predators (which are) particularly prominently [...]

Karzai’s brother ‘on CIA payroll’

US involvement in Afghanistan has come into new question with the claim that President Hamid Karzai’s brother has for years been on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency – even though he is suspected of being a major figure in the illicit opium trade that Washington and its [...]

How Washington Learned to Love Nonviolence

Nonviolence can be a major force for democratic social change, but not when it becomes a tool for covert intervention.
A close-cropped, no-nonsense infantry officer, Col. Robert Helvey was studying at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs on an Army fellowship. One day in 1987, he happened upon a seminar led by Gene [...]

CIA documents on Agent Posada Carriles released

The Washington, DC-based investigative nonprofit National Security Archive released several documents on Oct. 6 written by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1965 and 1966 about its Cuban-born longtime “asset” Luis Posada Carriles, who currently lives in Miami under indictment after entering the US illegally in 2005. The Archive’s [...]

CIA Opens Climate Change and National Security Center

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recently announced the creation of The Center on Climate Change and National Security. This new unit, comprised of specialists from the CIA Directorates of Intelligence and Science and Technology, is aimed at supporting American policymakers on issues related to the national security implications of [...]

Attorney: Oklahoma City bomb tapes appear edited

OKLAHOMA CITY  — Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday.
“The real story is what’s missing,” said Jesse Trentadue, [...]

Scientists: Obama’s election may reduce terrorism

Will Barack Obama’s election make terrorists less eager to strike? A data analysis released Thursday suggests it could make a difference.
In the Science magazine study, researchers Alan Bennett Krueger of Princeton University and Jitka Maleèková of the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Science in Prague looked at terrorist [...]

CIA OIG Report on Detention and Interrogation Activities Available

CIA OIG Report on Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003)

As widely reported in the press yesterday, the CIA Office of Inspector General has just released material on past detention practices in the ‘War on Terrorism’. The release of this material came about following a FOIA request by [...]

CIA Furious Over New Secret Site Expose

Already wrestling with a renewed controversy over contract killers, the CIA reacted angrily Thursday to a news organization’s revelation of yet another secret interrogation center.ABC News reported that the CIA had a secret site in Lithuania where interrogators grilled terrorist suspects,  “one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 [...]

C.I.A. Sought Blackwater’s Help to Kill Jihadists

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.
Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its [...]

Senate Bill Would Disclose Intel Budget Request

The Senate version of the FY2010 intelligence authorization bill (pdf) would require the President to disclose the aggregate amount requested for intelligence each year when the coming year’s budget request is submitted to Congress.  Currently, only the total appropriation for the National Intelligence Program is disclosed — not the request [...]

Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online Hacker ‘Dark Tangent’ Joins DHS Advisory Council

Forget the new cyber security czar position that President Barack Obama announced last week.
The real sign that the White House might be finally taking cyber security seriously came in an announcement on Friday that Jeff Moss, aka “Dark Tangent” and the former hacker behind the annual DefCon hacker confab in [...]

Michael V. Hayden today

Less than three months after stepping down as CIA director, retired general Michael V. Hayden has taken several jobs in the private sector. He has just joined the board of the National Interest Security Company (NISC), a holding company that manages all the assets of the DC Capital [...]

Journo Deemed A U.S Terror Threat

Apparently, the pen is so mighty, that we can’t even risk certain foreign journalists flying in our airspace.
According to reports over the weekend, an Air France flight to Mexico was diverted because of one passenger, Franco-Colombian writer Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for the Le Monde Diplomatique, a left-wing French-based [...]

EU nations eye prosecution of Bush officials

European officials and lawyers seek to criminalize former US officials over torture charges amid the reluctance of President Barack Obama.
A number of European authorities and human rights groups have expressed dissatisfaction with Obama’s failure to press charges against ex-CIA authorities who sanctioned or administered the so-called ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ to [...]

DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff in 1983 For Waterboarding Prisoners

In 1983, the Department of Justice prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies for waterboarding prisoners to get them to confess to crimes.
The deputies were sentenced to four years in prison and Parker pleaded guilty to extortion and federal civil rights violations and received a 10-year sentence. [...]

CIA’s CREST Leaves Cavity in Public Domain

The curious refusal of the Central Intelligence Agency to provide online access to its “CREST” database of declassified documents was examined last week in Mother Jones magazine.
“In a quiet, fluorescently lit room in the National Archives’ auxiliary campus in suburban College Park, Maryland, 10 miles outside of Washington, are [...]

CIA Updates Digital Archive, Restricts Access

The Central Intelligence Agency maintains a regularly updated electronic archive of declassified historical records that have been publicly disclosed, but it has effectively squandered the utility of digitizing these records by refusing to make them available online.
The CIA to its credit has done more than any other agency to scan [...]

NSA Dominance of Cybersecurity Would Lead to ‘Grave Peril’, Ex-Cyber Chief Tells Congress

The government’s national cybersecurity efforts would be in “grave peril” if they were dominated by the intelligence community, said Amit Yoran, former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division.
Yoran told a House subcommittee on Tuesday that although the Department of Homeland Security, which currently oversees [...]

Disgraced Senior CIA Official Heads to Prison Still Claiming He’s a Patriot

A judge wrapped up one of the most sordid and sprawling congressional scandals in American history Thursday when he sentenced Kyle “Dusty” Dustin Foggo, formerly the No. 3 official at the CIA, to just over three years in federal prison for defrauding the government.
Foggo is one of eight people who have [...]

Ecuador says expelled diplomat was ‘CIA chief’

The US diplomat Ecuador expelled from the country earlier this week was a CIA station chief, President Rafael Correa said on Saturday.
“Last week we expelled the US embassy’s (Mark) Sullivan from the country. He was, let’s be clear, the director of the CIA in Ecuador,” Correa told his weekly radio [...]

Iranians don’t “hate us because we have freedom”

Iran is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its historic Islamic revolution after three decades of siege warfare by the western powers. To understand why relations between Tehran and the West are so bitter, we must understand their historical context.
Iran’s jagged relations with the West began during World War II. [...]

Retiring CIA Inspector General Faces Suit Over Conduct of Office

John L. Helgerson, the CIA’s controversial inspector general, may be finally leaving the spy agency after three decades, but he will not be fading back into the shadows.Helgerso, who has been at the center of some of the agency’s most difficult moments related to terrorism and pre-war intelligence about Iraq, [...]