Who Is Karl Marx? -- video presentation
Excellent concise biography of the man whose evil ideas were responsible for the deaths of over 100 million persons by their own governments in the 20th Century.
Murray N. Rothbard's brilliant online essay, "Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist," is the most powerful indictment of Marxism ever written.
This is part 1 of a much larger work. The full book is 1177 pages, with 300 pages of bibliography.
After the fall of communism, and certainly after this wide-ranging demolition of Marxism by Austrian scholars, who can possibly defend Marxism? Plenty of people, many of them smart otherwise but uneducated in economics. This book is the antidote, covering the whole history of this nutty and dangerous system of thought. It begins by an alternately hilarious and tragic introduction by the editor Yuri Maltsev. He describes in vivid detail life in the Soviet Union, which, he points out contrary to myth, was indeed an attempt to realize Marx's vision. Of course the system moved away from the strict doctrine, lest everyone in the country be reduced to the most primitive possible economic conditions. He describes a society in which nothing works, ethics and morals collapse, and absurdities abound in every aspect of daily life. It is a priceless first-hand account.
Next come sweeping essays by David Gordon and Hans-Hermann Hoppe that get into the guts of the Marxian system and show where it went wrong from both a philosophical and economic perspective. Hoppe in particular here shows how Marx took classical liberal doctrine on the state and misapplied it in ways that contradicted all logic and experience.
Gary North provides a devastating look at Marx the man, while Ralph Raico zeros in on the Marxian doctrine of class. Finally, and as a triumphant finish, Rothbard offers a wholesale revision of the basis of Marxism. It was not economics, he says. It was the longing for a universal upheaval to overthrow all things we know about the world and replace it with a crazed fantasy based secular/religious longings. Rothbard finds all this in the unknown writings of Marx and his post-millennial predecessors in the history of ideas.
Socialism is the most important critical examination of socialism ever written. Socialism is most famous for Mises’s penetrating economic calculation argument. The book contains much more however. Mises not only shows the impossibility of socialism: he defends capitalism against the main arguments socialists and other critics have raised against it. A centrally planned system cannot substitute some other form of economic calculation for market prices, because no such alternative exists. Capitalism is true economic democracy. Socialism addresses the contemporary issues of economic inequality and argues that wealth can exist for long periods only to the extent that wealthy producers succeed in satisfying the consumers. Mises shows that there is no tendency to monopoly in a free market system. Mises analyzes reform measures, such as social security and labor legislation, which in fact serve to impede the efforts of the capitalist system to serve the masses. Socialism is a veritable encyclopedia of vital topics in the social sciences, all analyzed with Mises’s unique combination of historical erudition and penetrating insight.
This is the essay that overthrew the socialist paradigm in economics, and provided the foundation for modern Austrian price theory. When it first appeared in 1920, Mises was alone in challenging the socialists to explain how their pricing system would actually work in practice. Mises proved that socialism could not work because it could not distinguish more or less valuable uses of social resources, and predicted the system would end in chaos. The result of his proof was the two-decade-long "socialist calculation" debate.
In 1920, Ludwig von Mises dropped a bombshell on the European economic world with his article called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." It argued that socialism was impossible as an economic system. It set off two decades of debate, so by the time the essays appeared in English, in this very book here, in 1935, the debate was still raging. This volume edited by F.A. Hayek dug the knife into socialism's heart unlike any book to ever appear. It contains essays by Mises along with a foreword and afterword by Hayek. It also contains more commentary by N.G. Pierson, George Halm, and Enrico Barone. It is exceptionally well edited and beautifully argued, and has not been in print for many years. The contents are nothing short of prophetic. The so-called "Calculation Argument" has never been answered. It shows that without private property in capital goods, there can be no prices and hence no data available for cost accounting. Production becomes random at best, and completely irrational. Mises had convinced his generation and this book completely devastates the whole socialist apparatus from a theoretical point of view.
The great economist takes on Karl Marx, and his fundamental failure to understand the workings of the capital market and its relationship to value. The criticism was devastating, so much so that a leading Marxist responded, and thus herein is Rudolf Hilferding's response. It is very weak, as you will undoubtedly notice. The book is introduced by the socialist Paul Sweezy, and he too tries to rescue the Marxists from the corner into which Böhm-Bawerk drives them. So this book makes for great drama, and it is a pleasure to see the Austrian come out on top despite every effort by the compiler of the book to prevent it.
We are used to distinguishing the despotic regimes of the 20th century - communism, fascism, National Socialism, Maoism - very precisely according to place and time, origins and influences. But what should we call that which they have in common? On this question, there has been and is still a passionate debate.
This book documents the first international conference on this theme, a conference that took place in September of 1994 at the University of Munich. The book shows how new models for understanding political history arose from the experience of modern despotic regimes. Here, the most important concepts - totalitarianism and political religions - are discussed and tested in terms of their usefulness.
Available for the first time in English language translation, this is the long-awaited second volume of the three part set on Totalitarianism and Political Religions, edited by the eminent Professor Hans Maier. This represents a major study, with contributions from leading scholars of political extremism, sociology and modern history, the book shows how new models for understanding political history arose from the experience of modern despotic regimes. We are used to distinguishing the despotic regimes of the twentieth century - Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Maoism - very precisely according to place and time, origins and influences. But what should we call that which they have in common? On this question, there has been, and still is, a passionate debate. Indeed, the question seemed for a long time not even to be admissible. Clearly this state of affairs is unsatisfactory. The debate has been renewed in the past few years.
After the collapse of the communist systems in Central, East and Southern Europe, a (scarcely surveyable) mass of archival material has become available. Following the lead of Fascism and National Socialism, communist and socialist regimes throughout the world now belong to the historical past as well. This leads to the resumption of old questions: what place do modern despotisms assume in the history of the twentieth century? What is their relation to one another? Should they be captured using traditional concepts – autocracy, tyranny, despotism, dictatorship – or are new concepts required? Here, the most important concepts - totalitarianism and political religions - are discussed and tested in terms of their usefulness. This set of volumes is as topical and relevant to current world events in the twenty first century.
Available for the first time in English language translation, the third volume of Totalitarianism and Political Religions completes the set. It provides a comprehensive overview of key theories and theorists of totalitarianism and of political religions, from Hannah Arendt and Raymond Aron to Leo Strauss and Simone Weill. Edited by the eminent Professor Hans Maier, it represents a major study, examining how new models for understanding political history arose from the experience of modern despotic regimes. Where volumes one and two were concerned with questioning the common elements between twentieth century despotic regimes - Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Maoism – this volume draws a general balance. It brings together the findings of research undertaken during the decade 1992-2002 with the cooperation of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists for the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Munich. Following the demise of Italian Fascism (1943-45), German National Socialism (1945) and Soviet Communism (1989-91), a comparative approach to the three regimes is possible.
A broad field of interpretation of the entire phenomenon of totalitarian and political religions opens up. This comprehensive study examines a vast topic which affects the political and historical landscape over the whole of the last century. Moreover, dictatorships and their motivations are still present in current affairs, today in the twenty-first century. The three volumes of Totalitarianism and Political Religions are a vital resource for scholars of fascism, Nazism, communism, totalitarianism, comparative politics and political theory.
This documentary film explores the theories of Karl Marx and how they evolved as the major ideology that once dominated one third of the world. The production examines the roots of Marxism and carefully discloses the contradiction between Marx's hopes and today's reality. Marx was a vicious racist. His demonic and apocalyptic vision of destruction led to the deaths of over 100 million victims by their murderous Marxist regimes.
This biography covers the entirety of Vladimir Lenin's life, from his birth in Simbirsk in 1870 until his death in 1924. Viewers are able to see, through the events of Lenin's life, the course of discontent in Russia that led to the Russian Revolution.
Sutton was one of the 20th Century's most prodigious and incisive scholars of how the United States and its Western European allies built the Soviet Union's Military Industrial Complex. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a murderous parasitic regime responsible for the deaths of over sixty million of its own subjects by its state security forces, and over twenty seven million persons killed during the Second World War. This later devastating conflict was enabled by the duplicitous actions of Germany’s National Socialist Fuehrer Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his Politburo of killers as described in Victor Suvorov’s The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. In 1920, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises demonstrated in his path-breaking article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” that all attempts to establish socialism would not work, for reasons of informational efficiency. Because of the absence of a market-based pricing system of profit and loss, socialism could not perform the necessary economic calculation to survive.
The Soviets turned to economic parasitism through espionage, theft, and expropriation of technology from the West. It was Soviet parasitism and the transfer and theft of technology from the West which built the Soviet Military-Industrial Complex. Virtually the same complicit and compliant corporate and financial interests who enabled Nazi Germany’s warfare state, were responsible for creating this regime of terror. The authoritative volumes by Antony Sutton below definitively document these activities essential to understanding the Cold War struggle between East and West.
George Racey Jordan (January 4, 1898, New York - May 5, 1966, Los Angeles) was an American military officer, businessman, lecturer, activist, and author. He first gained nationwide attention in December 1949 when he testified to the United States Congress about wartime Lend-Lease deliveries to the Soviet Union, in the process implicating Harry Hopkins and other high officials in the transfer of nuclear and other secrets to the USSR.
Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years. “Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit,” Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience—in the China of “the Great Helmsman,” Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Vietnam under “Uncle Ho” and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah.
The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin’s destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu’s leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the widescale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao’s Red Guards. As the death toll mounts—as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.
The Gulag Archipelago: A New Foreword by Jordan B. Peterson
(Jordan Peterson: Foreword to The Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary Edition -- Visual Presentation)
The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Soviet forced labor camp system. The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968, it was published in the West in 1973 and, thereafter, circulated in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the Russian literary journal, Novy Mir, in 1989, in which a third of the work was published over three issues. GULag or Gulág is an acronym for the Russian term Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovyh Lagerey (Главное Управление Исправительно-трудовых Лагерей), or "Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps", the bureaucratic name of the governing board of the Soviet labour camp system, and by metonymy, the camp system itself.
The original Russian title of the book is Arkhipelag GuLag, the rhyme supporting the underlying metaphor deployed throughout the work. The word archipelago compares the system of labor camps spread across the Soviet Union with a vast "chain of islands", known only to those who were fated to visit them. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published, and it has been included in the high school program in Russia as mandatory reading since 2009.
Alexander Gray (1882–1968) was a British economist with a particularly keen appreciation of the Austrian contribution to the history of ideas. As with others of his generation, he was super well-educated and an outstanding stylist of the English language. Even by standards of his time, Professor Gray excelled in depth of research and clarity of prose, and his classic treatise on the history of ideas is a prime example: it is a real page turner from first to last. It was also Rothbard's own favorite book on socialism, next to Mises's own. "Alexander Gray is my favorite historian of economic thought," wrote Rothbard. "Gray's demolition of socialist writers was apt and devastating. Gray was also a poet and a translator of poetry into the Scottish language; and we find that his translations into broad Scots of European ballads and of Heine were sensitive and much admired."
Shafarevich's book The Socialist Phenomenon, which was published in the US by Harper & Row in 1980, analyzes numerous examples of socialism, from ancient times, through various medieval heresies, to a variety of modern thinkers and socialist states. From these examples he claims that all the basic principles of socialist ideology derive from the urge to suppress individuality. The Socialist Phenomenon consists of three major parts: 1, Chiliastic Socialism: Identifies socialist ideas amongst the ancient Greeks, especially Plato, and in numerous medieval heretic groups such as the Cathars, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Taborites, Anabaptists, and various religious groups in the English Civil War, and modern writers such as Thomas More, Campanella, and numerous Enlightenment writers in 18th-century France. 2. State Socialism: Describes the socialism of the Incas, the Jesuit state in Paraguay, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. 3. Analysis: Identifies three persistent abolition themes in socialism - the abolition of private property, the abolition of the family, and the abolition of religion (mainly, but not exclusively Christianity) Shafarevich argues that ancient socialism (such as Mesopotamia and Egypt) was not ideological, as an ideology socialism was a reaction to the emergence of individualism in the Axial Age. He compares Thomas More's (Utopia) and Campanella's (City of the Sun) visions with what is known about the Inca Empire, and concludes that there are striking similarities. He claims that we become persons through our relationship with God, and argues that socialism is essentially nihilistic, unconsciously motivated by a death instinct. He concludes that we have the choice of either pursuing death or life.
The God That Failed is a 1949 book which collects together six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous ex-communists, who were writers and journalists. The common theme of the essays is the authors' disillusionment with and abandonment of communism. The book jacket for the 2001 edition says it "brings together essays by six of the most important writers of the twentieth century on their conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism." The six contributors were Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright. Richard Crossman, the British Member of Parliament who conceived and edited the volume, at one point approached the famous American ex-communist Whittaker Chambers about contributing an essay to the book. At the time Chambers was still employed by Time magazine, having not yet gone public with his charges against Alger Hiss, and so declined to participate.
The book contains Fischer's definition of "Kronstadt" as the moment in which some communists or fellow-travelers decide not just to leave the Communist Party but to oppose it as anti-communists. Editor Crossman said in the book's introduction: "The Kronstadt rebels called for Soviet power free from Bolshevik dominance" (p. x). After describing the actual Kronstadt rebellion, Fischer spent many pages applying the concept to some subsequent former communists—including himself: "What counts decisively is the 'Kronstadt.' Until its advent, one may waver emotionally or doubt intellectually or even reject the cause altogether in one's mind and yet refuse to attack it. I had no 'Kronstadt' for many years" (p. 204). Writers who subsequently picked up the term have included Whittaker Chambers, Clark Kerr, David Edgar, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Norman Podhoretz.
He was American Communist Party General Secretary, Communist International executive committee member who courageously revealed the true nature of subversion, infiltration & Stalinist control of the CPUSA.
Mr. Burris owns a signed edition of this rare book.
Edmund Wilson's magnum opus, To the Finland Station, is a stirring account of revolutionary politics, people, and ideas from the French Revolution through the Paris Commune to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. It is a work of history on a grand scale, at once sweeping and detailed, closely reasoned and passionately argued, that succeeds in painting an unforgettable picture--alive with conspirators and philosophers, utopians and nihilists--of the making of the modern world. Critical and historical study of European writers and theorists of socialism who set the stage for the Russian Revolution of 1917, by Edmund Wilson. It was published in book form in 1940 although much of the material had previously appeared in The New Republic.
The work discusses European socialism, anarchism, and various theories of revolution from their origins to their implementation. It presents ideas and writings of political theorists representing all aspects of socialist, anarchist, and what would later be known as communist thought, among them Jules Michelet, Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, Mikhail Bakunin, Anatole France, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Ilich Lenin--who arrived at Petrograd's (St. Petersburg's) Finland Station in 1917 to lead the Bolshevik revolution.
An American journalist and revolutionary writer, John Reed became a close friend of Lenin and was an eyewitness to the 1917 revolution in Russia. Ten Days That Shook the World is Reed's extraordinary record of that event. Writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, he gives a gripping account of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. Containing verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and of the chance comments of bystanders, and set against an idealized backdrop of soldiers, sailors, peasants, and the proletariat uniting to throw off oppression, Reed's account is the product of passionate involvement and remains an unsurpassed classic of reporting. John Reed (1887-1920) American journalist and poet-adventurer whose colorful life as a revolutionary writer ended in Russia but made him the hero of a generation of radical intellectuals.
Reed became a close friend of V. I. Lenin and was an eyewitness to the 1917 October revolution. He recorded this historical event in his best-known book Ten Days That Shook the World (1920). Reed is buried with other Bolshevik heroes beside the Kremlin wall.
The Soviet Story is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people by the tens of millions on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now… The film tells the horrific story of the Soviet regime: The Great Famine in Ukraine (1932/33) which murdered million; the ideological compatibility of German National Socialism and Soviet Marxism/Leninism and their social engineering attempts to create “a new man; The Nazi SS-Soviet NKVD secret police partnership and collaboration; the Hitler/Stalin Non-Aggression Pact and the subsequent joint invasion of Poland in September 1939 as allies; the Katyn massacre of Polish officers (1940); Soviet mass deportations of millions during WWII; Medical experiments in the Soviet GULAG comparable to those in the Nazi concentration camps.
Exceptional six part BBC documentary series based on archival information obtained after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Shows the true barbaric nature of the conflict and the duplicity of all major leaders by dramatic reenactments of behind the scenes meetings.
Episode 1 examines the back story of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Battle of Poland together with the planning and start of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union of 1941.
Episode 2 explores the relationship between the Soviet Union and Great Britain during the war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Allied plans for a Western front in Europe.
Episode 3 features the Moscow Conference between Stalin and Churchill and two battles on the Eastern Front: Stalingrad and Kursk.
Episode 4 covers the Tehran Conference, the first between the "Big Three;" the D-Day Normandy invasion in France; and the Warsaw Uprising in Poland.
Episode 5 details the Battle of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, the Yalta Conference, the push to Berlin, and the victory over Germany from the perspective of Allied nations.
Episode 6 focuses on Operation August Storm, the end to the Pacific War, the Potsdam Conference, the fall from grace of Zhukov and Molotov, the 1953 death of Stalin, to the eventual fall of communist influence with the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The history of left-wing violence, forced labor camps and mass murder is often obscured by traditional media and modern academia. The body-count left in the wake of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong illustrated the dangers of communism, socialism and totalitarian leftist ideology overall. Mike Cernovich joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and the important historical lessons which much be learned to prevent the spread of violence in modern times.
This six part series, produced by Alexandre Ivankin at Contact Studio, Moscow, uses never before released films from the Russian archives and personal interviews to tell the true story of the annihilation of approximately 40 million Russians by Stalin. Stalin marshalls Soviet media to manipulate the minds of his population. All organs of communication are taken under Stalin's control, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theater, cinema and architecture--even opera and ballet. Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in the Georgian town of Gori in 1879. He was an early activist in the Bolshevik movement, where he first assumed the pseudonym Stalin (which means "man of steel").
He was named General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922, a post Stalin used to fortify his power base. When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, a struggle for control broke out hat pitted Stalin against his nemesis, Leon Trotsky, and a host of lesser party figures. Stalin's victory was slow and hard-fought, but by 1927 he had succeeded in having Trotsky expelled from the party. By 1928, Stalin was entrenched as supreme Soviet leader, and he wasted little time in launching a series of national campaigns (the so-called Five-Year Plans) aimed at "collectivizing" the peasantry and turning the USSR into a powerful industrial state. Both campaigns featured murder on a massive scale.
The millions of deaths in Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" (the network of labour camps [gulags] scattered across the length and breath of Russia) were a consequence of Stalin's drive for total control, and his pressing need for convict labour to fuel rapid industrialization. For Stalin, dissident viewpoints represented an unacceptable threat. This was the origin of the "cult of personality" that permeated Soviet politics and culture, depicting Stalin as infallible, almost deity-like. Beginning in 1935, the series of immense internal purges sent millions of party members and ordinary individuals to their deaths, either through summary executions or in the atrocious conditions of the "Gulag Archipelago." Soviet institutions and sectors like the Communist Party, the Army, the NKVD, and scientists and engineers were decimated by these purges.
The "Old Bolshevik" elite was targeted in three key "show trials" between 1936 and 1938, in which leaders such as Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Grigori Zinoviev were accused of conspiring with Trotskyite elements to undermine communism in the USSR. When the "Old Bolsheviks" had been consigned to oblivion, their successors and replacements quickly followed them. The destruction of the officer corps, about 35,000 military officers shot or imprisoned, and, in particular the execution of the brilliant chief-of-staff Marshal Tukhachevsky, is considered one of the major reasons for the spectacular Nazi successes in the early months of the German invasion in WWII. The impetus to "cleanse" the social body rapidly spilled beyond these elite boundaries, and the greatest impact of the Purge was felt in the wider society. Relatives of those accused and arrested, including wives and children down to the age of twelve, were themselves often condemned under the "counter-terrorism" legislation.
With the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet scholars like Edvard Radzinsky and Dmitri Volkogonov have published prominent exposés of Stalinist rule, based on newly-opened archives . And the estimates of the death toll arrived at by Robert Conquest and others, long denounced as craven exaggerations, have been shown instead to be, if anything, understated. See the works of Robert Conquest, and Aleksandr Solhenitsyn.
In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."
The "rivetingly told" (Times Literary Supplement) story of the CIA's Cold War cultural operations, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders presents for the first time the shocking evidence that the CIA infiltrated every niche of the cultural sphere during the postwar years. In a "hammer-blow of a book" (The Spectator, London) drawing together recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews, the author narrates the extraordinary story of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were instruments of America's secret service. The CIA's front organizations and the philanthropic foundations that channeled its money organized conferences, founded magazines, ran congresses, mounted exhibitions, arranged concerts, and flew symphony orchestras around the world. Many of the period's foremost intellectuals, artists, and philanthropists appear in the book: Isaiah Berlin, Clement Greenberg, Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, Robert Lowell, Henry Luce, Andr Malraux, Mary McCarthy, Reinhold Neibuhr, George Orwell, Jackson Pollock, Nelson Rockefeller, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Stephen Spender, among others. While many were unwitting participants in the CIA's cultural operation, others were willing collaborators. In this expose of covert patronage unprecedented in modern history, recently short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, Saunders has created "a crucial story" (The Times, London) that is "quite unputdownable" (Literary Review).
Colonel Prouty served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. He spent 9 of his 23 year military career in the Pentagon (1955-1964): 2 years with the Secretary of Defense, 2 years with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and 5 years with Headquarters, U.S. Air Force. In 1955 he was appointed the first "Focal Point" officer between the CIA and the Air Force for Clandestine Operations per National Security Council Directive 5412. He was Briefing Officer for the Secretary of Defense (1960-1961), and for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At times he would be called to meet with CIA director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at their homes on highly classified business. He was assigned to attend MKULTRA meetings.
In this capacity Colonel Prouty would be at the nerve center of the Military-Industrial Complex at a time unequaled in American History. He has written on these subjects, about the JFK assassination, the Cold War period, and Vietnamese warfare, and the existence of a "Secret Team". He backs up his work with seldom seen or mentioned official documents - some never before released. In Oliver Stone’s highly acclaimed film, JFK, the mysterious character ‘X’ portrayed by Donald Sutherland was in fact Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who assisted director Stone in the production and scripting of this historical epic. Prouty had relayed the shocking information detailed in the movie to the actual New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Cosner) in a series of communiques. Fletcher Prouty was the author of two excellent books, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy.
The Dulles–Jackson–Correa Report (also known as Intelligence Survey Group (ISG) and the Dulles Report) was one of the most influential evaluations of the functioning of the United States Intelligence Community, and in particular, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The report focused primarily on the coordination and organization of the CIA and offered suggestions that refined the US intelligence effort in the early stages of the Cold War.
In 1967 the magazine Ramparts ran an expos? revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding and managing a wide range of citizen front groups intended to counter communist influence around the world. In addition to embarrassing prominent individuals caught up, wittingly or unwittingly, in the secret superpower struggle for hearts and minds, the revelations of 1967 were one of the worst operational disasters in the history of American intelligence and presaged a series of public scandals from which the CIA's reputation has arguably never recovered. CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his "mighty Wurlitzer," on which he could play any propaganda tune. In this illuminating book, Hugh Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America's Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s. Covering the intelligence officers who masterminded the CIA's fronts as well as the involved citizen groups--?migr?s, labor, intellectuals, artists, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists--Wilford provides a surprising analysis of Cold War society that contains valuable lessons for our own age of global conflict.
Until now, many sinister events that transpired in the clash of the world’s superpowers at the close of World War II and the ensuing Cold War era have been ignored, distorted, and kept hidden from the public. Through a meticulous examination of primary sources and disclosure of formerly secret records, this riveting account of the widespread infiltration of the federal government by Stalin’s “agents of influence” and the damage they inflicted will shock readers.
Focusing on the wartime conferences of Teheran and Yalta, veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans and intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein, the former head of the U.S. Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation, draw upon years of research and a meticulous examination of primary sources to trace the vast deception that kept Stalin’s henchmen on the federal payroll and sabotaged policy overseas in favor of the Soviet Union. While FDR’s health and mental capacities weakened, aides such as Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins exerted pro-Red influence on U.S. policy—leading to massive breaches of internal security and the betrayal of free-world interests. Along with revealing the extent to which the Soviet threat was obfuscated or denied, this in-depth analysis exposes the rigging of at least two grand juries and the subsequent multilayered cover-up to protect those who let the infiltration happen. Countless officials of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations turned a blind eye to the penetration problem. The documents and facts presented in this thoroughly researched exposé indict in historical retrospect the people responsible for these corruptions of justice.
Accused of creating a bogus Red Scare and smearing countless innocent victims in a five-year reign of terror, Senator Joseph McCarthy is universally remembered as a demagogue, a bully, and a liar. History has judged him such a loathsome figure that even today, a half century after his death, his name remains synonymous with witch hunts.
But that conventional image is all wrong, as veteran journalist and author M. Stanton Evans reveals in this groundbreaking book. The long-awaited Blacklisted by History, based on six years of intensive research, dismantles the myths surrounding Joe McCarthy and his campaign to unmask Communists, Soviet agents, and flagrant loyalty risks working within the U.S. government. Evans’s revelations completely overturn our understanding of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.
Drawing on primary sources—including never-before-published government records and FBI files, as well as recent research gleaned from Soviet archives and intercepted transmissions between Moscow spymasters and their agents in the United States—Evans presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration. All of this was precisely as Joe McCarthy contended.
Blacklisted by History shows, for instance, that the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, had been identified by Communist leaders as a party member; that high-level U.S. officials were warned that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy almost a decade before the Hiss case became a public scandal; that a cabal of White House, Justice Department, and State Department officials lied about and covered up the Amerasia spy case; and that the State Department had been heavily penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents before McCarthy came on the scene.
Evans also shows that practically everything we’ve been told about McCarthy is false, including conventional treatment of the famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched the McCarthy era (“I have here in my hand . . .”), the Senate hearings that casually dismissed his charges, the matter of leading McCarthy suspect Owen Lattimore, the Annie Lee Moss case, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and much more.
In the end, Senator McCarthy was censured by his colleagues and condemned by the press and historians. But as Evans writes, “The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.” Blacklisted by History provides the first accurate account of what McCarthy did and, more broadly, what happened to America during the Cold War. It is a revealing exposé of the forces that distorted our national policy in that conflict and our understanding of its history since.
The Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (The Doolittle Report) is a 69-page formerly classified comprehensive study on the personnel, security, adequacy, and efficacy of the Central Intelligence Agency written by Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle. United States President Dwight Eisenhower requested the report in July 1954 at the height of the Cold War and following coups in Iran and Guatemala. The report compares with other contemporary Cold War documents such as George Kennan's "X" article in Foreign Affairs, which recommended a policy of "containment" rather than direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, and NSC-68, the secret policy document produced in 1950, which recommended a similarly restrained policy of “gradual coercion.”
Doolittle wrote with an abandon-all-principles approach that conveyed the national fear that the United States faced the prospect of annihilation at the hands of the Soviet Union: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost,” Doolittle wrote. “There are no rules in such a game… If the United States is to survive, long standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Doolittle’s forceful policy and language reflected the fear that motivated American citizens and policymakers in the wake of Soviet communism.
The Sword and the Shield is based on one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of recent times: a secret archive of top-level KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union which the FBI has described, after close examination, as the "most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network. Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident who worked in the KGB archive, smuggled out copies of its most highly classified files every day for twelve years. In 1992, a U.S. ally succeeded in exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow.
The archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the world. But the KGB's main target, of course, was the United States.Though there is top-secret material on almost every country in the world, the United States is at the top of the list. As well as containing many fascinating revelations, this is a major contribution to the secret history of the twentieth century.Among the topics and revelations explored are: The KGB's covert operations in the United States and throughout the West, some of which remain dangerous today. KGB files on Oswald and the JFK assassination that Boris Yeltsin almost certainly has no intention of showing President Clinton. The KGB's attempts to discredit civil rights leader in the 1960s, including its infiltration of the inner circle of a key leader.
The KGB's use of radio intercept posts in New York and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s to intercept high-level U.S. government communications. The KGB's attempts to steal technological secrets from major U.S. aerospace and technology corporations. KGB covert operations against former President Ronald Reagan, which began five years before he became president. KGB spies who successfully posed as U.S. citizens under a series of ingenious disguises, including several who attained access to the upper echelons of New York society.
The Venona Secrets presents one of the last great, untold stories of World War II and the Cold War. In 1995 the Venona documents secret Soviet cable traffic from the 1940s that the United States intercepted and eventually decrypted finally became available to American historians. Now, after spending more than five years researching all the available evidence, espionage experts Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel reveal the full, shocking story of the days when Soviet spies ran their fingers through America s atomic-age secrets.
Included in The Venona Secrets are the details of the spying activities that reached from Harry Hopkins in Franklin Roosevelt s White House to Alger Hiss in the State Department to Harry Dexter White in the Treasury. More than that, The Venona Secrets exposes: information that links Albert Einstein to Soviet intelligence and conclusive evidence showing that J. Robert Oppenheimer gave Moscow our atomic secrets How Soviet espionage reached its height when the United States and the Soviet Union were supposedly allies in World War II The previously unsuspected vast network of Soviet spies in America How the Venona documents confirm the controversial revelations made in the 1940s by former Soviet agents Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley.
The role of the American Communist Party in supporting and directing Soviet agents How Stalin s paranoia had him target Jews (code-named Rats ) and Trotskyites even after Trotsky s death How the Soviets penetrated America s own intelligence services The Venona Secrets is a masterful compendium of spy versus spy that puts the Venona transcripts in context with secret FBI reports, congressional investigations, and documents recently uncovered in the former Soviet archives. Romerstein and Breindel cast a spotlight on one of the most shadowy episodes in recent American history a past when treason infected Washington and Soviet agents were shielded, either wittingly or unwittingly, by our very own government officials.
The Venona secret US army project of the 1940's was a monumental achievement in this history of American code breaking and one of the America's most closely guarded secrets. This book exposes the greatest domestic counter-espionage operation that has ever been launched against the Soviet Union.
"The best book ever written about the strangest CIA chief who ever lived." - Tim Weiner, National Book Award-winning author of Legacy of Ashes
A revelatory new biography of the sinister, powerful, and paranoid man at the heart of the CIA for more than three tumultuous decades.
CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton was one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States government in the mid-20th century, a ghost of American power. From World War II to the Cold War, Angleton operated beyond the view of the public, Congress, and even the president. He unwittingly shared intelligence secrets with Soviet spy Kim Philby, a member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring. He launched mass surveillance by opening the mail of hundreds of thousands of Americans. He abetted a scheme to aid Israel’s own nuclear efforts, disregarding U.S. security. He committed perjury and obstructed the JFK assassination investigation. He oversaw a massive spying operation on the antiwar and black nationalist movements and he initiated an obsessive search for communist moles that nearly destroyed the Agency.
In The Ghost, investigative reporter Jefferson Morley tells Angleton’s dramatic story, from his friendship with the poet Ezra Pound through the underground gay milieu of mid-century Washington to the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate scandal. From the agency’s MKULTRA mind-control experiments to the wars of the Mideast, Angleton wielded far more power than anyone knew. Yet during his seemingly lawless reign in the CIA, he also proved himself to be a formidable adversary to our nation’s enemies, acquiring a mythic stature within the CIA that continues to this day.
Using primarily information provided in the Navy's official investigation of the death of America's first Secretary of Defense, which had been kept secret for 55 years,The Assassinationof James Forrestal thoroughly demolishes the widely believed view that Forrestal's fall from a 16th-floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 22, 1949, was an act of suicide. The official report, in fact, did not conclude that Forrestal committed suicide. It concluded only that the fall caused his death and that no one in the U.S. Navy was responsible for it. A major reason why the suicide thesis is still widely believed is that the news of the release of the official report, which the author obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2004, has been effectively suppressed.
Building upon what he has long made available on his DCDave.com web site, and in the manner of his 2018 book,The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, co-authored with Hugh Turley, David Martin breaks through the wall of silence and misinformation. This meticulous examination of the violent death of the leading government critic of American support for the creation of the state of Israel is vital to an understanding of U.S. and world history since the mid-20th century.
Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama -- the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history. The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party.
The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And because the Party's call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party organizers faced a constant wave of violence. Kelley's analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party's challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing, interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama Communist Party's demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism.
Excellent archive of articles, books, and speeches by one of most authoritative experts on Soviet espionage, counter-intelligence and KGB/GRU penetration of American domestic institutions.
It has long been known that Richard Nixon, in his interrogation of Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, was being fed information by FBI agents acting with the approval of J. Edgar Hoover. This essay will argue that Nixon also received assistance from the Dulles brothers, especially in a key meeting between the three men on August 11, 1948, five days before White’s untimely and disputed death
Left-wing historians' sympathy for American communism is an example of ideological bias and self-deception comparable to Holocaust denial, according to this uncompromising manifesto. Haynes and Klehr, historians and authors of The Secret World of American Communism, rehash major Cold War controversies-including Moscow's financial subsidies to the American Communist Party, the espionage cases against the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, and American communists' support for the Hitler-Stalin pact-in light of material from recently opened Soviet archives. But their focus is on the response of what they see as a left-wing "revisionist" academic establishment to new revelations about Stalin's crimes and American communists' subservience to Moscow.
Taking on leading history journals and prominent scholars like Ellen Schrecker, Eric Foner and Victor Navasky, the authors accuse revisionists of ignoring, downplaying and distorting the mounting evidence of communist espionage and subversion in the United States. Instead of facing facts, they argue, revisionists have propagated a mythology of American communism as a benign, idealistic, home-grown progressive movement destroyed by McCarthyite persecution, a caricature that "resembles more the chaotic New Left of the late 1960s than the rigid Leninist party it was." The authors champion a liberal, anticommunist "traditionalist" historiography, asserting that America's post-war campaign against communist subversion (McCarthy's excesses aside) was "a rational and understandable response to a real danger to American democracy."
While their confrontational tone and penchant for academic score-settling will inflame rather than settle these rancorous debates, their incisive analysis and meticulous attention to evidence make this a formidable rejoinder to left-wing orthodoxies.
In this definitive history of the evolution of the Communist party in America—from its early background through its founding in 1919 to its emergence as a legal entity in the 1920s—Theodore Draper traces the native and foreign strains that comprised the party, its shifting policies, and its secret as well as its open activities. He makes clear how the party in its infancy “was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power.”
“An outstanding contribution to knowledge and understanding of the Communist movement in this country.”—George F. Kennan.
“Provides the indispensable foundations for any understanding of American communism. Mr. Draper has unraveled the knotted threads of factionalism…and has presented the story with clarity, insight, and objectivity. He has woven all aspects—doctrinal, organizational, personal—into a coherent critical narrative.”—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., New York Times.
“An uncommonly good book.”—Sidney Hook.
For the first time, the hidden world of American communism can be examined with the help of documents from the recently opened archives of the former Soviet Union. Interweaving narrative and documents, the authors of this book present a convincing new picture of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), providing proof that it was involved in espionage and other subversive activities. At the same time, they disclose fascinating details about the workings of the party and about the ordinary Americans and CPUSA leaders who participated in its clandestine activities.
"A formidable achievement in archival research. No one will be able to write about the cpusa in the future without reference to this volume."-Maurice Isserman, Nation
"A memorable, powerful book. . . . One of this year's most significant books about twentieth-century American political history."-David J. Garrow, New York Newsday
"This book contains the first new revelation about American Communism in a generation. It is superbly edited and admirably presented. No one interested in the history of the American Communism can afford to miss it."-Theodore Draper Harvey Klehr, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University, is also the author of The Heyday of American Communism. John Earl Haynes is a specialist in twentieth-century American history at the Library of Congress. Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov is formerly of the Comintern Archive at the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History
Drawing on documents newly available from Russian archives, this important book conclusively demonstrates the continuous and intimate ties between the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and Moscow. Digging even deeper than the authors` earlier volume, The Secret World of American Communism, it conclusively demonstrates that the CPUSA was little more than a pawn of the Soviet regime.
This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account.
Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, Spies resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. Spies also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.
Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white hot anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the U.S. State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss-Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia and others) and the often-frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counter-espionage.
Drawing on secret and therefore candid coded telegraphs exchanged between Communist Party leaders around the world and their overseers at the Communist International (Comintern) headquarters in Moscow, this book uncovers key aspects of the history of the Comintern and its significant role in the Stalinist ruling system during the years 1933 to 1943. New information on aspects of the People’s Front in France, civil wars in Spain and China, World War II, and the extent of the Comintern’s cooperation with Soviet intelligence is brought to light through these archival records, never examined before.
The Amerasia affair was the first of the great spy cases of the postwar era. In June 1945, six people associated with the magazine Amerasia were arrested by the FBI and accused of espionage on behalf of the Chinese Communists. But only two, the editor of Amerasia and a minor government employee, were convicted of any offense, and their convictions were merely for unauthorized possession of government documents. Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh provide a full-scale history of the first public drama featuring charges that respectable American citizens had spied for the Communists.The Amerasia case remained a staple in American political life for the next half-decade. It provoked charges by conservatives of a cover-up of extensive Communist infiltration of the government and accusations by liberals of a witch-hunt designed to intimidate the press. And it played a significant role in the hearings held to examine Senator Joseph McCarthy's charge that the State Department had been infiltrated by a clique of 'card carrying Communists.' Klehr and Radosh, the first researchers to have obtained the FBI files on the case, show that a cover-up was indeed orchestrated by prominent government officials.
Duck and Cover is a civil defense social guidance film. Film production started in 1951 and it gained its first public screening in January 1952 during the era after the Soviet Union began nuclear testing in 1949 and the Korean War (1950–53) was in full swing. Funded by the US Federal Civil Defense Administration, it was written by Raymond J. Mauer, directed by Anthony Rizzo of Archer Productions, narrated by actor Robert Middleton and made with the help of schoolchildren from New York City and Astoria, New York. It was shown in schools as the cornerstone of the government's "duck and cover" public awareness campaign, being aired to generations of United States school children from the early 1950s until 1991, which marked the end of the Cold War.
One of the defining documentaries of the 20th century, The Atomic Cafe offers a darkly humorous glimpse into mid-century America, an era rife with paranoia, anxiety, and misapprehension. Whimsical and yet razor-sharp, this timeless classic illuminates the often comic paradoxes of life in the Atomic Age, while also exhibiting a genuine nostalgia for an earlier and more innocent nation. Narrated through an astonishing array of vintage clips and music (from military training films to campy advertisements, presidential speeches to pop songs) the film revolves around the threat (and thrill) of the newly minted atomic bomb.
Taking aim at the propaganda and false optimism of the 1950s, the film's satire shines most vividly in the clever image splicing, such as footage of a decimated Hiroshima alongside cheerful suburban duck-and-cover routines. More than anything else, The Atomic Cafe shows how nuclear warfare infiltrated the living rooms of America, changing the nation from the inside out. Immensely entertaining and devilishly witty, The Atomic Cafe serves up a revealing slice of American history: the legendary decade when we learned to live in a nuclear world.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a joint Norwegian-British film, based on the novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with the same name and released in 1970. The Norwegian title is En dag i Ivan Denisovitsj' liv. The movie stars Tom Courtenay as the title character, a prisoner in the Soviet gulag system of the 1950s who endures a long prison sentence. It tells of one routine day in his life. Finnish film director Jörn Donner tried to get the film to Finland, but the Finnish Board of Film banned the showing of the film.
In 1972 Donner complained to Supreme Administrative Court of Finland. The Supreme Administrative Court voted for the banning 5-4 on 28 February 1972. When, in 1972 and 1974, Swedish television showed the film, the Swedish television mast on the Åland Islands was subsequently shut down during the movie to prevent Finns from seeing the film. Director of the Finnish Board of Film Jerker Eeriksson said that the banning of the film was political because it harmed the Finnish-Soviet relationship. Director of the film Caspar Wrede, who then lived in England, refused to campaign against the banning in order to avoid bad publicity abroad.
The film was shown in Finland in 1993 and 1994 in the movie theater Orion in Helsinki, as well as in the cinema club in Vaasa. Finnish television showed the film in 1996 on the TV1 YLE channel.
The end of Soviet communism has given Westerners unprecedented access to Moscow's historical resources. Various archives have been opened and living witnesses to history are suddenly prepared to tell their stories, even in front of foreign television cameras. The abundance of new information coming straight from the horse's mouth is unlikely, however, to settle American debates about the origins and nature of the Cold War. History is an imprecise science allowing for a variety of interpretations--particularly when those doing the interpreting have a strong predisposition, or even a vested interest, in seeing things a certain way. This program provides documentary evidence and interviews which reveal Stalin's game plan in post-World War II Europe.
This program examines the myth of monolithic Communism; the rise of Mao and Communism in China in 1949; the background of the Kremlin's role in the Korean War; the death of Josef Stalin and the rise of Khrushchev in the Soviet Union; the Chinese reaction to Khrushchev's secret speech condemning Stalin and the cult of personality at the 20th Party Congress in 1956; the horrific tragedy of the Great Leap Forward in the cost of lives; and the Sino-Soviet Split between the People's Republic of China and the USSR.
It is one of the ill-kept secrets of America's intelligence agencies -- for decades, they have worked virtually non-stop to perfect means of controlling the human mind. But while many have suspected the existence of these projects, the details have long been preserved. Mind Control blows the lid off years of chilling experiments, drawing on documents reluctantly released through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with some of the victims, including a woman whose past was literally taken away.
Hear from John Marks, the author of In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, who broke the story of the CIA's abuses by unraveling the mysteries contained in financial records. All the other records pertaining to the experiments were destroyed by the agency in an attempt to prevent the details from ever being known.
Mr. Burris met John Marks in 1983 and discussed his book and the dangerous consequences of mind control with him.
An ITV Yorkshire (UK) documentary originally broadcast in 1993 about the secret chemical experiments carried out at Edgewood Arsenal on unsuspecting volunteers from the US military.
This 1979 ABC News documentary delves into the CIA's secret MKULTRA project which experimented with various purported mind control techniques including giving soldiers and others LSD and various other drug concoctions.
A 'Manchurian Candidate' is an unwitting assassin brainwashed and programmed to kill. In this book, former State Department officer John Marks tells the explosive story of the CIA's highly secret program of experiments in mind control. His curiosity first aroused by information on a puzzling suicide. Marks worked from thousands of pages of newly released documents as well as interviews and behavioral science studies, producing a book that 'accomplished what two Senate committees could not' (Senator Edward Kennedy).
“Perhaps the most compelling, well-researched, organized and well-written account of CIA operations ever.” (Progressive);
“A comprehensive, detailed and thoroughly readable account of the CIA safehouses, the brainwashing experiments, the involvement of the universities.” (Washington Monthly)
Mr. Burris met John Marks in 1983 and discussed his book and the dangerous consequences of mind control with him.
Operation Mind Control -- an investigative report into government mind control through the use of drugs such as LSD, behavior modification, hypnosis, and other “psycho-weapons”. Bowarts «Operation Mind Control: The Cryptocracys Plan to Psychocivilize You» is a classic in the annals of conspiracy research. It is a disturbing account of the secret use of mind control technology, by a secret government (or «cryptocracy»), with an aim to pacifying whole populations and furthering private global-investment strategies.
Meticulously researched and well-written, it remains - even today - one of the best books on the topic.
Nikita Khrushchev becomes Soviet leader after the death of Stalin. Khrushchev rolls back a number of oppressive measures that existed under Stalin, restores relations with Yugoslavia and redirects resources to consumer needs. In a secret speech to the Soviet leadership he condemns Stalin's ruthless rule. West Germany is allowed to rearm, provoking the formation of the Warsaw Pact. Khruschev still wants Eastern Europe to remain within the Soviet orbit - he sends in troops to quell revolts in East Germany, Poland and, most significantly, Hungary. Interviewees include Anatoly Dobrynin, Charles Wheeler and Sergei Khrushchev. .
The Power Elite is a 1956 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills, in which Mills calls attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggests that the ordinary citizen is a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those entities. According to Mills, the eponymous "power elite" are those that occupy the dominant positions, in the dominant institutions (military, economic and political) of a dominant country, and their decisions (or lack of decisions) have enormous consequences, not only for the U.S. population but, "the underlying populations of the world."
The institutions which they head, Mills posits, are a triumvirate of groups that have succeeded weaker predecessors:
(1) "two or three hundred giant corporations" which have replaced the traditional agrarian and craft economy,
(2) a strong federal political order that has inherited power from "a decentralized set of several dozen states" and "now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure," and
(3) the military establishment, formerly an object of "distrust fed by state militia," but now an entity with "all the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain."
. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, more commonly known as Dr. Strangelove, is a 1964 political satire black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the USSR and the USA. The film was directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, stars Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, and features Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, and Slim Pickens. Production took place in the United Kingdom. The film is loosely based on Peter George's thriller novel Red Alert.
The story concerns an unhinged United States Air Force general who orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It follows the President of the United States, his advisers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer as they try to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. It separately follows the crew of one B-52 bomber as they try to deliver their payload. Dr. Strangelove is widely regarded as one of cinema's greatest comedies.
In 1989, the United States Library of Congress included it in the first group of films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It was listed as number three on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list.
Evaluate how this episode establishes the political and social context of the sixties generation. Examines the young parents of the 1950's in pursuit of the American Dream, their values shaped by the Depression, World War II, the Cold War and McCarthyism. Looks at how their children's generation began to bond together in rebellion against a restrictive set of societal rules, shaping the decade to come. Additionally it shows what life was like for blacks as the civil rights movement emerged.
Evaluate how this episode examines the heady idealism of the 1960's when it seemed possible that youth could change the world; when more teenagers entered college than ever before; when John F. Kennedy inspired social and political activism on both the left and the right; and when the civil rights movement reached a peak of influence, involvement and momentum.
JFK offers a new perspective on his complicated private life, including his relationship with his wife, his close connection to his younger brother, Robert, and his complex bond with his powerful father. It also reevaluates Kennedy's strengths and weaknesses in the Oval Office as he navigated some of the most explosive events of the mid-twentieth century--the disastrous failure at the Bay of Pigs, the urgent demands of an increasingly impatient civil rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the escalating conflict in Southeast Asia.
PBS American Experience presents a fresh look at an enigmatic man who remains one of the nation's most beloved and mourned leaders, John F. Kennedy. Beginning with Kennedy's childhood years as the privileged but sickly son of one of the wealthiest men in America, the film explores his early political career as a lackluster congressman, his successful run for the U.S. Senate, and the game-changing presidential campaign that made him the youngest elected president in U.S. history. With the benefit of recently opened archives, the film recounts his struggles with life-threatening illnesses, and his efforts to keep them hidden from the public.
This ABC News documentary, JFK Remembered, narrated by Peter Jennings, presents "the Good JFK."
This ABC News documentary, Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years, narrated by Peter Jennings, presents "the Bad JFK."
This monumental work of investigative journalism reveals the Kennedy White House as never before. With its meticulously documented & compulsively readable portrait of John F. Kennedy as a man whose reckless personal behavior imperiled his presidency, The Dark Side of Camelot sparked a firestorm of controversy upon its initial publication - becoming a runaway bestseller & one of the year's most talked-about books. Now in paperback, this watershed work will continue to provoke public discussion as the debate intensifies over what constitutes proper personal & political behavior on the part of our nation's leaders.
Frank hard-hitting investigative journalism at its best by Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, provided the basis for Peter Jennings' excellent ABC News documentary, Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years. Hersh forever destroys the myth of Camelot and details JFK's relationship to an underworld subculture of gangsters, prostitutes, payoffs, drugs, and corruption. Gus Russo was a key researcher for Hersh and the ABC News project. There are direct research connections leading to his own volume , The Outfit, particularly in regards to Joseph P. Kennedy's deal with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana using labor racketeering to fix the 1960 presidential election of JFK.
This is a film about the real John F. Kennedy, the President who was prepared to risk his political career in return for sex. In a terrible irony, as the American Press finally braced itself to reveal the story in 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas. It took his life, but it may have saved his reputation. Using new documentary evidence and recently-released FBI files, the film reveals his long string of affairs and lovers. His recklessness, and his belief that he was untouchable, threatened to lead to his political downfall. By the autumn of 1963, the American press was on the brink of exposing him. In Britain, a sex and spying scandal caused the resignation of MP John Profumo. One of the women involved in the Profumo scandal, Mariella Novotny, claimed to have had a relationship with JFK. An American newspaper picked up the story and published an article with coded references to the President, suggesting he was involved in a vice scandal.
This is an episode from the A&E/CBS News series The 20th Century, hosted by CBS newsman Mike Wallace. More than 50 years after the fact, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a topic of intense debate. Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone? Was the Warren Commission pressured into releasing a false report? Is it possible that the CIA had Kennedy killed?
Join Mike Wallace for a point-by-point investigation of these and other questions surrounding the events of November 22, 1963. Extensive footage from the CBS News archives plus clips from the world-famous Zapruder home movie bring the tragedy to life, while interviews with those who were there including reporters and government officials capture the chaos and grief of one of the most terrible moments in American history. The 20th Century also examines the controversial findings of the Warren Report, and talks to many people who believe that the report was manipulated by forces within the government.
The “Legend” of Lee Harvey Oswald -- article by Charles Burris
Our story begins with Petr Popov. Popov was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officer who had been passing secrets to the Americans for seven years. In April 1958, Popov had alerted his Soviet Russia Division (SRD) case officer George Kisevalter that clandestine technical information regarding the CIA U-2 spy plane had reached Soviet intelligence via a Soviet mole. The intelligence services (especially the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton – Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDOCI) suspected a Soviet mole had penetrated the dank bowels of the deep state and obtained highly secret information concerning the U-2 spy plane.
Thus began Angleton’s elaborate efforts to discover and out this treacherous mole. It will ultimately lead to his downfall within the CIA.
We journey deeper within the Wilderness of Mirrors as a young Marine radar operator, Lee Harvey Oswald, soon attempts defection to the USSR, entering the cloistered labyrinth of decades of lies, disinformation, duplicity, and deception regarding this mysterious individual. That disturbing aspect of the story is fleshed out in John M. Newman’s Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume II, and in Peter Dale Scott’s Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House.
Angelton was in the epicenter of events which led to the November 22, 1963 coup d’état and savage murder of President John F. Kennedy.
Soon an elaborate multilayered mole hunt began. Abroad, the CIA/State Department “dangled” Oswald as a US Marine radar operator “defector” to the Soviets, while in the US they compiled a byzantine, contradictory and ever-shifting documentary “legend” of manipulated and altered biographical data concerning Oswald as a trap to snare whom among the various interagency intelligence personnel who accessed his files was the possible mole.
Upon his return to the US, Oswald continued his counterintelligence role as agent provocateur, informer, and ultimately as “patsy.”
History has recorded Lee Havey Oswald as the “lone nut assassin” of President John Kennedy. But perhaps he is someone substantially different than what “official history” has made of him.
His favorite TV show as a kid was I Led Three Lives about a double agent for the FBI, Herbert Philbrook, who secretly spies on the Communist Party in the US. He was a ninth-grade dropout who joined the Marines in 1956. He was a radar operator with a top security clearance who worked on projects related to the secret U-2 spy planes for the CIA. Oswald was assigned first to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in July 1957, then to Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan in September as part of Marine Air Control Squadron 1. He learned to speak Russian while a Marine. Like all Marines, he was trained and tested in shooting and scored 212 in December 1956, slightly above the requirements for the designation of sharpshooter. In May 1959 he scored 191, which reduced his rating to marksman. He was a poor shot.
Oswald obtained a hardship discharge from the Marines allegedly because of his mother’s health, left the United States, and tried to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959. The Soviets were immediately suspicious of his intentions believing he was one of many such agents sent to spy on them. He tried to commit suicide. He was then sent to the city of Minsk to work as a lathe operator at the Gorizont Electronics Factory, which produced radios, televisions, and military and space electronics. He was under constant surveillance by the Soviets. Oswald met a young 19 year old girl, Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, who was the niece of a Soviet intelligence official. Marina thought he was a Russian because he spoke the language like a native Russian. He married Marina and later petitioned the US State Department for permission to return to the United States. It was granted. The State Department loaned them the money to come to the US in 1962. This was quite unusual for the State Department to grant permission to return and loan money to someone who tried to renounce his US citizenship as a “defector.”
Although he was someone who tried to defect to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, he travelled in right-wing, anti-Communist circles of former Russian émigrés. His new best friend was George de Mohrenschildt, a petroleum geologist with international business connections who was a CIA contract agent and colleague of George Herbert Walker Bush. He held a series of odd jobs.
He moved to New Orleans and became the sole member of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald ordered the following items from a local printer: 500 application forms, 300 membership cards, and 1,000 leaflets with the heading, "Hands Off Cuba" establishing a paper trail of his pro-Castro activities. He visited anti-Castro militant Carlos Bringuier at a store he owned in New Orleans offering his services as a former Marine. Bringuier was the New Orleans delegate for the anti-Castro organization Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE). This was a CIA front group.
In 1963 the group was financed by the CIA with $25,000 per month, under a CIA program named AMSPELL run by George Joannides, the chief of the psychological warfare branch in Miami's JM/WAVE station. The money went to Luis Fernandez Rocha, the DRE's leader in Miami, and supported the DRE's activities in a variety of cities, including New Orleans. Joannides also provided non-financial support, including reviewing military plans and briefing them on how to handle the press. Joannides worked with the group from December 1962 to April 1964; CIA monthly reports on the group from 1960 to 1966 have been declassified, except for this period.
In 1978 the CIA summoned Joannides out of retirement to serve as the Agency's liaison to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, in specific regard to the death of President Kennedy. Former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley writes "the spy withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting. It wasn't until 2001, 38 years after Kennedy's death, that Joannides' support for the Cuban exiles, who clashed with Oswald and monitored him, came to light."
Bringuier would later tell the Warren Commission that he believed Oswald’s visits were an attempt to infiltrate his group, when they were actually used to establish his “legend” or cover as a Marxist supporter of Cuba.
On August 9, Oswald turned up in downtown New Orleans handing out pro-Castro leaflets. One of his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets had the address "544 Camp Street" hand-stamped on it. Bringuier confronted him claiming he was tipped off about my leafleting by a friend. A well-publicized scuffle ensued and Bringuier, Oswald, and two of Bringuier's friends were arrested for disturbing the peace. Before leaving the police station, Oswald asked to speak with an FBI agent. Agent John Quigley arrived and spent over an hour talking to him.
Oswald later appeared on New Orleans TV and radio interviews claiming to be a Marxist supporter of Castro and the Cuban regime, further establishing his “legend” or cover identity persona, just as Herbert Philbrick did as a double agent for the FBI in his favorite TV show as a child.
In 1961-62, the New Orleans chapter of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a CIA front group, occupied an office in the Newman Building at 544 Camp Street. This was the building where anti-Castro activist and accused JFK Assassination conspirator Guy Banister had his office. Banister also had worked in Naval Intelligence and continued his intelligence connections. This was also the address Oswald stamped on his pro-Castro flyers.
Banister's office was within walking distance of the New Orleans offices of the FBI, CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the Reily Coffee Company where Oswald worked. Reily was his employer and a supporter of anti-Castro Cubans. During this period, Banister associate Sergio Arcacha Smith was the "official delegate" for the New Orleans chapter of the CRC.
Banister's secretary, Delphine Roberts, told author Anthony Summers that Oswald "...seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with [Banister's] office." Roberts said, "As I understood it, he had the use of an office on the second floor, above the main office where we worked.... Then, several times, Mr. Banister brought me upstairs, and in the office above I saw various writings stuck up on the wall pertaining to Cuba. There were various leaflets up there pertaining to Fair Play for Cuba.”
Later Oswald is going to be accused of shooting at right-wing former Major General Edwin Walker in his home, although both Walker and the Dallas police stated he was shot at with a 30.06 rifle, a firearm Oswald never owned. The Dallas police claimed that the bullet was a 30.06 caliber; the bullet shells from the Texas School Book Depository were 6.5mm. The Walker bullet was too severely deformed to allow a conclusive analysis of its pattern of grooves. A spectrographic examination by Henry Heilberger of the FBI laboratory found that the lead alloy in the bullet was different from that of bullet fragments found in President Kennedy’s car.
Oswald’s wife Marina was the Warren Commission’s chief witness to my allegedly shooting at both General Walker and President Kennedy. She later fully renounced her testimony stating it was achieved under duress and threats of sending her back to the Soviet Union to face reprisals.
Although Oswald never spoke of any hostility or dislike towards President John Kennedy he is going to be accused of shooting the most protected man in America.
Oswald is going to be accused of ordering a cheap mail order rifle so there is a paper trail, instead of simply going to a local gun shop in Texas to purchase the rifle incognito. In Texas no identification was needed, and no incriminating paper trail would exist. Identification was only required, and an incriminating paper trail created, when purchasing a weapon from a different state, by mail order.
He is going to be accused of taking pictures of himself with the rifle he is going to use. Then he is going to be accused of shooting the president from the place where he works, the Texas School Book Depository.
The Texas School Book Depository building was owned by D. H. Byrd, co-founder of the Civil Air Patrol (in which Oswald served in as a youngster in New Orleans) and was a strong financial supporter of Lyndon Johnson. After World War II Byrd helped incorporate CAP and have it designated as an Auxiliary of the Air Force, helped initiate the International Air Cadet Exchange, and established or supported cadet scholarships. For his work with the CAP Byrd was awarded the US Air Force's Air Force Scroll of Appreciation on 24 May 1963. Byrd and fellow Dallas right-wing billionaire H. L. Hunt were personal friends of Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis Lemay, a rabid Kennedy hater who later flew hundreds of miles to be in the operation room gallery at JFK’s autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the day he was murdered.
D. H. Byrd also employed LBJ's personal hitman Malcolm Wallace at his defense company LTV. LTV got a big defense contract in January, 1964. Wallace’s fingerprint was found in the sniper’s nest on the Sixth Floor of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD). Byrd had the so-called "sniper's window" removed from the TSBD which he kept as a souvenir. Byrd was a big game hunter and had the heads of all sorts of animals in his house. Some persons suspect the TSBD sniper's window was right next to those mementos.
Oswald is going to be accused of taking off from the TSBD and shooting a cop, Officer T. D. Tippit, and leaving his wallet on the scene so he could be found.
On November 24, 1963, Oswald is going to be shot by Dallas night club owner Jack Ruby in the garage of the Dallas Police headquarters in full view of television cameras broadcasting live to millions and die at Parkland Hospital. Ruby had stalked Oswald at police headquarters all weekend since his arrest.
Jack Ruby had long standing connections to organized crime figures, all the way back when he was a numbers runner for Al Capone’s mob in Chicago while a youth. In the weeks prior to the assassination he had been in contact with major crime figures from around the country.
For half a century, people have debated the Kennedy assassination. Some claim that the Warren Commission got it right that Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-nut assassin. Others contend that Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. It is not the purpose of this book to engage in that debate. The purpose of this book is simply to focus on what happened at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of November 22, 1963. What happened that night is so unusual that it cries out for truthful explanation even after all these years.
Peter Dale Scott's meticulously documented investigation uncovers the secrets surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. Offering a wholly new perspective—that JFK's death was not just an isolated case, but rather a symptom of hidden processes—Scott examines the deep politics of early 1960s American international and domestic policies.
Scott offers a disturbing analysis of the events surrounding Kennedy's death, and of the "structural defects" within the American government that allowed such a crime to occur and to go unpunished. In nuanced readings of both previously examined and newly available materials, he finds ample reason to doubt the prevailing interpretations of the assassination. He questions the lone assassin theory and the investigations undertaken by the House Committee on Assassinations, and unearths new connections between Oswald, Ruby, and corporate and law enforcement forces.
Revisiting the controversy popularized in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Scott probes the link between Kennedy's assassination and the escalation of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam that followed two days later. He contends that Kennedy's plans to withdraw troops from Vietnam—offensive to a powerful anti-Kennedy military and political coalition—were secretly annulled when Johnson came to power. The split between JFK and his Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the collaboration between Army Intelligence and the Dallas Police in 1963, are two of the several missing pieces Scott adds to the puzzle of who killed Kennedy and why.
Scott presses for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination, not as an external conspiracy but as a power shift within the subterranean world of American politics. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK shatters our notions of one of the central events of the twentieth century.
Peter Dale Scott has written extensively on the Kennedy assassination and other dark corners of the American political scene. His encyclopedic knowledge enables him to connect the dots among the players, the organizations, and the unacknowledged collusions—the deep politics— of our often troubled political system.
Deep Politics on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba, originally published in 1995, narrows the focus of Scott’s earlier Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Scott delivers the most detailed treatment yet of the mysterious sojourn of Lee Harvey Oswald (or someone using his name) to Mexico City in the fall of 1963. Was this trip a key aspect of the framing of Oswald, was it an approved intelligence operation, or was it perhaps both?
It is now known that allegations of Communist conspiracy in the wake of the JFK assassination, emanating mostly from Mexico City, caused Lyndon Johnson to put together a “blue ribbon commission” to investigate what happened in Dallas. Scott explains through meticulous research and analysis exactly why LBJ would want the Warren Commission to rush to a conclusion, and the far-reaching political ramifications of the commission’s public findings.
Scott’s analysis suggests the evidence from Mexico City was part of a frame-up, making Deep Politics on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba an essential piece of research and analysis, shedding new light on the Communist conspiracy allegations behind the JFK assassination.
With a foreword by Rex Bradford and a preface by Bill Simpich: From deep within American society emerged the plot that killed a president
Beneath the orderly facade of the American government lies a complex network, only partly structural, linking Wall Street influence, corrupt bureaucracy, and the military-industrial complex. Here lies the true power of the American empire: This behind-the-scenes web is unelected, unaccountable, and immune to popular resistance. Peter Dale Scott calls this entity the deep state, and he has made it his life’s work to write the history of those who manipulate our government from the shadows. Since the aftermath of World War II, the deep state’s power has grown unchecked, and nowhere has it been more apparent than at sun-dappled Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.
The central mystery of the JFK assassination is not who fired the guns that fateful day, but the untouchable forces behind the shooters. In this landmark volume, Scott traces how culpable elements in the CIA and FBI helped prepare for the assassination, and how such elements continue to influence our politics today.
In his 1993 publication Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Scott looked closely at the foreground of the assassination: Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, and their connections to Dallas law enforcement, to the underworlds of Dallas and New Orleans, and to Cuba. This new book, in contrast, looks at the assassination as an event emanating from the American deep state, including actions of the CIA and FBI in Washington and Mexico City, and apparent continuities with later deep events, notably Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, and 9/11. Dallas ’63 concludes with an overview of the 2 pivotal decades between the death of JFK and the Reagan Revolution, when all 4 presidents following Kennedy were increasingly at odds with deep state ambitions for world hegemony and saw their presidential careers prematurely terminated.
Jeffrey Sachs – “JFK’s Quest for Peace;”
Stephen Kinzer – “Regime Change: Roots of the Imperial Temptation;”
Michael Glennon – “Double Government and the ‘Best Truth’ about the Assassination;"
Douglas Horne -- “The National Security Establishment’s Obsession with Invading Cuba;”
Michael Swanson – “What Is The Purpose of the National Security State?”
Peter Janney – “JFK & Mary Meyer: Relationship as Redemption;”
Ron Paul – “Enemies: Foreign and Domestic;”
Jefferson Morley – “Angleton, Cuba, and Assassination;”
James DiEugenio – “Vietnam Declassified: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon;”
Oliver Stone with James DiEugenio – “If JFK Were Alive Today;” and
Jacob G. Hornberger – “The National Security State: The Biggest Mistake in U.S. History”
This is an excellent and invaluable resource. Comprehensive, accessible and unprecedented, Who's Who in the JFK Assassination presents vital information on each of more than 1,400 individuals related in any noteworthy way to the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit and alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22 and 24, 1963. Based on years of research, a wealth of sources and a long study of the Warren Commission's twenty-six volumes, this encyclopedic book includes: A-to-Z entries on virtually all the suspects, victims, witnesses, law enforcement officials and investigators.
Quick identification of each person followed by biographical facts, testimony, evidence and more. Detailed listings of sources. Explorations of the puzzling theories and countless sides of the case. Extensive cross-referencing of entries, allowing readers to follow their own investigations and construct their own conclusions. This all-new who's who will prove an essential companion to the many best-selling books, documentaries and feature films about the JFK assassination.
Bound to be referred to again and again, it is the complete resource for anyone who wants to know more about-- or wants to keep better track of-- the key players involved in one of the most infamous chapters in American history.
This is the first of several high-level political analyses motivated by a need to better understand the politics that led to both the JFK assassination and the Nixon Watergate Affair. It deploys as the primary theoretical model, C. Wright Mills "Theory of the Power Elite" and the framework in Carroll Quigleys book "Tragedy and Hope." With these tools, Carl Oglesby posits an interesting thesis: that JFK's assassination, instead of being a random act by a lone nut was in fact a carefully planned and professional executed ongoing coup d' etat a la Americaine, a not so silent coup by the same forces responsible for the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X and possibly the demise and eventual destruction of the billionaire Howard Hughes.
What all of these events had in common was that they were links in a chain designed to replace one set of power elite (members of the old moneyed "peace promoting" Northeastern Yankee Establishment) with another (the Nuevo Riche and newly arrived, "progress through war" Western Cowboys). Thus it is argued here that the events connecting Dallas, Memphis, Watergate and the demise of the Hughes empire, are but threads in a common fabric, growing and evolving directly out of the systematic corruption of American politics and out of contemporary political realities.
The late Murray N. Rothbard was particularly enamored with this pioneering book, remarking:
"Carl Oglesby's new book is not only exciting and thoroughly researched, it presents the only analytic framework — originated by himself — which makes sense of the violent events of the last decade and a half our recent political history, and puts them all into a coherent framework: the Yankee vs. Cowboy analysis.
"The important question looms: why is it that Oglesby has been alone in coming up with this framework? I think the answer is that the methodologies of other writers and researchers have led them astray: the free-market economists who are critical of government actions never bother to ask who benefitted from those actions and who were likely to be responsible for them; the Marxists are anxious to indict an abstract, mythical and unified ‘capitalist class' for all evils of government, and believe that detailed research into concrete divisions and conflicts among power elites detract from such an indictment; those sociologists who have engaged in concrete power elite analysis have only examined structures (who owns corporation X, who belongs to what social club?) rather than the dynamics of concrete historical events; the one writer who has treated Yankees and Cowboys has been so blinded by particular hostility to the Cowboys that he virtually includes everyone living in the Sunbelt as part of a vast Cowboy conspiracy; and the various doughty investigators and reporters of Dallas or Watergate have struck to surface events because they lacked the overall coherent framework.
"Carl Oglesby has surmounted all of these defects, and has therefore been able to make a giant breakthrough in explaining our recent history."
The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established by President Lyndon B. Johnson on November 29, 1963 to investigate the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy that had taken place on November 22, 1963. The 88th U.S. Congressional session passed Senate joint resolution 137 authorizing the Presidential appointed Commission to report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy mandating the attendance and testimony of witnesses and the production of evidence concerning the infraction occurring in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
Its 889-page final report was presented to President Johnson on September 24, 1964 and made public three days later. It concluded that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and that Oswald acted entirely alone. It also concluded that Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later. The Commission took its unofficial name—the Warren Commission—from its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren. In November 1964, two months after the publication of its 889-page report, the Commission published twenty-six volumes of supporting documents, including the testimony or depositions of 552 witnesses and more than 3,100 exhibits. All of the commission's records were then transferred on November 23 to the National Archives.
The unpublished portion of those records was initially sealed for 75 years (to 2039) under a general National Archives policy that applied to all federal investigations by the executive branch of government, a period "intended to serve as protection for innocent persons who could otherwise be damaged because of their relationship with participants in the case.” The 75-year rule no longer exists, supplanted by the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and the JFK Records Act of 1992.
By 1992, 98 percent of the Warren Commission records had been released to the public. Six years later, at the conclusion of the Assassination Records Review Board's work, all Warren Commission records, except those records that contained tax return information, were available to the public with redactions. The remaining Kennedy assassination related documents are scheduled to be released to the public by 2017, twenty-five years after the passage of the JFK Records Act.
Despite this congressional mandate, not all records were declassified or released.
Mr. Burris met the author when he spoke as the guest speaker at an assembly at Memorial High School.
This is the full length uncut version of Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane. Lane, one of the early critics of the preconceived conclusions of the Warren Commission, went to Dallas to do his own investigation and interview witnesses that were ignored by the Commission and others who expanded on their knowledge of the JFK assassination. Particularly crucial were the authoritative statements of eyewitnesses S. M. Holland, Lee E. Bowers, James Tague, and Mrs. Acquila Clemons, What is portrayed in this short critique offers a different picture from the one presented by the US government to the world. This film is a brief for the defense of Lee Harvey Oswald. Mark Lane's pioneering best-selling book, Rush to Judgment, challenged the Warren Commission Report relating to Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin of President John Kennedy.
While serving as chief analyst of military records at the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997, Douglas P. Horne discovered that the Zapruder Film was examined by the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center two days after the assassination of President Kennedy. In this film, Horne interviews legendary NPIC photo interpreter Dino Brugioni, who speaks for the first time about another NPIC examination of the film the day after the assassination. Brugioni didn't know about the second examination and believes the Zapruder Film in the archives today is not the film he saw the day after the assassination. Drawing on Volume 4 of his book "Inside the ARRB", Horne introduces the subject and presents his conclusions.
Reveals an intense power struggle that plagued the Kennedy Administration before the Vietnam War and contends that the President's advisors conspired to deceive Kennedy and push the United States into combat.
One of the most unsettling, revelatory books about the relationship between the CIA and JFK's alleged assassin ever published "reads like an intricate spy thriller" (Publishers Weekly).
From the acclaimed author of JFK and Vietnam comes a book that uncovers the government's role in the Kennedy assassination more clearly than any previous inquiry. What was the extent of the CIA's involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald? Why was Oswald's file tampered with before the assassination of John F. Kennedy? And why did significant documents from that file mysteriously disappear? Oswald and the CIA answers these questions, not with theories, but with information from the primary sources themselves—ex-agents, officials, and secret records. To look at the Oswald file is to look at the most sensitive CIA operation of the Cold War. The story is as alarming as it is tragic; the lies and manipulations it reveals led directly to Kennedy's murder. Oswald and the CIA is a gripping journey to the darkest corners of the CIA. 23 black-and-white photographs
Revised edition, January 2017. The first in a series of volumes on the JFK assassination, Where Angels Tread Lightly is a unique scholarly examination of historical episodes that go back to WWII, the Office of Strategic Services, and the early evolution of the CIA—up to and beyond Castro’s assumption of power in Cuba in 1959. This book is a groundbreaking investigation of America’s failure in Cuba that uncovers the CIA’s role in Castro’s rise to power and their ensuing efforts to destroy him.
This work retraces the paths taken by many of the key players who became entangled in the CIA’s plots to overthrow Castro and the development of the myth that Castro was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy.
With rigorous scholarship and the brilliant insight of a trained textual records interpreter and document forensic specialist, Dr. John M. Newman sheds new light on the multiple identities played by individual CIA officers. Where Angels Tread Lightly deciphers the people and operations that belong to a large number of CIA cryptonyms and pseudonyms that have remained, until now, unsolved.
The book’s first chapter contains new revelations about how Oswald was a witting false defector to the USSR in a CIA plan to surface a KGB mole in the CIA. The second volume in a series on the assassination of President Kennedy, “Countdown to Darkness” describes events during a dangerous quickening of the Cold War. The race for a long-range delivery system for nuclear weapons came to its final, unexpected, and unstable conclusion—the “missile gap” favored the United States, not the Soviet Union. The European colonial empires were collapsing in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, spawning Cold War hot spots, where Moscow and Washington rushed in to fill the void. The inevitable consequence of Castro’s revolution played itself out as communism established itself—armed to the teeth by the Soviet Bloc by early 1961—a few miles from the American underbelly.
This book reveals how deeply the Eisenhower Administration was in denial about the entrenched Castro police state, the complete penetration of all anti-Castro groups by Cuban intelligence, and the convulsive spectacle of the exiled Cuban leaders. As Eisenhower marshaled his subordinates to overthrow Castro, the president lost patience with DCI Allen Dulles. Eisenhower wanted a Cold War triple play—the elimination of Castro and, to ensure support from Europe and Latin America, the simultaneous elimination of Congolese Prime Minister Lumumba and Dominican Republic Dictator Trujillo. Dulles approved a CIA plan to use the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro in the fall of 1960, as the Democratic and Republican nominees entered the U.S. presidential election campaign. The Nixon-Kennedy debates turned into a spectacle over the crisis in Cuba. JFK pummeled Nixon for not standing up to Castro and not arming the rebels inside and outside of Cuba, while Nixon, who knew that was exactly what the administration was doing, was unable to respond due to the covert nature of the plan. In the NSC, the president had demanded, “Everyone must be prepared to swear that he has not heard of it.” Unfortunately for Vice President Nixon, Kennedy had heard all about it. By the fall of 1960, the principal Cuban exile groups in Miami, and their underground sections in Cuba, had long since descended into chaos. The principal CIA officer responsible for holding them together, Gerry Droller, was singularly incompetent. But that mattered little, as the rate at which Soviet Bloc weapons were pouring into Cuba rendered the exile leadership problem irrelevant. The exile government would never be put ashore in Cuba. All of this came together in a terrible ending.
The covert CIA paramilitary plan was unable to keep pace with the consolidation of the regime in Havana, and that plan breathed its last before Kennedy was inaugurated. It did not take long for Allen Dulles and the Pentagon chiefs to figure out that if they told the president the truth about Cuba and Laos, he would abort in Cuba and negotiate over Laos. So they lied to President Kennedy about their views. They assumed that when the exile invasion force was being slaughtered on the beachhead, the president would change his mind and send in the marines and airplanes. The lie about Laos nearly worked. But when the lies about Cuba—that the brigade could succeed and the Cuban people would rise up in rebellion to assist it—did not work, the countdown to darkness came to its tragic, and ignominious end. Once past that foreboding event horizon, political and economic forces inexorably cleaved inward like matter pulled into the singularity of a black hole. Within a year, Kennedy would fire the top three men at the CIA and most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Into the Storm: The Assassination of President Kennedy Volume III provides insights, details, and revelations about the absolutely essential question of context: What was the true nature of the national security state during the era of President Kennedy's public service?
The story of the man who inspired Oliver Stone’s JFK.Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the former CIA operative known as “X,” offers a history-shaking perspective on the assassination of president John F. Kennedy. His theories were the basis for Oliver Stone’s controversial movie JFK. Prouty believed that Kennedy’s death was a coup d’?tat, and he backs this belief up with his knowledge of the security arrangements at Dallas and other tidbits that only a CIA insider would know (for example, that every member of Kennedy’s cabinet was abroad at the time of Kennedy’s assassination). His discussion of the elite power base he believes controlled the U.S. government will scare and enlighten anyone who wants to know who was really behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 40 black-and-white photographs and illustrations.
Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. He spent 9 of his 23 year military career in the Pentagon (1955-1964): 2 years with the Secretary of Defense, 2 years with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and 5 years with Headquarters, U.S. Air Force. In 1955 he was appointed the first "Focal Point" officer between the CIA and the Air Force for Clandestine Operations per National Security Council Directive 5412. He was Briefing Officer for the Secretary of Defense (1960-1961), and for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At times he would be called to meet with CIA director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at their home on highly classified business. He was assigned to attend MKULTRA meetings. In this capacity Colonel Prouty would be at the nerve center of the Military-Industrial Complex at a time unequaled in American History.
He has written on these subjects, about the JFK assassination, the Cold War period, and Vietnamese warfare, and the existence of a "Secret Team". He backs up his work with seldom seen or mentioned official documents - some never before released. He was the author of JFK : The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy and The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World.
The acclaimed book Oliver Stone called “the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance,” JFK and the Unspeakable details not just how the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy was carried out, but WHY it was done…and why it still matters today. At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history: starting a nuclear war.
Horrified by the specter of nuclear annihilation, Kennedy gradually turned away from his long-held Cold Warrior beliefs and toward a policy of lasting peace. But to the military and intelligence agencies in the United States, who were committed to winning the Cold War at any cost, Kennedy’s change of heart was a direct threat to their power and influence.
Once these dark “Unspeakable” forces recognized that Kennedy’s interests were in direct opposition to their own, they tagged him as a dangerous traitor, plotted his assassination, and orchestrated the subsequent cover-up. Douglass takes readers into the Oval Office during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, along on the strange journey of Lee Harvey Oswald and his shadowy handlers, and to the winding road in Dallas where an ambush awaited the President’s motorcade.
As Douglass convincingly documents, at every step along the way these forces of the Unspeakable were present, moving people like pawns on a chessboard to promote a dangerous and deadly agenda. JFK and the Unspeakable shot up to the top of the bestseller charts when Oliver Stone first brought it to the world’s attention on Bill Maher’s show.
Since then, it has been lauded by Mark Lane (author of Rush to Judgment, who calls it “an exciting work with the drama of a first-rate thriller”), John Perkins (author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, who proclaims it is “arguably the most important book yet written about an American president), and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who calls it “a very well-documented and convincing portrait…I urge all Americans to read this book and come to their own conclusions."
Mark Lane tried the only U.S. court case in which the jurors concluded that the CIA plotted the murder of President Kennedy, but there was always a missing piece: How did the CIA control cops and secret service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza? How did federal authorities prevent the House Select Committee on Assassinations from discovering the truth about the complicity of the CIA?
A Shocking Exposé Looking into the Failure of Our Government to Investigate the Assassination of a President
There will never be another government investigation of JFK’s assassination, and in The Last Investigation an insider tells why. Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, reveals the distorted priorities, the manipulations, and the political machinations designed to derail legitimate efforts to solve the murder of a democratically elected president. He explains how and why the committee refused to hear public testimony from key witnesses, avoided taking action against high-ranking intelligence agents who committed perjury, and deliberately distorted its interpretation of evidence in order to give its final report the false appearance of substance.
The Last Investigation was a landmark release in 1993 among the growing volumes of JFK assassination literature. It contains no wild conspiracy theories, no reckless assertions of government cover-up or duplicity. Fonzi, drawing from firsthand knowledge, unreleased documents, and still-secret files, offers suspenseful accounts of discovering new evidence of conspiracy while tracking elusive witnesses, only to find them suddenly dead under mysterious circumstances. With powerful new evidence, he concludes his fifteen-year search for the identity of legendary spymaster Maurice Bishop, who was last seen in Dallas in September of 1963 with Oswald. He also reveals the significant new data he uncovered—the first verified link between the CIA and Lee Harvey Oswald—and then discloses how the Assassination Committee bosses deliberately slammed the door on the evidence.
Now, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, Skyhorse Publishing is proud to reissue the definitive edition of The Last Investigation, accompanied by a new preface written by the late author’s wife. Both a suspenseful spy story and an important historical document, The Last Investigation is essential reading for everyone who wants to understand what went wrong with the government probe that left the Kennedy assassination an appalling, unresolved chapter in our country’s history. 36 b/w photographs .
The death of Mary Meyer left many Americans with questions. Who really killed her? Why did CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton rush to find and confiscate her diary? Had she discovered the plan to assassinate her lover, President Kennedy, with the trail of information ending at the steps of the CIA? Was it only coincidence that she was killed less than three weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report?
Fans of The Murder of Mary Russell, JFK: A Vision for America, and other JFK books will love Mary’s Mosaic. Building and relying on years of interviews and painstaking research, author Peter Janney follows the key events and influences in Mary Pinchot Meyer’s life—her first meeting with Jack Kennedy; her support of her secret lover, President Kennedy, as he worked towards the pursuit of world peace and away from the Cold War; and her exploration of psychedelic drugs. Fifty years after the assassinations of President Kennedy and Mary Meyer, this book helps readers understand why both took place.
Author Peter Janney fought for two years to obtain documents from the National Personnel Records Center and the US Army to complete this third edition. It includes a final chapter about the mystery man who could be the missing piece to learn the truth behind Meyer’s murder.
Focuses upon the intimate relationship between JFK and Mary Pinchot Meyer and their brutal murders.
Dr. Cyril Wecht, for two decades the elected coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania (including Pittsburgh), is a nationally acclaimed forensic pathologist, and holds both a medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh (1956), and a law degree from the University of Maryland (1962). Forensic pathologists specialize in medically determining how and why someone died.
In criminal murder cases this function is absolutely vital in helping to determine the guilt or innocence of a suspect — in no case more so than in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Dr. Wecht, a very early critic of the Warren Commission, testified at the HSCA. At the annual JFK Lancer assassination research conference in Dallas, held in November, Dr. Wecht summarized the medical evidence against the lone-gunman hypothesis. At the center of Dr. Wecht’s examination is what has become known as the “single-bullet theory” — or the “magic bullet,” as it is known to its detractors: the theory that one bullet can account for the multiple wounds (besides the headshot) of both JFK and Governor Connally.
According to Dr. Wecht, the conclusions of the Warren Commission rest entirely on the single-bullet theory. If that theory fails, then there had to be more than one gunman. This, in turn, leads to questions about the history of the United States since 1963 that many people would rather not pursue. With both passion and meticulous attention to detail, Wecht dissects the Warren Commission’s conclusions.
Moving beyond the medical evidence, he then utters words unexpected from any former American elected official, and particularly powerful coming from a person with his credentials: “What we witnessed…my friends, in plain, plain English — was [a] coup d’état in America. The overthrow of the government. That’s what this case was all about.”
Author David Talbot talked about his book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, in which he recalls the life and career of Allen Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA.
The AARC Public Library is a collection of over 35,000 pages of reports, transcripts, and other documents relating to political assassinations. Many of these documents were recently declassified under the terms of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, whose mandate was carried out by the Assassination Records Review Board.The AARC Public Library is a collection of over 35,000 pages of reports, transcripts, and other documents relating to political assassinations. Many of these documents were recently declassified under the terms of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, whose mandate was carried out by the Assassination Records Review Board.
Website focusing upon the JFK assassination.
Website focusing upon the JFK assassination.
Watch this classic eight minute YouTube clip of JFK Assassination researcher John Judge from the “JFK: Cinema as History” conference (January 1992) which appeared on C-SPAN. It reveals more about “the why” of the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the coup d’état following his murder than almost anything you have probably heard. I still have a videotape of this full 90 minute event in my VHS/DVD archive in my high school classroom.
After quoting Thomas Jefferson on the importance of a free press to a republic, John Judge makes a disparaging reference to The Washington Post and The New York Times. He then pauses for a few seconds and is shown glaring at another panel member. This person (not shown in the clip) was Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, who had viciously attacked Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. The older man who is briefly shown in one momentary scene is the late Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty who served as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff where he was in charge of the global system designed to provide military support for covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. In Oliver Stone’s highly acclaimed film, JFK, the mysterious character ‘X’ portrayed by Donald Sutherland was in fact Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who assisted director Stone in the production and scripting of this historical epic.
Prouty had relayed the shocking information detailed in the movie to the actual New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Cosner) in a series of communiques. Fletcher Prouty was the author of two excellent books, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy.
From the mind of legendary political insider Roger Stone, here is the sensational New York Times bestseller that reveals the truth about who was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
From the mind of consummate political insider Roger Stone, unofficial adviser to Donald Trump and subject of the documentary Get Me Roger Stone, comes a compelling case that Lyndon Baines Johnson had the motive, means, and opportunity to orchestrate the murder of JFK.
Stone maps out the case that LBJ blackmailed his way on the ticket in 1960 and was being dumped in 1964 to face prosecution for corruption at the hands of his nemesis attorney Robert Kennedy. Stone uses fingerprint evidence and testimony to prove JFK was shot by a long-time LBJ hit man—not Lee Harvey Oswald.
President Johnson would use power from his personal connections in Texas, from the criminal underworld, and from the United States government to escape an untimely end in politics and to seize even greater power. President Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States, was the driving force behind a conspiracy to murder President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In The Man Who Killed Kennedy, you will find out how and why he did it.
Legendary political operative and strategist Roger Stone has gathered documents and uses his firsthand knowledge to construct the ultimate tome to prove that LBJ was not only involved in JFK’s assassination, but was in fact the mastermind.
LBJ aims to prove that Vice President Johnson played an active role in the assassination of President Kennedy and that he began planning his takeover of the U.S. presidency even before being named the vice presidential nominee in 1960. Lyndon B. Johnson's flawed personality and character traits, formed as a child, grew unchecked for the rest of his life as he suffered severe bouts of manic-depressive illness. He successfully hid this disorder from the public as he bartered, stole, and finessed his way through the corridors of power on Capitol Hill, though it's recorded that some of his aides knew of his struggle with bipolar disorder.
Phillip F. Nelson’s new book begins where LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination left off. Now president, Johnson begins to push Congress to enact long-dormant legislation that he had previously impeded, always insisting that the timing wasn't right. Nelson argues that the passage of Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation was designed to take the focus of the nation off the assassination as well as lay the groundwork for building his own legacy.
Nelson also examines Johnson’s plan to redirect US foreign policy within days of becoming president, as he maneuvered to insert the US military into the civil war being fought in Vietnam. This, he thought, would provide another means to achieve his goal of becoming a great wartime president. In addition, Nelson presents evidence to show that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 was arguably directed by Johnson against his own ship and the 294 sailors on board as a way to insert the US military into the Six-Day War. It only failed because the Liberty refused to sink.
Finally, Nelson presents newly discovered documents from the files of Texas Ranger Clint Peoples that prove Johnson was closely involved with Billie Sol Estes and had made millions from Estes’s frauds against taxpayers. These papers show linkages to Johnson’s criminal behavior, the very point that his other biographers ignore.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Riding in an open-topped convertible through Dallas on November 22, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson heard a sudden explosive sound at 12:30 PM. The Secret Service sped him away to safety, but not until 1:20 PM did he learn that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Sworn in next to a bloodstained Jackie Kennedy at 2:40 PM, Johnson worked feverishly until 3:00 in the morning, agonizing about the future of both his nation and his party. Unbeknownst to him, his actions had already determined the tragic outcome of his presidency.
In November 22, 1963, historian Steven Gillon tells the story of how Johnson consolidated power in the twenty-four hours following the assassination. Based on scrupulous research and new archival sources, this gripping narrative sheds new and surprising light on one of the most written-about events of the twentieth century.
Here is the History Channels' 2003 production of LBJ's secret war with the Kennedys', Chasing Demons: LBJ VS The Kennedy's. This documentary was aired during the 40th anniversary week that the HC dedicated to the legacy of John F. Kennedy, it then promptly disappeared after the barrage of backlash from LBJ's powerful widow, "Lady Bird" Johnson and others over the channels portrayal of Lyndon Johnson during the week of the 40th anniversary of JFK's assassination. The film is a psychological examination of the behind-the-scene confrontation between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and its impact on America in the period following John Kennedy’s assassination. The film utilizes actual recorded phone calls between the principals, with insightful commentary by key historical persons/witnesses involved in these matters.
We now know from recently published books and taped interviews that the “elephant in the room” which is never discussed or mentioned in the program was the firm belief by both Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy that Lyndon Johnson was involved in JFK’s murder in a coup d’état (see the discussion of Kennedy trusted confidant and loyalist William Walton's trip to the Soviet Union one week after Kennedy's assassination in David Talbot's book Brothers where he related these beliefs to key Soviet officials). The film dramatically portrays Lyndon Johnson’s increasing paranoia and dark suspicions concerning Robert Kennedy and his ulterior motives against him, fueled by covert intelligence reports given to him by his long-time close associate (and next door neighbor) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, enemy of both John and Robert Kennedy.
One of my previous students remarked that the documentary resembled the plot intrigue in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I pointed out that this was an outstanding and very perceptive observation, for there had actually been a very controversial play, Mac Bird, written on this theme. All the other students then began to see parallels between the two stories from what they had remembered from studying Macbeth in their English Language Arts class.
This production was basically hidden away as it was pulled from circulation when powerful persons close to the legacy of Lyndon Johnson objected to how he was portrayed during that week over several shows, as much as certain persons might complain that his legacy was tarnished, keep in mind that this program uses archival audio recordings, and that most of the people interviewed for this 2003 program were his peers.
It is quite odd that the HC would air this show that had so many persons who lived during the Kennedy and Johnson years in the White House talk of intimate details and then to have the show discarded from their lineup of related programs. Obviously this Chasing Demons special was removed along with the 2003 The Men Who Killed Kennedy series episodes, partially at the powerful insistence of LBJ's widow, Claudia "Lady Bird" Taylor Johnson.
According to Professor Jones, President Kennedy was planning a troop withdrawal from Vietnam and intended to pursue a diplomatic solution to end the conflict. He asserts that the President sanctioned a coup against Premier Diem as a means for facilitating the withdrawal, but the assassination de-stabilized South Vietnam, thus preventing the return of U. S. troops. After the Kennedy assassination, the exit strategy was taken off the table by his successor President Johnson.
Professor Jones argues that if Kennedy had not been assassinated, his withdrawal plan would have spared the lives of 58,000 Americans. In researching the book, Professor Jones examined recently declassified hearings by the Church Committee on the U.S. role in assassinations, and newly released tapes of Kennedy White House discussions. He also interviewed John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and other Kennedy advisers. Professor Jones answered questions from members of the audience after his presentation.
"A Time for Choosing", also known as "The Speech", was a speech presented during the 1964 U.S. presidential election campaign by future president Ronald Reagan on behalf of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. To this day, "The Speech" is considered one of the most effective ever made on behalf of a candidate. Nevertheless, Barry Goldwater lost the election by one of the largest margins in history. Soon afterwards, Reagan was asked to run for Governor of California; he ran for office and won election in 1966.
Reagan was later dubbed the "Great Communicator" in recognition of his effective oratory skills. He was elected President of the United States in 1980 and 1984.
The most famous of all political campaign commercials, known as the “Daisy Girl” ad, ran only once as a paid advertisement, during an NBC broadcast of Monday Night at the Movies on September 7, 1964. Without any explanatory words, the ad uses a simple and powerful cinematic device, juxtaposing a scene of a little girl happily picking petals off of a flower (actually a black-eyed Susan), and an ominous countdown to a nuclear explosion. The ad was created by the innovative agency Doyle Dane Bernbach, known for its conceptual, minimal, and modern approach to advertising.
The memorable soundtrack was created by Tony Schwartz, an advertising pioneer famous for his work with sound, including anthropological recordings of audio from cultures around the world. The frightening ad was instantly perceived as a portrayal of Barry Goldwater as an extremist. In fact, the Republican National Committee spelled this out by saying, “This ad implies that Senator Goldwater is a reckless man and Lyndon Johnson is a careful man.”
This was precisely the intent; in a memo to President Johnson on September 13, Bill Moyers wrote, “The idea was not to let him get away with building a moderate image and to put him on the defensive before the campaign is old.” The ad was replayed in its entirety on ABC’s and CBS’s nightly news shows, amplifying its impact.
This is a C-SPAN 3 re-broadcast of an anti-communism film, produced in 1966 by the John Birch Society, which uses narration and news footage to detail the methods of communist revolutionaries in China, Algeria, and Cuba, then argues that U.S. Civil Rights leaders are also Communists using the same methods. The film condemns several U.S. Presidents and the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts.
Ken Burns is the establishment’s most noted (and notorious) court documentarian and intellectual bodyguard of the State. For decades his glossy productions have shaped and defended the “official line” or interpretation on the State’s wars, its presidential regimes, or other key historical events, personages, and public policies. As a result they enjoy high esteem and recognition in the mainstream media and court academia. His latest PBS excursion in agitprop is The Vietnam War, a ten part series that has drawn much heated controversy and harsh criticism.
Here is a select sample of such commentary and analysis: Ken Burns’s ‘Vietnam War’ is No Profile in Courage: Celebrated filmmaker continues tradition of avoiding inconvenient truths; JFK HAD ORDERED FULL WITHDRAWAL FROM VIETNAM: SOLID EVIDENCE: PBS Vietnam Series: Glossing over JFK’s Exit Strategy; Ken Burns & Lynn Novick, The Vietnam War: Part One; THE KEN BURNS VIETNAM WAR DOCUMENTARY GLOSSES OVER DEVASTATING CIVILIAN TOLL; Veterans angry, disappointed following PBS’ Vietnam War documentary; The Ken Burns Documentary – A Review; Ken Burns Never Knew How Wrong He Was About the Vietnam War; Ken Burns and Lynn Novick don’t understand anti-Vietnam War protesters; KEN BURNS SAYS THE VIETNAM WAR WAS “BEGUN IN GOOD FAITH.” SO WAS EVERY OTHER LOUSY WAR; KEN BURNS’S VIETNAM: GREAT TV. HORRIBLE HISTORY; and THE LIBERTARIAN ANGLE: THE VIETNAM WAR.
CIA/State Dept. Cold War liberals and anti-Communist social democrats dominated the US foreign policy establishment in 1954.They thought the existing indigenous elite in Vietnam was too traditionalist and too corrupt to bring about the (non-Communist) social revolution they assumed Vietnam needed. So they picked Diem, a man with impeccable anti-colonialist, anti-French credentials and a brother in the anti-communist wing of the international labor movement.
It also didn't hurt that he was one of a handful of Vietnamese of any kind living in the US in 1954 and he didn't stint on presenting his case. But when the CIA and the State Department gave control of the country to Diem and his family they presented it to a gang of thieves far worse than the ones that had preceded them. Also, Diem was far more concerned with crushing anti-Communist traditionalist power centers than he was with fighting the Viet Cong.
He tried-using bribery made possible by generous US aid and police state terror administered by Diem's brother Nhu - to create a totalitarian regime while using all the US State Dept. approved rhetoric. Thus, when Diem was finally overthrown, there were no strong, coherent elements left in the South to counter the Vietcong threat.
Professor Schultz talked about his book The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy and Johnson’s Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam, published by Harper Collins. Professor Schultz was a member of the covert operations team, the “Studies and Observation Group” from 1964 to 1972 during the Vietnam War. The book describes psychological operations, commando raids, espionage, and deception operations. He specifically talked about President Kennedy taking the covert actions projects away from the CIA and turning them over to the Studies Observation Group.
Hearts and Minds is a 1974 American documentary film about the Vietnam War directed by Peter Davis. The film's title is based on a quote from President Lyndon B. Johnson: "the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there". The movie was chosen as Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 47th Academy Awards presented in 1975.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken of Kim Phuc, a young Vietnamese girl fleeing naked from a napalm attack, continues to resonate today as the personification of the horrors of war. Jane Pauley revisits that horrific chapter of the Vietnam War, and finds out how Kim Phuc has found healing and peace.
Mr. Burris met Kim Phuc and expressed his deep admiration for her courage and diligence in bringing her message of peace, remembrance and reconciliation to the world.
Details the impact of how events such as the Vietnamese Tet Offensive, the insurgent presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy against incumbent Lyndon Johnson, Johnson's announcement of his refusal to seek re-election, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the rise of the counter-culture and student protests at Columbia University, the Parisian student-led revolution in France in May, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the police riot at the Democratic National convention, the massacre of protesters in Mexico City, the Prague uprising, the insurgent presidential campaign of George Wallace, and the presidential race between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey, made 1968 the pivotal year which shaped a generation of Americans.
It was a time when a generation rebelled and lost its innocence. From the Vietnam War to the struggle for racial equality to the birth of a counter-culture explosion, the 1960s was a decade of change, experimentation and hope that transformed an entire nation. The documentary features revealing interviews with the prominent figures of the era including: Barbara Ehrenreich, Daniel Ellsberg, Patrick Buchanan, Jesse Jackson, Tom Hayden, Robert Bork, Arlo Guthrie, Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, Robert McNamara, Ed Meese III and Bobby Seale.
Covert operations, by definition, are difficult to examine. Because they are shrouded in secrecy, one is never sure whether all the relevant data concerning their scope, origin, and degree of success are at hand. Yet it is apparent that governments will continue to insist on having covert operations as an option. What motivates the United States to undertake such actions and how well the United States has been served by these measures are especially crucial issues. An examination of U.S. covert-action policy since World War II reveals two facts that are not always fully appreciated.
First, both the scope and the scale of such operations have been enormous. Paramilitary operations-- which can be more accurately described as secret wars, the most extreme form of covert action--have resulted in countless deaths and immense destruction. Covert operations have become the instrument of choice for policymakers who assume that a cold war status quo is inevitable. Second, the success of U.S. covert operations has been exaggerated. Some operations, such as the one against the Soviet Union in the early postwar years and the later one against Castro, were outright fiascoes. Other operations, such as the ones involving Greece and Iran, which were once acclaimed successes, left a legacy of anti-Americanism that continues to hamper the conduct of our foreign policy.
Moreover, because such operations have almost always become public-- Nicaragua being an obvious example--debates over their legitimacy have fostered considerable domestic divisiveness. Thus, it is time for a reassessment of the role of covert operations in U.S. foreign policy. How effective are they? Under what circumstances, if any, should they be used? What reforms are needed?
Is the Central Intelligence Agency a bulwark of freedom against dangerous foes, or a malevolent conspiracy to spread American imperialism? A little of both, according to this absorbing study, but, the author concludes, it is mainly a reservoir of incompetence and delusions that serves no one's interests well. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Weiner musters extensive archival research and interviews with top-ranking insiders, including former CIA chiefs Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner, to present the agency's saga as an exercise in trying to change the world without bothering to understand it.
Hypnotized by covert action and pressured by presidents, the CIA, he claims, wasted its resources fomenting coups, assassinations and insurgencies, rigging foreign elections and bribing political leaders, while its rare successes inspired fiascoes like the Bay of Pigs and the Iran-Contra affair. Meanwhile, Weiner contends, its proper function of gathering accurate intelligence languished. With its operations easily penetrated by enemy spies, the CIA was blind to events in adversarial countries like Russia, Cuba and Iraq and tragically wrong about the crucial developments under its purview, from the Iranian revolution and the fall of communism to the absence of Iraqi WMDs.
Many of the misadventures Weiner covers, at times sketchily, are familiar, but his comprehensive survey brings out the persistent problems that plague the agency. The result is a credible and damning indictment of American intelligence policy. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved
Groundbreaking, pioneer expose of the deep state. “There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible.”
Wise and Ross continued: “The first is the government that citizens read about in their newspapers and children study about in their civics books. The second is the interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States in the Cold War. This second, invisible government gathers intelligence, conducts espionage, and plans and executes secret operations all over the globe.”
Keith Jeffery presented a history of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The author was given unprecedented access to the MI6 archives to assist in his examination of the organization from 1909 to 1949. Mr. Jeffery recalls the longstanding relationship between the British Secret Intelligence Service and the White House, its covert operations inside the United States, examines the organization’s espionage tactics, and profiles members of the Service, which included writers such as Graham Greene and Somerest Maugham.
Sir John Scarlett talked about why he, as the then chief of SIS, commissioned the book. Keith Jeffery and Sir John Scrlett discussed the book with at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. They also responded to questions from members of the audience.
British Intelligence Service Operations Sir John Sawers, chief of Britain’s MI6 secret service since June, made his first public speech, addressing the need for secrecy, the role covert intelligence-gathering played in Iraq and Iran, and the UK secret service’s position on torture. His speech was the first public speech given by the head of British Intelligence in its 100 year history.
Former Mossad Director Efraim Halevy gave his perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran’s nuclear program, and Syria and Egypt. In his remarks he criticized Israeli policies and disagreed with Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations, in which the Israeli prime minister drew a red line across a diagram to indicate a threshold for nuclear development that Iran was approaching beyond which Israel would not tolerate.
He also called for a more realistic approach to Israeli policy toward recent uprisings and upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa. Mossad, or the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, is one of the main entities in the Israeli intelligence community, usually associated with covert operations community.
The Association of National Security Alumni is opposed to the use of covert operations in intelligence gathering. Mr. MacMichael discussed the operations of the CIA and the intelligence community.
Many Americans have condemned the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human rights. But the United States has done almost nothing to prosecute past abuses or prevent future violations. Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, historian Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government.
During the Cold War, McCoy argues, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to weaken a subject’s resistance to interrogation. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the CIA revived these harsh methods, while U.S. media was flooded with seductive images that normalized torture for many Americans. Ten years later, the U.S. had failed to punish the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, and continued to exploit intelligence extracted under torture by surrogates from Somalia to Afghanistan. Although Washington has publicly distanced itself from torture, disturbing images from the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America’s moral authority as a world leader.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day.
But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War.
“With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
“This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University “Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is an impressive historical piece of research that appeals not only to Southeast Asianists but also to those interested in examining the historical embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police power apparatuses and their apparently inherent propensity to implement illiberal practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs “McCoy’s remarkable book . . . does justice both to its author’s deep knowledge of Philippine history as well as to his rare expertise in unmasking the seamy undersides of state power.”—POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies
At the end of the nineteenth century the United States swiftly occupied a string of small islands dotting the Caribbean and Western Pacific, from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Hawaii and the Philippines. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State reveals how this experiment in direct territorial rule subtly but profoundly shaped U.S. policy and practice—both abroad and, crucially, at home. Edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, the essays in this volume show how the challenge of ruling such far-flung territories strained the U.S. state to its limits, creating both the need and the opportunity for bold social experiments not yet possible within the United States itself. Plunging Washington’s rudimentary bureaucracy into the white heat of nationalist revolution and imperial rivalry, colonialism was a crucible of change in American statecraft. From an expansion of the federal government to the creation of agile public-private networks for more effective global governance, U.S. empire produced far-reaching innovations. Moving well beyond theory, this volume takes the next step, adding a fine-grained, empirical texture to the study of U.S. imperialism by analyzing its specific consequences. Across a broad range of institutions—policing and prisons, education, race relations, public health, law, the military, and environmental management—this formative experience left a lasting institutional imprint. With each essay distilling years, sometimes decades, of scholarship into a concise argument, Colonial Crucible reveals the roots of a legacy evident, most recently, in Washington’s misadventures in the Middle East.
In this remarkable tour de force of investigative reporting, James Bamford exposes the inner workings of America's largest, most secretive, and arguably most intrusive intelligence agency. The NSA has long eluded public scrutiny, but The Puzzle Palace penetrates its vast network of power and unmasks the people who control it, often with shocking disregard for the law. With detailed information on the NSA's secret role in the Korean Airlines disaster, Iran-Contra, the first Gulf War, and other major world events of the 80s and 90s, this is a brilliant account of the use and abuse of technological espionage.
A no-holds-barred examination of the National Security Agency packed with startling secrets about its past, newsbreaking revelations about its present-day activities, and chilling predictions about its future powers and reach.
The NSA is the largest, most secretive, and most powerful intelligence agency in the world. With a staff of thirty-eight thousand people, it dwarfs the CIA in budget, manpower, and influence. Recent headlines have linked it to the economic espionage throughout Europe and to the ongoing hunt for the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
James Bamford first penetrated the wall of silence surrounding the NSA in 1982, with the much-talked-about bestseller The Puzzle Palace. In Body of Secrets, he offers shocking new details about the inner workings of the agency, gathered through unique access to thousands of internal documents and interviews with current and former officials. Unveiling extremely sensitive information for the first time, Bamford exposes the role the NSA played in numerous Soviet bloc Cold War conflicts and discusses its undercover involvement in the Vietnam War. His investigation into the NSA's technological advances during the last fifteen years brings to light a network of global surveillance ranging from on-line listening posts to sophisticated intelligence-gathering satellites. In a hard-hitting conclusion, he warns that the NSA is a two-edged sword. While its worldwide eavesdropping activities offer the potential for tracking down terrorists and uncovering nuclear weapons deals, it also has the capability to listen on global personal communications.
Like the breakout bestsellers on Cold War espionage The Sword and the Shield and Blind Man's Buff, Body of Secrets is must-reading for people fascinated by the intrigues of a shadowy underworld. As one of the most important works of investigative journalism to come out of Washington in years, it should be read by everyone concerned about the inevitability of Orwell's Big Brother.
Bamford has been the preeminent expert on the National Security Agency since his reporting revealed the agency’s existence in the 1980s. Now Bamford describes the transformation of the NSA since 9/11, as the agency increasingly turns its high-tech ears on the American public.
The Shadow Factory reconstructs how the NSA missed a chance to thwart the 9/11 hijackers and details how this mistake has led to a heightening of domestic surveillance. In disturbing detail, Bamford describes exactly how every American’s data is being mined and what is being done with it. Any reader who thinks America’s liberties are being protected by Congress will be shocked and appalled at what is revealed here.
A Pretext for War reveals the systematic weaknesses behind the failure to detect or prevent the 9/11 attacks, and details the Bush administration’s subsequent misuse of intelligence to sell preemptive war to the American people. Filled with unprecedented revelations, from the sites of “undisclosed locations” to the actual sources of America’s Middle East policy, A Pretext for War is essential reading for anyone concerned about the security of the United States.
Acclaimed author James Bamford–whose classic book The Puzzle Palace first revealed the existence of the National Security Agency–draws on his unparalleled access to top intelligence sources to produce a devastating expose of the intelligence community and the Bush administration.
This is Barbara Newman's 1992 documentary which explores what was behind the Watergate burglary. This segment is part one of six.
This article is cited in Roger Stone’s excellent book, Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth About the President, Watergate, and the Pardon (see pages 439, 440, 492) in the section dealing with the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
It has dawned on the liberals of his party that Jimmy Carter is not entirely one of them. Some people knew that all along—David Rockefeller, for instance, who now had a friend at the White House. In the following pages, a political reporter inquires into Carter's ideological loyalties, and an economic columnist explores the importance of Carter's ''Trilateral Connection." In the election year of 1976, Jimmy Carter ran a successful campaign for the presidency which was based on his image as an anti-establishment, peanut-farming, ex-governor of the state of Georgia.
Yet, since the fall of 1973, Carter had been associated with David Rockefeller and other members of an international power elite through his association with the Trilateral Commission, one of Rockefeller’s many policy-making organizations. While this side of Carter’s background was almost totally ignored by the mass media, the American. public was fully informed about his peanut-farming activities, the Playboy interview, and Amy’s lemonade stand.
According to the Italian publication Europa, as cited in The Review of The News, Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a founding director of the Trilateral Commission (TLC), had agreed on Carter’s potential as our next president as far back as 1970. Supportive of Carter’s close relationship with this little-known power elite is the fact that many members of his administration have been drawn from the membership rolls of the TLC.
These include: Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State; Brzezinski, National Security Adviser; W. Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of Treasury; Harold Brown, Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; Warren Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State; Richard N. Cooper, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs; Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; and C. Fred Bergsten, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economic Affairs. Carter’s personal choice for vice president, Walter Mondale, is also a member of the TLC.
On UNE 13, 1991 The Fund for New Priorities in America sponsored a forum entitled, “An Election Held Hostage and the October Surprise: What Really Happened,” to discuss recent allegations that advisers from the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign cut a deal with Iran to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election in exchange for arms.
Panel members included Gary Sick, a former member of the National Security Council who has raised awareness of the issue through editorials and media appearances. A letter signed by eight of the former hostages in Iran requesting a congressional investigation into the involvement of the Reagan campaign was circulated through the House of Representatives and the Senate. Sen. Wellstone expressed his support for a full investigation into the matter by a congressional committee.
The panel becomes an exploration of the effects that the National Security State has on democracy in the United States from a contemporary and historical perspective.
The 1980 October Surprise refers to an alleged plot to influence the outcome of the 1980 United States presidential election between incumbent Jimmy Carter (D–GA) and opponent Ronald Reagan (R–CA). One of the leading national issues during that year was the release of 52 Americans being held hostage in Iran since 4 November 1979. Reagan won the election. On the day of his inauguration, in fact, 20 minutes after he concluded his inaugural address, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced the release of the hostages.
The timing gave rise to an allegation that representatives of Reagan's presidential campaign had conspired with Iran to delay the release until after the election to thwart President Carter from pulling off an "October surprise". According to the allegation, the Reagan Administration rewarded Iran for its participation in the plot by supplying Iran with weapons via Israel and by unblocking Iranian government monetary assets in U.S. banks.
Brought to Light: Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals, and Covert Action is an anthology of two political graphic novels, published originally by Eclipse Comics in 1988. Both are based on material from lawsuits filed by the Christic Institute against the US Government. The two stories are Shadowplay: The Secret Team by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, and Flashpoint: The LA Penca Bombing documented by Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan and adapted by Joyce Brabner and Tom Yeates.
Brought to Light was edited overall by Joyce Brabner, Catherine Yronwode acted as executive editor, and Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney was the publication designer. Flashpoint: The LA Penca Bombing is written by Joyce Brabner, as told to her by Christic Institute clients Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan. It deals with the La Penca bombing which happened during the civil war in Nicaragua in 1984. Credits for “Flashpoint” list Jonathan Marshall on the introduction, Joyce Brabner writing, and Thomas Yeates illustrating, with letters by Bill Pearson and painting by Sam Parsons. Martha Honey and Tony Avirgan are credited with having told the story to Joyce Brabner.
When the Tower Commission concluded that the Iran-contra affair was an aberration, it was wrong. Those who doubt the existence of what David Wise and Thomas Ross in 1964 called the " Invisible Government" should read Kwitny's detailed, chilling expose of the network of current and former military men and intelligence operatives who conducted a far-reaching "covert" operation behind the cover of an Australian bank.
After the Nugan Hand bank collapsed in 1980, what emerged (according to this book, not the official investigation) is a web of crime, corruption, drugs, and CIA complicity in undermining a friendly nation's politics and defrauding ordinary people that makes Watergate, if not Contra-gate, look like a Sunday school picnic. Wall Street Journal correspondent Kwitny is the author of Endless Enemies. -- From Library Journal.
This acclaimed PBS documentary is Bill Moyer's 1987 scathing critique of the criminal subterfuge carried out by the Executive Branch of the United States Government to implement covert operations which are clearly contrary to the wishes and values of the American people. This film discusses how the "secret government" has no constitution; the rules it follows are the rules it makes up. It also compares and contrasts the Watergate Scandal and the Iran-Contra Affair as detailed in the film.
This documentary discusses the hidden dimensions of the Iran-Contra Affair; the October Surprise Scandal of 1980; CIA complicity in the global narcotics trade; CIA assassinations and covert activities; and FEMA, REX84, and the plans for the suspension of the U. S. Constitution.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a nine-year proxy war during the Cold war involving the Soviet Union, supporting the Marxist-Leninist government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan against the Afghan Mujahideen guerrilla movement and foreign "Arab--Afghan" volunteers. The Mujahideen received unofficial military and/or financial support from a variety of countries including the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Israel, Indonesia and China. The Afghan government, with the Soviet Union as its ally, received different aid from the government of India under Indira Gandhi. (wikipedia.org)
Gorbachev and Bush meet at Malta in December 1989 to consider the recent dramatic events. Only the previous week the Communist government resigned in Czechoslovakia; and shortly Nicolae Ceaușescu would be deposed and executed in the bloody Romanian Revolution. Gorbachev permits German reunification and removes Soviet troops from Europe, but fails to secure financial support from the West. As the Soviet economy collapses, Gorbachev faces opposition from both reformers and hardliners.
Sharing their abhorrence of Soviet disintegration, Gorbachev brings in hardliners to his government and cracks down on the Lithuanian independence movement. However they later turn on Gorbachev and stage a coup. Boris Yeltsin is instrumental in rallying the public and military to defeat the coup. Sidelining Gorbachev, Yeltsin sets the course for Russia to leave the Soviet Union by establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Soviet Union ends on 25 December 1991, and in his Christmas Day address Bush announces the Cold War is over.
The cost of the Cold War is considered in retrospect. Interviewees include Mircea Dinescu, Alexander Rutskoy and Condoleezza Rice. The pre-credits scene features Bush and Gorbachev explaining how uncertain the world had suddenly become.
In one of the most divisive and controversial works of the 20th Century, Raspail chillingly predicted and prophesied decades ago precisely what is occurring and its suicidal consequences for the diseased remnants of Western civilization. It is unquestionably the most powerful novel I have ever read. Insidious egalitarianism, destructive welfarism, aggressive multiculturalism, cultural Marxism, Third World invasions by the wretched of the earth, militaristic imperialism posing as humanitarian liberation, and mindless parousiatic atheism.
The Panama Deception is a 1992 American documentary film that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film is critical of the actions of the US military during the 1989 invasion of Panama by the United States, covering the conflicting reasons for the invasion and depicting the US media as biased. It also highlighted media bias, showing events that were unreported or misreported in the news. The United States Invasion of Panama, code-named Operation Just Cause, was the invasion of Panama by the United States in December 1989. It occurred during the administration of U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and ten years after the Torrijos–Carter Treaties were ratified to transfer control of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama by January 1, 2000. During the invasion, de facto Panamanian leader, general, and dictator Manuel Noriega was deposed, president-elect Guillermo Endara sworn into office, and the Panamanian Defense Force dissolved.
The precarious "shock and awe" doctrine of preemptive war has become increasingly dominant in national security policy circles. These classic films on the Cold War have again regained a striking relevance and importance. Let them both entertain and educate you on the vital issues of war, espionage, and the deadly terror of nuclear weapons of mass destruction."
Founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Trilateral Commission embarked on a New International Economic Order based on Technocracy. Brzezinski called this the "Technetronic Era" in his 1970 book, Between Two Ages. History now reveals the original Trilateral strategy and the means by which they have carried it out. Zbigniew Brzezinski quotes from Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era:
"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."
"In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason."
"Marxism represents a further vital and creative state in the maturing of man's universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man and a victory of reason over belief."
"National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept."
"People, governments and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations."
"The society will be dominated by an elite of persons free from traditional values who will have no doubt in fulfilling their objectives by means of purged techniques with which they will influence the behavior of people and will control and watch the society in all details. It will become possible to exert a practically permanent watch on each citizen of the world."
"More directly linked to the impact of technology, it involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control."
With meticulous detail and an abundance of original research, Patrick M. Wood uses his book Technocracy Rising and this authoritative presentation to connect the dots of modern globalization in a way that has never been seen before so that the persons can clearly understand the globalization plan, its perpetrators and its intended endgame. In the heat of the Great Depression during the 1930s, prominent scientists and engineers proposed a utopian energy-based economic system called Technocracy that would be run by those same scientists and engineers instead of elected politicians.
Although this radical movement lost momentum by 1940, it regained status when it was conceptually adopted by the elitist Trilateral Commission (co-founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller) in 1973 to be become its so-called “New International Economic Order.” Brzezinski called this the "Technetronic Era" in his 1970 book, Between Two Ages. History now reveals the original Trilateral strategy and the means (covert and overt) by which they have carried it out.
The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies was a 1975 report written by Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki for the Trilateral Commission. In the same year, it was republished as a book by the New York University Press. The report observed the political state of the United States, Europe and Japan and says that in the United States the problems of governance "stem from an excess of democracy" and thus advocates "to restore the prestige and authority of central government institutions."
The report serves as an important point of reference for studies focusing on the contemporary crisis of democracies. The report outlines that in 1960s Western Europe the governments are "overloaded with participants and demands" which the highly bureaucratic political systems are unable to handle, thus rendering their societies ungovernable. It points to a political decision made by France that was made in "semisecret, without open political debate, but with a tremendous amount of lobbying and intrabureaucratic conflict."
The report says the problems of the United States in the 1960s stemmed from the "impulse of democracy ... to make government less powerful and more active, to increase its functions, and to decrease its authority" and concludes that these demands are contradictory. The impulse for the undermining of legitimacy was said to come primarily from the "new activism" and an adversarial news media, while the increase in government was said to be due to the Cold War defense budget and Great Society programs.
To remedy this condition, "balance [needs] to be restored between governmental activity and governmental authority." The effects of this "excess of democracy" if not fixed are said to be an inability to maintain international trade, balanced budgets, and "hegemonic power" in the world.
The Council on Foreign Relations is the Mt. Olympus of the Establishment, where the elite plutocracy meet for plunder and deceit. This accessible and easy-to-read book is an excellent anti-Establishment primer, tracing the origins and influence of the CFR within the northeastern seaboard anglophile Establishment that has dominated our once beloved Republic since the violent and brutal suppression of the Southern War for Independence in 1865.
Freed of constitutional restraints, America embarked on the road to empire. With the triumphant rise of the Yankee mercantile and banking elites such as the House of Morgan and the Rockefellers, the suicidal path toward the corporate welfare-warfare state was cleared. The key way station in this fatal journey was the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations by Edward M. House, Elihu Root, John W. Davis, Allen and John Foster Dulles, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and others named in this volume.
Their anointed elite successors within the CFR of today have continued this downward spiral of imperial decline, eminent bankruptcy, and the coming destruction of the last vestiges of the old Republic.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the United States emerged as the world’s only superpower: no other nation possesses comparable military and economic power or has interests that bestride the globe. Yet the critical question facing America remains unanswered: What should be the nation’s global strategy for maintaining its exceptional position in the world? Zbigniew Brzezinski tackles this question head-on in this incisive and pathbreaking book.
The Grand Chessboard presents Brzezinski’s bold and provocative geostrategic vision for American preeminence in the twenty-first century. Central to his analysis is the exercise of power on the Eurasian landmass, which is home to the greatest part of the globe’s population, natural resources, and economic activity. Stretching from Portugal to the Bering Strait, from Lapland to Malaysia, Eurasia is the ”grand chessboard” on which America’s supremacy will be ratified and challenged in the years to come.
The task facing the United States, he argues, is to manage the conflicts and relationships in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East so that no rival superpower arises to threaten our interests or our well-being.The heart of The Grand Chessboard is Brzezinski’s analysis of the four critical regions of Eurasia and of the stakes for America in each arena—Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and East Asia.
The crucial fault lines may seem familiar, but the implosion of the Soviet Union has created new rivalries and new relationships, and Brzezinski maps out the strategic ramifications of the new geopolitical realities. He explains, for example: Why France and Germany will play pivotal geostrategic roles, whereas Britain and Japan will not. Why NATO expansion offers Russia the chance to undo the mistakes of the past, and why Russia cannot afford to toss this opportunity aside. Why the fate of Ukraine and Azerbaijan are so important to America. Why viewing China as a menace is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why America is not only the first truly global superpower but also the last—and what the implications are for America’s legacy.
Brzezinski’s surprising and original conclusions often turn conventional wisdom on its head as he lays the groundwork for a new and compelling vision of America’s vital interests.
Researcher Barbara Honegger's presentation titled "Behind the Smoke Curtain" in Seattle's Town Hall Theater, January 12, 2013, on what happened and what didn't happen at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Mr. Lewis H. Lapham discussed his book, Theater of War, published by The New Press. The book is his response to the September 11 attacks. Mr. Lapham, a long-time opponent of war, joined a group of panelists in a discussion of the current war on terrorism, and Mr. David Theroux moderated the event. Mr. Weaver is the author of News and the Culture of Lying, published by The Free Press, and Mr. Jonathan Marshall is the author of Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency and Covert Operations in the Third World, published by Eclipse Books.
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, the threat of terrorism again confronts Americans. More than a decade after 9/11 and hundreds of billions of dollars later, there are pressing questions about whether America’s investment in its “terrorism industrial complex” has made us safer. In FRONTLINE’s Top Secret America—9/11 to the Boston Bombings, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest traces the journey from 9/11 to the Marathon bombings and investigates the secret history of the 12-year battle against terrorism.
This provocative, thoroughly researched book explores the covert aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Prominent political analyst Peter Dale Scott marshals compelling evidence to expose the extensive growth of sanctioned but illicit violence in politics and state affairs, especially when related to America's long-standing involvement with the global drug traffic. Beginning with Thailand in the 1950s, Americans have become inured to the CIA's alliances with drug traffickers (and their bankers) to install and sustain right-wing governments. The pattern has repeated itself in Laos, Vietnam, Italy, Mexico, Thailand, Nigeria, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Panama, Honduras, Turkey, Pakistan, and now Afghanistan_to name only those countries dealt with in this book. Scott shows that the relationship of U.S. intelligence operators and agencies to the global drug traffic, and to other international criminal networks, deserves greater attention in the debate over the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. To date, America's government and policies have done more to foster than to curtail the drug trade. The so-called war on terror, and in particular the war in Afghanistan, constitutes only the latest chapter in this disturbing story.
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a non-fiction book on heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia, which covers the period from World War II to the Vietnam War. Published in 1972, the book was the product of eighteen months of research and at least one trip to Laos by the principal author, Alfred W. McCoy. McCoy wrote Politics of Heroin while seeking a PhD in Southeast Asian history at Yale University. Cathleen B. Read (a graduate student who spent time in the region during the war) and Leonard P. Adams II are also listed as co-authors. Arguably, Politics of Heroin's most notable feature was its documentation of CIA complicity and aid to the Southeast Asian opium/heroin trade. The CIA actively tried to suppress this book, and the rigorous research McCoy undertook to compile and compose its explosive contents. This volume established McCoy as the premier authoritative expert in this area of scholarly research.
McCoy later updated and expanded his research, and published The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. The first book to prove CIA and U.S. government complicity in global drug trafficking, The Politics of Heroin, includes meticulous documentation of dishonesty and dirty dealings at the highest levels from the Cold War until today. Maintaining a global perspective, this groundbreaking study details the mechanics of drug trafficking in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South and Central America. New chapters detail U.S. involvement in the narcotics trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan before and after the fall of the Taliban, and how U.S. drug policy in Central America and Colombia has increased the global supply of illicit drugs.
Mr. Burris had an opportunity to discuss his scholarly endeavors with Dr. McCoy several years ago.
Along with McCoy's Congressional testimony, this initially controversial thesis gained a degree of mainstream acceptance. The thesis of the book was that most of the world's heroin was produced in the Golden Triangle. It is transported in the planes, vehicles, and other conveyances supplied by the United States. The profit from the trade has been going into the pockets of some of our best friends in Southeast Asia. The charge concludes with the statement that the traffic is being carried on with the indifference if not the closed-eye compliance of some American officials, and there is no likelihood of its being shut down in the foreseeable future.
In particular, Air America, covertly owned and operated by the CIA, was used to transport the illicit drugs. At the same time, the heroin supply was partially responsible for the perilous state of US Army morale in Vietnam. "By mid 1971 Army medical officers were estimating that about 10 to 15 percent of the lower-ranking enlisted men serving in Vietnam were heroin users." Having interviewed Maurice Belleux, former head of the French intelligence agency SDECE, McCoy also uncovered parts of the French Connection scheme used by the agency to finance all of its covert operations during the First Indochina War through control of the Indochina drug trade.
The CIA reacted strongly to the book: "...high-ranking officials of the C.I.A have signed letters for publication to a newspaper and a magazine, granted a rare on-the-record interview at the agency's headquarters in McLean, Va." (the letters were to the Washington Star and were signed by William E. Colby and Paul C. Velte Jr. the letter to Harper & Row (the book's publishers) on 5 July by CIA general counsel Lawrence R. Houston asked that they be given the galley proofs so that they could criticize errors and rebut unproven accusations "We believe we could demonstrate to you that a considerable number of Mr. McCoy's claims about this agency's alleged involvement are totally false and without foundation, a number are distorted beyond recognition and none is based on convincing evidence.") and take whatever legal action they felt necessary before the book's publication.
McCoy eventually overcame his initial reluctance to provide a copy to the CIA who then sent the promised list of criticisms and corrections. Harper & Row felt the material the CIA offered was extremely weak, but that the book was reasonably well sourced. (McCoy conducted "more than 250 interviews, some of them with past and present officials of the CIA He said that top-level South Vietnamese officials, including President Nguyen Van Thieu and Premier Tran Van Khiem, were specifically involved."; a vice president and general counsel of Harper & Row said "We don't have any doubts about the book at all. We've had it reviewed by others and we're persuaded that the work is amply documented and scholarly.") and not only published it, but published it two weeks before its scheduled release date.
The third and expanded edition was published in 2003, more pointedly entitled The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (ISBN 1-55652-483-8); the book has also been translated into nine languages.
Hugh Wilford talked about his book, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East, in which he recounts the CIA’s early forays in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s. The operations were led by Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, head of the region’s covert actions, who was assisted by his cousin Archie Roosevelt, chief of the Beirut Station. In his book, the author reports that these men’s actions, in conjunction with covert operations specialist Miles Copeland, would invariably lay the groundwork for foreign policy relations between the U.S. and the Middle East.
"The most clear and engaging history of the deadly, historic partnership between Western powers and political Islam."—Salon.com
Devil's Game is the first comprehensive account of America's misguided efforts, stretching across decades, to dominate the strategically vital Middle East by courting and cultivating Islamic fundamentalism.
Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with dozens of policy makers and CIA, Pentagon, and foreign service officials, Robert Dreyfuss follows the trail of American collusion from support for the Muslim Brotherhood in 1950s Egypt, to links with Khomeini and Afghani jihadists, to longstanding ties between radical Islamists and the leading banks of the West. The result is as tragic as it is paradoxical: originally deployed as pawns to foil nationalism and communism, extremist mullahs and ayatollahs now dominate the landscape, thundering against freedom of thought, science, women's rights, secularism—and their former patron.
Chronicling a history of double-dealing, cynical exploitation, and humiliating embarrassment that continues to this day, Devil's Game reveals a pattern that, far from furthering democracy or security, ensures a future of blunders and blowback.
Robert Dreyfuss talked about the relationship between the U.S. government and the Islamic right in the Middle East. He explained that during the Cold War, the United States, looking to gain strategic advantage in the Middle East, aligned itself with the Islamic right in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt even though more progressive groups existed. Mr. Dreyfuss talked about the consequences of these alignments and in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
Author Barry Lando talked about his book, Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, published by Other Press. He argued that the current situation in Iraq is a result of decades of duplicitous international entanglements in the region. Beginning with World War I and extending to the present, Mr. Lando cited actions that he says have caused massive death and long-term psychological trauma to the country’s people, including the 1963 CIA-backed coup that brought the Baath Party to power; and America’s role in the failed 1991 Iraqi revolt against Saddam Hussein.
Author Stephen Kinzer talked about his book Overthrow : America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, published by Times Books. He discussed the U.S.'s long history of regime change and proposed that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had historical roots going back to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. He said that while the policy of direct military involvement to achieve regime change was put on hold during the Cold War, it had been reestablished since the fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Kinzer also talked about fourteen episodes of regime change contained in his book, including America’s involvement in Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iran.
In Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War, filmmaker Robert Greenwald chronicles the Bush Administration's determined quest to invade Iraq following the events of September 11, 2001. The film deconstructs the administration's case for war through interviews with U.S intelligence and defense officials, foreign service experts, and U.N. weapons inspectors -- including a former CIA director, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even President Bush's Secretary of the Army. Their analyses and conclusions are sobering, and often disturbing, regardless of one's political affiliations.
Leading scholars consider Iraq's history and strategic importance from the vantage point of its residents, neighbors (Iran, Turkey, and Kurdistan), and the Great Powers
Mr. Burris saw and met Dr. McCoy when he presented this lecture at the University of Tulsa.
This volume presents a practical demonstration of the relevance of Carl Schmitt's thought to parapolitical studies, arguing that his constitutional theory is the one best suited to investing the ’deep state’ with intellectual and doctrinal coherence. Critiquing Schmitt’s work from a variety of intellectual perspectives, the chapters discuss current parapolitical reality within the domain of criminology, the parapolitical nature of both the dual state and the national security state corporate complex.
Using the USA as a prime example of the world’s current dual or ’deep political state’, the criminogenic dimensions of the parapolitical systems of post 9/11 America are discussed. Using case studies, the dual state is examined as the causal factor of inexplicable parapolitical events within both the developed and developing world, including Sweden, Canada, Italy, Turkey, and Africa.
"The Dual State is a powerful and provocative interrogation of contemporary politics of security, based on a critical reinterpretation of Carl Schmitt's political thought. The contributors trace the operation of the para-political logic in a dazzling variety of settings, demonstrating the continuing dependence of the global liberal order on disavowed and covert structures of authority. Combining theoretical sophistication with empirical diversity, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary world politics.' Sergei Prozorov, University of Helsinki, Finland
'Recent history (with its seminal falsifications like the false-flag US anthrax attacks) has served to increase the relevance of parapolitical analysis. This anthology shows the recurrence of parapolitics in many different countries, and also contributes to a theoretical understanding of both the phenomenon and the study of it, the latter in the context of officially funded (and CIA-subsidized) academic social science. Most of the investigative essays are open-ended, as they should be. In all this important and wide-ranging collection is an excellent introduction to parapolitical studies, the best that I know." -- Peter Dale Scott, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Government of the Shadows analyses the concept of clandestine government. It explores how covert political activity and transnational organised crime are linked -- and how they ultimately work to the advantage of state and corporate power. The book shows that legitimate government is now routinely accompanied by extra-governmental covert operations.
Using a variety of case studies, from the mafia in Italy to programmes for food and reconstruction in Iraq, the contributors illustrate that para-political structures are not 'deviant', but central to the operation of global governments. The creation of this truly parallel world-economy, the source of huge political and economic potential, entices states to undertake new forms of regulation, either through their own intelligence agencies, or through the more shadowy world of criminal cartels.
See Chapter 29 - "The Corruption of Patriotism"
National security policy in the United States has remained largely constant from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration. This continuity can be explained by the “double government” theory of 19th-century scholar of the English Constitution Walter Bagehot. As applied to the United States, Bagehot’s theory suggests that U.S. national security policy is defined by the network of executive officials who manage the departments and agencies responsible for protecting U.S. national security and who, responding to structural incentives embedded in the U.S. political system, operate largely removed from public view and from constitutional constraints.
The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.
JFK-9/11 assembles the most significant and well-documented "deep events" of the last fifty years into a coherent narrative of the "deep history" of the United States and its sphere of influence. The result is both a concise introduction for newcomers (a "deep history for dummies"), and an insightful perspective for informed readers. Relying strictly on documented evidence and state-of-the-art JFK and 9/11 research, the book cuts through the layers of government and mainstream media lies, to expose the hidden powers at work in the Empire's underground foreign policy. It documents the role of undercover and paramilitary operations, psychological warfare and disinformation campaigns, and above all false flag terror, in the course of world politics since the beginning of the Cold War, and increasingly since September 11th. The book is divided in two parts: the first deals with the underlying forces of the Cold War, the second with the driving forces of the War on Terror.
In a completely original analysis, prize-winning historian Alfred W. McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power—from the 1890s through the Cold War—and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century through a fusion of cyberwar, space warfare, trade pacts, and military alliances. McCoy then analyzes the marquee instruments of US hegemony—covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.
Peeling back layers of secrecy, McCoy exposes a military and economic battle for global domination fought in the shadows, largely unknown to those outside the highest rungs of power. Can the United States extend the “American Century” or will China guide the globe for the next hundred years? McCoy devotes his final chapter to these questions, boldly laying out a series of scenarios that could lead to the end of Washington’s world domination by 2030.
The incomparable researchers Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D. (The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U. S. Democracy and American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan) and Alfred W. McCoy, Ph.D. (The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade) have detailed the covert “deep state” reality of the domestic power elite enmeshed within the extra-constitutional welfare-warfare state apparatus enabled by the Federal Reserve, while the belligerent interventionist foreign policy with the Third World since the end of World War II is exposed as narco-centric, behind the Cold War/War on Terror public facade or rationale.
Along with the multinational petroleum and weapons/intelligence industries of the military-industrial complex, the global narcotics trade is one the biggest businesses in the world. It is fueled and enabled by the clandestine intersection of drug money, intelligence and money laundering on a vast scale by banks and financial institutions across the planet. Dedicated researchers have connected the dots linking the “underworld” of organized crime (narcotics) to the “upperworld” of the establishment (Wall Street banks and CFR-connected corporations/foundations/media). Interwoven within the nexus are the clandestine intelligence services, with ties to both “worlds.”
This provocative book makes a compelling case for a hidden “deep state” that influences and often opposes official U.S. policies. Prominent political analyst Peter Dale Scott begins by tracing America’s increasing militarization, restrictions on constitutional rights, and income disparity since the Vietnam War. He argues that a significant role in this historic reversal was the intervention of a series of structural deep events, ranging from the assassination of President Kennedy to 9/11. He does not attempt to resolve the controversies surrounding these events, but he shows their significant points in common, ranging from overlapping personnel and modes of operation to shared sources of funding. Behind all of these commonalities is what Scott calls the deep state: a second order of government, behind the public or constitutional state, that has grown considerably stronger since World War II. He marshals convincing evidence that the deep state is partly institutionalized in non-accountable intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, but it also includes private corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC, to which 70 percent of intelligence budgets are outsourced. Behind these public and private institutions is the traditional influence of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, allied with international oil companies beyond the reach of domestic law. With the importance of Gulf states like Saudi Arabia to oil markets, American defense companies, and Wall Street itself, this essential book shows that there is now a supranational deep state, sometimes demonstrably opposed to both White House policies and the American public interest.
David Talbot, author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, interviews author Peter Dale Scott upon the publication of Scott's book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy.
Brilliant synthesis of hundreds of books detailing the Establishment's deadly war against the American people, their liberties, and their families.
The Authentic History Center endeavors to tell the story of the United States primarily through popular culture. It was created to teach that the everyday objects in society have authentic historical value and reflect the social consciousness of the era that produced them. New interpretive sections are added when substantial resources have been collected. Until then, incomplete collections are presented as digital archives without comment for individual study. The site is a work in progress.
Hip Hop has had an overwhelming influence on the black community in America, as well as society as a whole. Hip Hop is more than music, Hip Hop is a culture. Over the past three decades, Hip Hop has influenced and uplifted America, speaking up for generations and providing a voice to a group of people trying to deliver a message.
Opponents of the Hip Hop culture argue that the music is aggressive in nature and promotes social rebellion- however provocative lyrics do not negate the fact that Hip Hop is a vocal outlet for many people in America. Hip Hop has provided a platform for MCs and rappers to express their opinions about society, the government and the treatment of African Americans in America for decades.
This outlet is crucial for the uplifting of the black community and would benefit society entirely if people opposed to Hip Hop tried to embrace the culture rather than attack the culture.