The CIA runs the biggest news service in the world with a budget larger than those of all the major wire services put together. In 1975 a Senate intelligence committee found that the CIA owned outright “more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines, and book pub- lishing complexes” and subsidized many more. A New York Times investigation revealed another fifty media outlets run by the CIA in the United States and abroad, and at least twelve publishing houses, which marketed over 1,200 books secretly commissioned by the CIA, including some 250 in English. As the Times explained it, these figures were far from the whole story.“ The CIA subsidized books on China, the Soviet Union, and Third World struggles which were then reviewed by CIA agents in various U.S. media, including the New York Times.
CIA operatives have planted stories of Soviet nuclear tests that never took place and fabricated "diaries” and “confessions” of defectors from socialist countries. In the early 1950s a news story claiming that China was sending troops to Vietnam to help insurgents fight against the French proved to be a CIA fabrication.“ The agency induced the New York Times to remove a reporter, Sidney Gruson, from a story about the CIA-inspired overthrow of a democratic government in Guatemala because he was getting too close to uncovering the U.S. plot. Stories about Cuban soldiers killing babies and raping women in Angola, concocted by the CIA, were planted abroad, then picked up by AP and UPI stringers for "blowback” runs in the U.S.
In Scott Kimball, the FBI thought it had found a high-value informant who could help solve big cases. What it got instead was lies, betrayal, and murder.
This is one of those stories that when you think it can’t get much worse - it does. Man, what a scumbag. Another fine piece of long form journalism from Atavist Magazine. (Via Longform.)
James Albert Bond from Devon came to Warsaw in February 1964 with his wife and six-year-old son, to take the position of a secretary-cum-archivist to the military attaché at the British Embassy. During his time here he made a few trips to northeast Poland, accompanying senior staff of the local SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) station, allegedly to gather information on military facilities there. As an imperialist diplomat, Bond was automatically put under surveillance by Department II (Counter-intelligence) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which noted his talkativeness, caution and penchant for women. They recorded little more: within ten months, the man sent his family back home, and a couple of weeks later departed himself, never to return.
See also: James Bond Unmasked. A deep dive into the original books by Mordecai Richler.
Female snipers of the Soviet 3rd Shock Army. Bottom Row, left to right: 20, 80, and 83 confirmed kills. Second row: 24, 79, 70. Third row: 70, 89, 89, 83. Top row: 64 and 24 confirmed kills. Germany, May 4, 1945.
During the final weeks of the Trump Administration, a senior official on the National Security Council sat at his desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across from the West Wing, on the White House grounds. It was mid-November, and he had recently returned from a work trip abroad. At the end of the day, he left the building and headed toward his car, which was parked a few hundred yards away, along the Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument. As he walked, he began to hear a ringing in his ears. His body went numb, and he had trouble controlling the movement of his legs and his fingers. Trying to speak to a passerby, he had difficulty forming words. “It came on very suddenly,” the official recalled later, while describing the experience to a colleague. “In a matter of about seven minutes, I went from feeling completely fine to thinking, Oh, something’s not right, to being very, very worried and actually thinking I was going to die.”
He fell to the ground before he reached his car, and realized that he was in no condition to drive. Instead, he made his way to Constitution Avenue, where he hoped to hail a taxi. He managed to open the Lyft app on his phone, and ordered a driver, who took him to the hospital. When he arrived at the emergency room, the official thought, I’m probably not walking out of here.
A Viet Cong guerrilla stands guard in the Mekong Delta. “You could find women like her almost everywhere during the war,” said the photographer. “She was only 24 years old but had been widowed twice. Both her husbands were soldiers. I saw her as the embodiment of the ideal guerrilla woman, who’d made great sacrifices for her country.” 1973. (Photo by Le Minh Truong).
THE DOORBELL RANG at 135 Rue Esseghem, A MODEST ROW HOUSE in Jette, a Brussels suburb. The concierge was occupied with a pair of Japanese tourists visiting the apartment, which had been home to the surrealist painter René Magritte and his wife, Georgette Berger, from 1930 until 1954, and was now a private museum. It was shortly after 10 a.m. on September 24, 2009. When she excused herself to answer the door, the concierge found two young men waiting at the threshold. One of them asked if visiting hours had begun; the other placed a pistol against her head and forced his way inside.
The armed men quickly rounded up both tourists and the three staff members on duty, leaving them kneeling in the museum’s small courtyard, where Magritte had hosted weekly gatherings for painters, musicians, and intellectuals. With the hostages out of their way, one of the thieves jumped the glass partition protecting the tiny museum’s centerpiece: Olympia, a 1948 portrait of the late artist’s wife, pictured nude with a seashell resting on her stomach. The painting measured 60 by 80 centimeters and was estimated to be worth 2 million euros. Belgian police arrived within minutes, summoned by an alarm triggered by the removal of the painting. But by that time, the thieves had returned to a getaway car that sped off toward the neighboring suburb of Laeken.
