Tag Archives: cia

I t was nearly midnight in February 2021 when Nasir Andar’s team of soldiers pinpointed the location of the suicide bomber’s house behind a police station in Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan. They crept up to the gate and called up the rest of the assault force, who would …

“Frankly, I still don’t know what happened,” author Tom O’Neill says early on in Netflix’s new documentary Chaos: The Manson Murders. “But I know that what we were told didn’t happen.” It’s an auspicious start to the new film, directed by Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Unknown Known) …

Donald Trump’s pick to head the CIA, John Ratcliffe, took a lucrative spin through Washington’s revolving door after his time in the first Trump administration, according to a disclosure with the Senate. In recent years, Ratcliffe has worked as a consultant and advisor for several defense contractors. Two of the …

Political interference, mind control, domestic spying, and generally speaking, making America worse (again). These are just some of the many grievances Donald Trump and his allies have leveled against the intelligence community in recent months. They have been repeated on podcasts, on YouTube shows, and at rallies since Trump began …

J ust before dawn on Sept. 24, 2007, a red, white, and blue Gulfstream II fell from the sky over the Yucatán Peninsula. The private jet had taken off without passengers from Rio Negro, Colombia, for Cancún, Mexico, more than 1,200 miles north, but crossed radar as a suspicious flight, …

O ne day well into President George W. Bush’s second term, an ultra-deep-cover Central Intelligence Agency officer flew back to the United States for a break from a yearslong assignment in the Middle East. The man had a bushy beard and a distinctive, needled scar on one arm from an …

It was the summer of 2016 when a manager at the Central Intelligence Agency pulled him into a conference room, sat him down at a table, and asked him to read the intelligence they had brought. Michael van Landingham wasn’t naive about what the Kremlin was capable of. His work …

In a secret recording produced at trial, Ross Roggio, an international arms dealer and con artist from Pennsylvania, spat defiance towards the federal agents investigating him. “They can fucking arrest me and torture me till the day they die,” he said. The federal prison system is about to get a …

Can a drug cartel do good? It’s an especially subversive question in North America, where the word “cartel” evokes boundless cruelty. But the Americas hold no monopoly on narco-trafficking supergroups. In fact, the world’s mightiest cartel is entrenched in Southeast Asia’s highlands. This secretive organization, known as the United Wa …

A Taliban air force commander walks into a big, empty gym with his men and hops onto a treadmill. He burns a few calories, cracks a couple of muted jokes, and steps off before lifting a couple of dumbbells. “This was fun,” he says without affect, and moves on to …