CovertAction Bulletin

On Philip Agee and the History CovertAction Magazine: In-depth Interviews with Louis Wolf and Chris Agee

Today we turn to Philip Agee, ex-CIA Case Officer from 1957 to 1969. After a series of short extraordinary excerpts from interviews with Philip Agee, featured in the classic documentary history of the CIA entitled “On Company Business," David Giglio goes in-depth with Louis Wolf and Chris Agee discussing Phil and the history of CovertAction Magazine.

 

Philip Agee was stationed in various parts of Latin America including Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico throughout the 1960s. As one of the first ex-CIA whistleblowers to go public in 1975, Agee not only exposed the covert activities of the U.S. government but provided the critical analysis including political economy to contextualize the mechanics of U.S. imperialism.

 

In addition to writing his tell-all book in 1975 entitled CIA Diary: Inside the Company, where he named all the actual names and operations, Agee started CovertAction Magazine (originally named CovertAction Information Bulletin) in 1978 with Louis Wolf, William Schaap, Ellen Ray, James and Elsie Wilcott, William Kunstler, and Michael Ratner.

 

The Magazine was created in order to carry on the work of the preceding publication called CounterSpy, which had been shut down as a result of CIA harassment. Over the years, contributors to the Magazine have included critics of U.S. foreign policy such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Philip Wheaton, Sean Gervasi and Christopher Hitchens.

 

By the printing of the second issue, eleven bookstores promoted the stapled newsletter. And by issue #3, the official library of the CIA had actually sent in its subscription request which was then posted on the cover. You can read these and all the back issues in the archives of CovertActionMagazine.com.

 

The publication became of interest to Congress in 1982 with the passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which made the practice of revealing the names of undercover officers illegal under U.S. law—even if derived from public unclassified sources.

 

Over the years, the magazine worked with and supported whistleblowers like John Stockwell, Ralph McGehee, David MacMichael, Jennifer Harbrury, Ambassador/Colonel Ann Wright, Christopher Simpson, and Wayne Madsen, publishing hundreds of articles on CIA covert operations and intelligence-related disclosures including undercover NSA and FBI operations in the U.S. and around the world.

 

When you think of the more recent whistleblowers including Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and Daniel Hale, we are talking about a long history of whistleblowers going back to Philip Agee, Daniel Ellsberg, Anthony Russo and more…

 

As covered in earlier episodes, CAM played a important role in the making of Oliver Stone’s JFK in the early 1990s. Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap encouraged, edited and published Jim Garrison’s book entitled “On the Trail of the Assassins.” They then handed it to Oliver Stone in an elevator at the Havana Film Festival in the late 80s and he was quickly convinced to make the film.

In 1992, with issue #43, the magazine was renamed as CovertAction Quarterly and won awards from organizations including Project Censored for stories like "Phi Beta Capitalism", about corporate influence on universities.

 

CovertAction Quarterly ceased publication of its print magazine in 2005 with issue #78, and later relaunched online as CovertAction Magazine in 2018.

 

Numerous articles from CovertAction Quarterly were collected in two anthologies, CovertAction: The Roots of Terrorism and Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars The American Way, both by Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap and published by Ocean Press in 2003.

 

Agee and Louis Wolf also published Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe and Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa, with Ellen Ray, Bill Schaap, and Karl Van Meter.

 

Lou Wolf is the lone surviving co-founder of CovertAction Magazine. In this intriguing interview, David Giglio, from OurHiddenHistory.org, sat down with myself and Lou to discuss our experiences with the Magazine and living and working with, my father, Philip Agee.

 

Thank you for listening to and supporting CovertAction Bulletin, the official podcast of CovertAction Magazine--an investigative journal exposing covert action since 1978.

 

Head on over to CovertAction Bulletin to listen to the full interview and to our website where you will find hundreds of articles on the nefarious activities of U.S. imperialism and plutocrats worldwide.

Whistleblower Bill Binney, Former Technical Director of the NSA, Goes In-Depth on the Surveillance State

Today we turn to whistleblower Bill Binney, the former intelligence official and Technical Director of the National Security Agency, and go in-depth on the surveillance state, how 9/11 could have been avoided, Russiagate and more...

 

Bill resigned in the wake of 9/11 after more than 30 years with the NSA. He was a critic of his former employers during the Bush Sr. and Jr. administrations, and later criticized the NSA's data-collection policies during the Obama administration. More recently, he demonstrated with technical evidence that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections by hacking into the DNC servers.

 

After the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, Bill and his team were fast developing a program called ThinThread to monitor all communications around the world. The Nation reported that "despite ThinThread’s proven capacity to collect actionable intelligence, agency director Gen. Michael Hayden vetoed the idea of deploying the system in August 2001, just three weeks before 9/11." Hayden’s decisions, the whistleblowers told The Nation, "left the NSA without a system to analyze the trillions of bits of foreign SIGINT flowing over the Internet at warp speed, as ThinThread could do."

 

After discarding Bill's ThinThread program, which cost $3.2 million and used encryption to block out certain aspects of communications that might violate the U.S. constitution, among other things, Hayden implemented TrailBlazer instead, which violated numerous U.S. constitutional protections and cost 1,000 times more.

 

Not that we at CAM are in favor of any surveillance program, even Bill, as he tells us in this interview, celebrates the fact that he quit and never delivered an even more powerful program that would automatically produce reports on actionable intelligence.

 

Jeremy Kuzmarov, the Managing Editor at CAM, and Chris Agee, Executive Editor, sat down with

Bill last September (2020) and discussed his work with the NSA, why he quit, and his views on the current surveillance state. Among other revelations, Bill provides evidence demonstrating that the DNC hack by the Russians was a false flag event and that the surveillance state is slipping into what he calls 'total population control toward totalitarianism.'

 

See the attached slides Bill uses in his talks exposing the worldwide surveillance state.

 

Thank you for listening to and supporting CovertAction Bulletin, the official podcast of CovertAction Magazine--an investigative journal exposing covert action since 1978. Head on over to our website where you will find hundreds of articles on the nefarious activities of U.S. imperialism and plutocrats worldwide.

Nicaragua’s Evidence-Based Democracy Threatens U.S. Oppression Domestically and Abroad

In this episode, we turn to Nicaragua and the recent elections that just took place last month, on November 7th.

 

Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas won the elections with over 75% of the vote. Nicaragua’s non-partisan, independent Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) reported that over 65% of the 4.4 million eligible voters (16 years and older) participated in the election.

 

Meanwhile, the mainstream media—including so-called progressive media outlets like National Public Radio—regurgitated U.S. State Department talking points on the elections highlighting the jailing of opponents without providing the much-needed background to the events including the activities of the U.S.-supported coup-plotters advocating the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government.

 

As reported in CovertAction Magazine, The Grey Zone and other trailblazing outlets, the reality on the ground couldn't be more different.

 

As is typical, U.S. covert activities were in full swing using National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Agency for International Development money to finance the opposition, destabilize the country and the elections, not to mention support worldwide propaganda campaigns to deride President Ortega as a dictator. Its no wonder that so many people are confused about recent events in Nicaragua.

 

Today, we take an in-depth look at the electoral process and history of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. We find that U.S. destabilization efforts are nothing new—efforts that are quite common around the world—particularly in countries that are forging independent paths to implement universal healthcare, literacy campaigns and economies oriented toward raising the standard of living for its own people. In the view of the U.S. plutocratic elite, such efforts undermine international corporate interests and serve as an example threatening U.S. hegemony.

 

CAM sent globetrotting correspondent Lauren Smith to Nicaragua to report on the elections first hand. See her in-depth article published in CovertAction Magazine entitled "Nicaragua’s Evidence-Based Democracy Threatens U.S. Oppression Domestically and Abroad." She joins us today with Mark Cook who has reported on Nicaragua for the past 4 decades.

 

Thank you for listening to and supporting CovertAction Bulletin, the official podcast of CovertAction Magazine--an investigative journal exposing covert action since 1978. Head on over to our website where you will find hundreds of articles on the nefarious activities of U.S. imperialism and plutocrats worldwide.

Peter Dale Scott, Author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK

In this third installment of our Destiny Betrayed series on the JFK assassination, Aaron talks with Professor Peter Dale Scott, author of Deep Politics of the Death of JFK as well as Dallas '63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House.  Peter Dale Scott is also known for inventing two important research approaches: parapolitics and deep politics.

 

This is the first of two series installments with Professor Scott on the subject of the JFK assassination.

 

This episode also features contributions from Abby Martin of The Empire Files and a postscript discussion between Aaron and pod-friend Ben Howard. Many thanks to our sound engineer Anthony Fest of Project Censored!

 

For full episodes go to https://www.patreon.com/CovertActionBulletin. CovertAction Bulletin is the official podcast of CovertAction Magazine.

Poetry, Terror, and Suppressed Memory--A Tribute to Peter Dale Scott

This episode features a surprise tribute to the great poet and scholar of deep politics, Professor Peter Dale Scott. The event took place in my Peace Studies of the American Century class.

 

The students had been studying the tragic 1965 massacre of 500,000 to 2,000,000 Indonesians. As part of their studies, the class read excerpts of Professor Scott’s poem Coming to Jakarta. The retired Berkeley professor, was scheduled to appear through Zoom, planning to give a reading and answer questions about his long form poem.

 

Professor Scott did some of the best early work on the massacre. He graciously agreed to speak to my students about Coming to Jakarta. This was just days after his 92nd birthday, so to surprise Peter, I invited his best friend to join us—the renowned Pentagon Papers whistleblower and peace activist, Daniel Ellsberg.

 

In addition to reading Coming to Jakarta, my students also watched The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated film about the 1965 massacre. On a whim, I decided to extend an invitation to Joshua as well, knowing that he had cited Peter's work as an inspiration for his films. I sent Joshua a DM on Twitter and amazingly, he got back to me. He also agreed to surprise Peter and my students.

 

Joshua Oppenheimer’s films changed Indonesian history. In this class meeting, he finally met Peter and paid him a most heartfelt tribute. 

 

And Daniel Ellsberg—himself the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary—also gave a wonderful tribute to Joshua’s films and to Peter’s poetry and prose. This episode also features Freeman Ng and Ben Howard.

 

For full episodes go to https://www.patreon.com/CovertActionBulletin. CovertAction Bulletin is the official podcast of CovertAction Magazine.

David Talbot, Author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years

This is the second part of our Destiny Betrayed series on the JFK assassination. In this episode, Aaron talks with David Talbot about his book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.

Published in 2007, Brothers tells the story of the Kennedy presidency as experienced by many of the people who worked with and knew John and Robert Kennedy. Among other things, the book definitively established an important missing part of the era's history. Drawing from dozens of interviews with the living members of the Kennedy circle, Talbot revealed how Robert Kennedy came to learn that his brother's assassination was the result of an operation involving the CIA with help from the agency's mafia and right-wing Cuban friends. Brothers also revealed that RFK planned to reinvestigate his brother's murder once he got to the White House. Tragically, the Senator was himself assassinated before that could happen.

David Talbot also appears in the new Oliver Stone documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. Streaming now on Showtime, the film was written by Jim DiEugenio--author of Destiny Betrayed and The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. This episode also features contributions from Abby Martin of The Empire Files. Abby recently returned from a trip overseas, during which she grilled Nancy Pelosi about Pentagon pollution in front of an international audience.

For full episodes go to https://www.patreon.com/CovertActionBulletin. CovertAction Bulletin is the official podcast of CovertAction Magazine.

The 9/9/2001 Massoud Assassination

In this episode, Aaron and his illustrious CovertAction Magazine colleague, John Kiriakou, discuss the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud.  They are joined by two luminaries:  Peter Dale Scott and Pepe Escobar.  Peter is a retired UC Berkeley English professor, a renowned poet, and the legendary scholar who basically invented the study of parapolitics and deep politics. His books of poetry and prose include 'Coming to Jakarta', 'Deep Politics and the Death of JFK', 'The Road to 9/11', and 'The American Deep State'. Pepe Escobar is Editor at Large for Asia Times. For the last two decades, Escobar has been THE guy writing about the New Silk Road in China and Central Asia. He was also one of the last journalists to speak to Massoud before his death.

 

Listeners may wish to read the articles referred to in this episode:

 

"Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001 a Crucial Pre-condition for 9/11?" by Peter Dale Scott and Aaron Good: https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/12/09/was-the-now-forgotten-murder-of-one-man-on-september-9-2001-a-crucial-pre-condition-for-9-11/

 

"9/9 and 9/11, 20 Years Later" by Pepe Escobar:  https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/9-9-and-9-11-20-years-later/.

 

For full episodes go to https://www.patreon.com/CovertActionBulletin. CovertAction Bulletin is the official podcast of CovertAction Magazine.

Oliver Stone‘s JFK w/Zach Sklar & Jim DiEugenio

This first episode of the CovertAction Bulletin podcast is also the first part of our Destiny Betrayed series on the JFK assassination. In this episode, Aaron talks with Zachary Sklar, the co-screenwriter of Oliver Stone's JFK. They are joined by series producer, Jim DiEugenio, the writer and  co-creator of Oliver Stone's JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, now streaming on Showtime.  

Released in 1991, JFK was based upon Jim Garrison's memoir, 'On the Trail of the Assassins.'  The book was published by CovertAction Magazine's old publishing arm, Sheridan Square Press. Zachary Sklar edited Garrison's memoir before taking on screenwriting duties after Stone purchased the book's film rights.  In this episode, we cover the origin story of the memoir and the film, the unprecedented controversy sparked by the movie, and the singular historical impact of the film. 

This episode also features the multitalented Abby Martin of The Empire Files.

For full episodes go to https://www.patreon.com/CovertActionBulletin. CovertAction Bulletin is the official podcast of CovertAction Magazine.#