Nicholas Schou interviews Douglas Valentine about his new book, Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire, published in May of this year by Trine Day. Listen To This Story Introduction by Nicholas Schou: In the early 1990s, when the US began to normalize relations with Vietnam, Douglas Valentine, then a young author and historian of […]
In Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire, Douglas Valentine descends into some of the most sinister aspects of US foreign policy. These include drug running, illegal arms sales, bribery, human and artifact trafficking, far right coups, assassinations, agitprop and disinformation, as well as fiefdoms set up by former CIA and their assets that are […]
Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers and an American advisor in Vietnam taken sometime between 1967 and 1975. Photo credit: US Army / Wikimedia
Introduction by Kim Petersen
By 1961, the insurgency was growing and the in-coming Kennedy Administration put the blame on the repressive policies of Ngô regime. The Kennedys were also upset that Diệm’s brothers Cẩn and Nhu, and their spymaster Tuyến, were smuggling opium out of Laos and using the profits to finance a vast agent network targeted against Diệm’s political opponents. Having just endured the Bay of the Pigs fiasco, the Kennedys were angry at the CIA, which had trained many of the agents and commandoes Nhu, Cẩn, and Tuyến used in their smuggling operations.
My guest today is the great Douglas Valentine. Doug joins me to discuss his latest book The CIA as Organized Crime. We begin by looking at why Doug decided to write this book and the way in which it is structured. Next we delve into Doug’s relationship with the CIA and how he came to write about it’s inner-workings. Doug talks about his relationship with the agency and how he began getting access to operatives and officials while writing The Phoneix Program, including his meetings with former CIA Director William Colby.
In 1966, the US anthropologist Jules Henry wrote in The Nation:
By RYAN ABBOTT | Courthouse News | July 23, 2013
WASHINGTON – A federal judge dismissed claims that the CIA dosed a bioweapons scientist with LSD in 1953, killed him and made it look like a suicide.
