Spy TV

Newly-available emails show that when Claire Danes first visited CIA headquarters, she did so in very low-key fashion after a friendly CIA agent got her in. This confirms that the Agency have been involved in the production of Homeland since the first season, and shows how even their liaisons with the entertainment industry are sometimes done very quietly.

This week I joined Pearse to talk about the beginning of the new season of Homeland, and how it isn't quite what we expected. The entire 6th season is set between the US presidential election and inauguration day and while the president-elect is female, she is no Hitlery Clinton. Instead she is a peacenik who wants to withdraw from Syria, and believes the domestic terrorist threat is overblown.

Spies is the 'new' game show from Channel 4. I say 'new' because it's a blow-for-blow remake of the 2004 BBC series Spy, which also took a small group of members of the public and had three former spooks put them through their paces via a series of tests and training exercises.

The CIA finally jumped on the cooking-themed reality TV propaganda bandwagon in 2010 when they hosted an episode of Top Chef. This week we take a look at the episode in question, how it flattered the CIA, and how Top Chef has involved numerous government agencies and departments. We round off looking at some of the reasons why cooking programmes make for effective propaganda.(Read more...)

In this subscriber-only podcast I talk about the new book I am working on, the fake news hype of recent weeks and review nuclear war sitcom The Brink. This podcast is only available to supporters of my patreon campaign. Click the link below to go to my patreon page and sign up so you can get this and future subscriber-only podcasts.

Mutt and Jeff were a pair of Norwegian double agents during WW2, named after the popular cartoon characters. They played a crucial role in deceiving the Nazi intelligence apparatus by taking part in false flag sabotage and deception operations. Several of these operations have very curious codenames including Operation GUY FAWKES and Operation BUNBURY. In this episode I dwell on the relevance of MI5 operations sourcing their codenames from historical and fictional figures.

Tricia Jenkins' The CIA in Hollywood was one of the books that inspired me to start this site, and the recently published second edition expands considerably on the original. Because the CIA is resistant to FOIA requests and other forms of inquiry, Jenkins amassed a wide range of open source materials and interviewed various people both from the CIA (or formerly of the CIA) and from the entertainment industry.

Chase Brandon was the CIA's first entertainment liaison officer, working in the entertainment industry for over a decade from 1996 onwards. Brandon helped produce over a dozen major films and a similar number of TV shows and more than any other individual helped set up a permanent CIA network within Hollywood and the rest of the industry.

In the 1950s the CIA and CBS were very close and this relationship enabled the CIA to use CBS to influence the media landscape in the United States.

The X-Files new mini-season has been accused of being an admission of truth by the global elite, a type of predictive programming and an attack on conspiracy theorists. In this episode we explore the possibility that it promotes conspiracy theories and conspiracism as a way of thinking far more than it mocks or discourages those things.