Cold War

The 1973 ITV documentary The Red Under the Bed helped convict the Shrewsbury 24 by accusing them of being communists for their role in leading the 1972 Building Workers Strike.

The Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman was an Egyptian cleric who played a critical role in the early years of Al Qaeda. Rahman and his followers took over the New York branch of the MAK, an international fundraising and recruiting organisation that was central to the CIA's Operation Cyclone. His followers carried out several major crimes - the murders of the mosque's original imam Mustafa Shalabi and of Jewish Defence League founder Meir Kahane, as well at the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Goldeneye is possibly the best of the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films, but like two others in the Brosnan period it relied on US military support. This entailed the Pentagon reviewing the script and demanding two changes - one political, one promotional - in exchange for helping to shoot one brief scene with uniformed soldiers and military vehicles.(Read more...)

(ANTIWAR) Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made an appearance today on Good Morning America, discussing the ever-worsening relations between the United States and Russia, and describing them as “maybe even worse” than they were during the Cold War.

In this lecture we come to the Catholic version of Tragedy and Hope the overlooked geopolitical tome of Malachi Martin, Keys of This Blood: John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order. Almost as revelatory as Dr. Quigley’s magnum opus, this angle looks at the Vatican’s role in 20th century geopolitics and its infiltration by Satanic and Masonic Groups.

Beginning a new series on the history of Al Qaeda, this week I provide the basis for what's coming in the next several episodes. What is or was Al Qaeda? Four distinct models have been proposed to try to answer this question so I outline each, drawing on the works of Rohan Gunaratna, Jason Burke/Adam Curtis, Nafeez Ahmed and Daniele Ganser.

Mark Hackard on Red Ice Radio with Henrik Palmgren. Henrik and I discussed Soviet intelligence operations, specifically the history of illegals, deep politics and geostrategy, and the course of Russian and Western culture.
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Being shocked by the weakness of the Republican Party is a bit like being shocked by the intellectual vacuousness of the Democrats. The Democrats along with their neo-con fellow travellers are ramping up their ‘everyone who disagrees with us is a Russian agent’ campaign, this time from the heart of Congress.

From the Donald Trump school of naming things came The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World, a 1965 spoof of the James Bond movies. Like many 1960s spy thrillers The Second Best Secret Agent was on the radar of the CIA.(Read more...)

The headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) seen with the United States, RFE/RL and the Czech Republic flags in the foreground, in Prague Friday, Jan. 15, 2010. (AP /CTK, Michal Kamaryt)