Featured-ClandesTime

Hollywood doesn’t make war films any more. This isn’t entirely true, but compared to the post-WW2 period there are a lot less war films being made today. In this in-depth episode I offer a brief history of war movies and anti-war movies, and how the Pentagon’s policy on supporting films depicting war seems to have changed over time. I highlight some of my favourite anti-war movies, along with the most anti-war films the DOD has supported.

The Weather Underground were the most active and successful militant left-wing group in US history. As part of their anti-Vietnam war operations they bombed the Pentagon, the State Department, corporate headquarters and other high-profile targets. In this episode I examine whether they were a lethal terrorist organisation, or a non-lethal militant anti-war gang. I look […](Read more...)

For the last several weeks the British media has been in full panic mode after two people were apparently poisoned in the English town of Amesbury, a few miles from Salisbury. The official story is that the pair found a perfume bottle containing Novichok that was discarded by Russian assassins after the poisoning of the […](Read more...)

On March 4th Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in the sleepy British city of Salisbury, by forces currently unknown. The British government immediately blamed Russian intelligence, leading to weeks of accusations and counter-accusations, diplomatic expulsions and lots of conspiracy theories about who really did this, and why.

The book of Ecclesiastes tells us, ‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’ Even the idea that there is nothing new is thousands of years old. This week we’re going to look at why Hollywood appears to have run out of ideas despite being one of the most innovative places on earth.

In the five years running up to 9/11 the NSA were monitoring Osama Bin Laden's satellite phone and Al Qaeda's communication hub, and the CIA were closely following their key operatives, including to the so-called '9/11 summit' in Malaysia. So why didn't they prevent the attacks?

What if I told you that the same man trained Meir Kahane’s killer, the World Trade Center bombers, the African embassy bombers and Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguards? What if this man was a member of the Egyptian Army unit that assassinated Anwar Sadat, and was a translator and close associate of Ayman Zawahiri? And what if he did all this while serving in the US Special Forces, as an FBI informant and working for the CIA? That man is Ali Mohamed, perhaps the most astonishing spy of recent times.

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.

Unreal is a gripping and brutal satire of reality TV but it is much more than that. While this might sound like a drama about a trivial subject, the content of Unreal makes it one of the most serious and important TV series of recent years. It follows two female producers as they make a romance-themed reality show, highlighting the degree to which they're willing to manipulate the contestants in order to produce 'good TV'.

What connects JFK, Allen Dulles and the CIA's invasion at the Bay of Pigs to the movies Thunderball and Goldfinger? The answer is the relationship between the CIA and James Bond. In this episode we look at Fleming's decades-long relationship with American intelligence, from the OSS through to the CIA, and how Dulles' friendship with Fleming allowed the Agency to quietly improve their public image via the James Bond novels.