In December 1974, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh's front-page account (paywall) of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program documented their illegal domestic intelligence operations against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States. The article eventually prompted investigations by the Rockefeller Commission and the Church and Pike committees. "There have been other reports on the CIA's doping of civilians, but they have mostly dished about activities in New York City. Accounts of what actually occurred in San Francisco have been sparse and sporadic. But newly declassified CIA records, recent interviews, and a personal diary of [George H. White,] an operative at Stanford Special Collections shed more light on the breadth of the San Francisco operation." SF Weekly: "Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA doped San Francisco citizens with LSD." MK-ULTRA: Previously on Metafilter. (Via)
posted by zarq on Mar 26, 2012 - 29 comments

Foreign Policy is reporting that Israeli intelligence agents posed as CIA officers to recruit members of Jundallah, a designated terrorist group, in its covert fight against the Iranian effort to acquire nuclear capability.
posted by RedShrek on Jan 13, 2012 - 36 comments

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip ends tonight, and Aaron Sorkin will be leaving television production for a while. His current project is Charlie Wilson's War, a movie starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, based on the late George Crile's excellent, funny nonfic book of the same name. The movie will trace "party animal" Congressman Charles "Good Time Charlie" Wilson's (D, TX) rise from a scandal (he was caught in "a hot tub tryst with two cocaine-sniffing showgirls in Las Vegas",) to his role in the 1980's covertly funding Afghanistan guerrillas so they could expand their war with the Soviet Union. Wilson's actions would eventually help collapse the Afghan PDPA government, a power vacuum which would be filled by the Taliban. Who would have thought ending the Cold War would be so easy?
posted by zarq on Jun 28, 2007 - 60 comments

Trevor Paglen is a scholar and artist who investigates the California prison-industrial complex and secret military bases in his work as an "experimental geographer." In his new book, Tracking the Torture Taxi, Paglen uses the methods of "21st century participatory journalism" (including a Google Earth image of a CIA interrogation facility) to uncover the network of private planes (such as Aero Contractors of Smithfield, NC) that whisk people off to secret prisons without oversight.
posted by jonp72 on Sep 20, 2006 - 6 comments

Internet blows CIA cover The identities of thousands of Central Intelligence Agency employees, many of them operating under cover, have been available to anyone looking for the right information in public records searches. Only problem: The CIA was kind of surprised to find this out. (Site may require registration for some. Use BugMeNot.)
posted by emelenjr on Mar 12, 2006 - 41 comments