CIA during Cold War

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CIA keeps its spy museum hush-hush
When the CIA's gadget gurus need a new piece of technology to satisfy the demands of agents in outpost in the war on terror, they often walk into the past. It's all down the hall in the CIA Museum, where technological fantasies of the Cold War are taking on new relevance in the fight against terrorists. A smaller option for remote surveillance? Maybe there's a way to adapt that old "Insectothopter", a robotic dragonfly developed in the 1970s to fly tiny listening devices through open windows in heavily guarded buildings. "We're revisiting technologies all the time..." says Toni Hiley, the museum's curator.
by usatoday.com :: 2008-07-31 :: Cold War Museums, Memorials

CIA's Secret War in Tibet
In a top secret and little-known, decade-long "war at the top of the world," the CIA supported a Tibetian resistance force in its fight against the Communist Chinese. In the popular imagination Tibet was a legendary theocracy in which a Dalai Lama smiled over a kingdom where no man raised a hand in violence. Then along came the Communist Chinese, who made short work of these placid people. But contrary to the pop history, the Tibetans did not just let the Chinese roll over Tibet in 1951. They fought a long, bloody war of resistance that struck blows to Chairman Mao Tse-tung's expansionist plans.
by biddho :: 2008-03-22 :: CIA during Cold War

CIA's Unsolved Mysteries - The annual Raleigh Spy Conference
The annual Spy Conference will return to Raleigh in March, bringing in espionage and Cold War experts to discuss the CIA's secrets. The last Spy Conference focused on Fidel Castro and Cuba. This year it will focus on the Central Intelligence Agency and its history and is titled "CIA's Unsolved Mysteries: The Nosenko Defection, Double Agents and Angleton's Wilderness of Mirrors." Speakers include: Pete Bagley, the former chief of CIA's Soviet bloc counterintelligence division. Dr. David Robarge, Chief Historian for the CIA. Jerry Schecter, former correspondent for Time in Moscow during the Cold War.
by raleigh2 :: 2008-02-21 :: CIA during Cold War

Central Intelligence Agency 60 years old: Controversial history of CIA
In this background report Gary Thomas looks at the CIA's past and its current state. Some historians say various sectors of the government had enough information to warn of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. But no one, as spies say, connected the dots. That led Franklin Roosevelt to create the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to carry out espionage and sabotage. With the end of WWII the OSS faded into history - replaced by the CIA on Sept. 18, 1947. In his new history of the CIA, Tim Weiner is critical of the CIA's 60-year record: "The legacy of operational failures is long, very long, and the successes don't always stand."
by voanews :: 2007-09-18 :: CIA during Cold War

Donald F.B. Jameson Handled Russian Defectors for CIA
Donald F.B. "Jamie" Jameson, a branch chief in the CIA's directorate of operations who was highly regarded for his work handling Russian defectors, died at 82. He was "one of the most experienced defector recruiters and handlers within the agency," according to Tom Mangold's book "Cold Warrior." He was recruited to the CIA to enlist agents to infiltrate the Soviet Union: "a very large effort that produced virtually no results useful to intelligence." 1962-1969 Jameson headed Soviet bloc covert action - branch, which encouraged dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. He helped arrange for the defection of Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
by washingtonpost :: 2007-09-14 :: CIA during Cold War

CIA can keep Johnson's Vietnam War-era Security Reports Secret
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) doesn't have to disclose 40-year-old security briefings to President Lyndon Johnson, an appeals court ruled. The court said that the president's daily intelligence briefings are "the most important and timely intelligence" on national defense and foreign policy. Larry Berman sued the agency after it refused Freedom of Information Act request to release 2 briefings during the Vietnam War. A 1968 briefing from 2 days after Johnson announced he wouldn't seek re-election and a 1965 briefing from 9 days after Johnson ordered 50,000 more troops to Vietnam.
by bloomberg :: 2007-09-07 :: CIA during Cold War

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the Central Intelligence Agency
Catapulted into the White House by the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman knew nothing about the atomic bomb or the Soviet allies. He needed information to use his power. "When I took over, the President had no means of coordinating the intelligence." Roosevelt had created the Office of Strategic Services, under General William J. Donovan, as America's intelligence agency. But OSS was never built to last. When the new CIA arose from its ashes, Truman wanted it to serve as a news service. "It was not intended as a 'Cloak & Dagger Outfit'!" He insisted that he never wanted the CIA "to act as a spy organization."
by nytimes :: 2007-07-23 :: CIA during Cold War

Feds compensate victim of CIA-funded brainwashing experiments
Janine Huard, who survived Cold War-era brainwashing experiments, accepted an offer to end her class-action lawsuit against the federal government, which jointly funded the experiments with the CIA. The terms of the settlement are confidential, but Huard says it will allow her to live out her days in peace. Huard was a young mother of 4 suffering from post-partum depression when she checked herself into McGill's Allen Memorial Institute in 1950. She was one of hundreds of patients of Dr. Ewan Cameron subjected to treatments like massive electroshock therapy and LSD. The patients were induced into comas and exposed to repetitive messages to brainwash them.
by redorbit :: 2007-07-09 :: CIA during Cold War

CIA to release black files - illegal assassination plots, kidnapping, etc
The CIA is to declassify secret files detailing illegal domestic surveillance, assassination plots, kidnapping, subjecting US citizens to "unwitting" CIA drug experiments to induce "behaviour modification" and other "black" operations from the 1950s to the 1970s. The files detail the ageny's activities at the height of the cold war with the Soviet Union and "Red" China; and the Vietnam conflict. The records were compiled in 1973 at the behest of the CIA director James Schlesinger, and collected in a 693-page dossier known as the "family jewels". Although some of its contents have been leaked, the CIA has refused until now to reveal the full dossier.
by guardian :: 2007-06-25 :: CIA during Cold War

10 Million Pages of CIA Declassified Records Available
The CIA delivered more than 420,000 additional pages of redacted declassified electronic records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) facility in College Park, Maryland. The declassified CIA records are hosted on the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), which now includes more than 10 million pages of records declassified under Executive Order 12958 (by President Bill Clinton). This Executive Order requires Intelligence Community agencies to review all nonexempt records that are 25 years old or older for declassification. As a result, millions of pages of classified information are now available for research.
by newsblaze :: 2007-06-13 :: CIA during Cold War

CIA had cat to bug Russians: "slit the cat open, put batteries in him"
CIA tried to uncover the Kremlin's secrets during the 1960s by turning cats into walking bugging devices, declassified documents show. In one Cold War experiment a cat, "Acoustic Kitty", was wired up for use as an eavesdropping platform. It was hoped that the animal, surgically altered to accommodate transmitting devices, could listen to conversations. Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, told: "They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that."
by telegraph :: 2007-05-29 :: CIA during Cold War

CIA Myth, CIA History - Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games
It should come as no surprise that the history of the CIA during the Cold War has been distorted and mythologized. In the official CIA history the dupes have become heroes and false defectors have become true defectors. This falsification of history has been popularized in books like David C. Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors, Tom Mangold's Cold Warrior, and David Wise's Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA. Now a lead character in CIA history has written an account that explodes the popular falsifications. The former CIA chief of Soviet bloc counterintelligence, Tennent H. Bagley, has written "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games".
by financialsense :: 2007-05-21 :: CIA during Cold War

How climber Pete Takeda retraced a CIA mission to Nanda Devi
In the 1980s, one day when climber Pete Takeda was around the campfire, he heard a tale which seemed stranger than fiction. It was about a clandestine CIA mission to the Himalayas to spy on China and how once there "they lost the plutonium" while planting a sensor. It prompted Takeda to do some research and he found that the story was true. He also read mountaineer M S Kohli's book, Spies in the Himalayas, on the same subject written with Kenneth Conboy which. After the Chinese went nuclear in 1964, the US and India decided to plant a nuclear-powered sensing device on Nanda Devi to monitor China's nuke plans.
by financialexpress :: 2007-05-01 :: CIA during Cold War

Sex and the C.I.A. - The Life and Times of Randy Duke Cunningham
I spoke with a number of CIA officers and asked them about the use of sex as a weapon of espionage and whether Foggo-scale misbehavior would be deemed a security risk. The consensus was that sexual promiscuity posed no problem, especially if the CIA employee was single. Continuous adultery might raise eyebrows and lead to a suggestion of counseling. However, philandering that raised chain-of-command-issues was a big problem. In one case a junior officer in Europe discovered that his wife was sleeping with his station chief. "Everyone got sent home and reprimanded. It was a big mess, but this was seen as a character issue, not a security issue."
by harpers :: 2007-04-18 :: CIA during Cold War

Mystery of missing Thai Silk King
It was an Easter Sunday on 26 March 1967 - Vietnam was 10 months away from the Tet Offensive. "Thai Silk King" Jim Thompson walked out of Moonlight Cottage and was never seen again. It was not his wealth that guaranteed his disappearance would become one of South East Asia's greatest mysteries - it was his past. He had spent WWII with the OSS, the US intelligence agency that was the precursor to the CIA. The official explanation was that Thompson had become lost in the jungle. Tristan Russell does not believe it: "He apparently only went for a short walk. There's no deep jungle there so how one could be lost in the jungle and not be found I can't see."
by bbc :: 2007-03-28 :: CIA during Cold War

Portrait of the CIA as an Artist - The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
Frances Saunders says the CIA financed the avant-garde art movement from which abstract expressionism and performance art emerged. In the 1950s the Agency wanted to move the center of art away from the social realism, which threatened the status quo with its realistic depictions of the human condition. The CIA bankrolled a whole bevy of public pontificators like Irving Kristol, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Hannah Arendt, and Mary McCarthy. It was fond of ex-leftists like Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, and George Orwell who had ratted out establishment Stalinists.
by countercurrents :: 2007-01-27 :: CIA during Cold War

Canadian victim of CIA brainwashing seeks class-action
Janine Huard says she was a young mother with mild post-partum depression when she checked herself in for psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital more than five decades ago. She was drugged and subjected to "depatterning," during which repetitive recordings were played in her ear for weeks on end, one of them telling her she was of no use to her family. The ordeal came at the hands of Dr. Ewen Cameron, who pioneered "psychic driving," by which he believed he could erase the memories of patients and rebuild their psyches. The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited him to experiment with mind control techniques beginning.
by cbc :: 2007-01-11 :: CIA during Cold War

US influence in Nicaragua - days of the CIA-backed warfare
Washington remembers the days of the CIA-backed counterinsurgency organized to remove Nicaragua's Sandinistas from power. Since the end of the Cold War, the region's politics has changed. US desire for influence has not. It is no longer a fight against communism, but against the sway of Hugo Chavez and what his political presence in Central America means for the authority of the US in Latin America. In the 1980s, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was a source of pride for many Nicaraguans. It was the Sandinistas who ended 43 years of Somoza family's brutal dictatorship in 1979. This US-backed string of dictators began with Anastasio Somoza in 1936.
by mexidata :: 2006-07-27 :: CIA during Cold War

Spy criticized CIA's handling of defectors
F. Mark Wyatt, a former CIA agent who spent 3 decades on the front lines of Cold War espionage and who in retirement worked to improve the lives of Soviet-bloc defectors, died. After years of helping woo potential defectors, Wyatt believed the CIA could do a better job of helping former spies adjust to their new lives in this country. Several top officials redefected because of the shabby treatment they received.
by washingtonpost :: 2006-07-19 :: CIA during Cold War

CIA and NASA Linked During Cold War Space Race
A space history sleuth has documented cooperative ties between NASA and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the heated U.S.-Russian space race in the late 1950s through the 1960s. Not only did the CIA provide data to NASA, the space agency also gave expertise to the spy agency. Declassified documents about the historical NASA-CIA partnership are being detailed at the World Space Congress. In "Brothers in Arms: The CIA and the American Civilian Space Program, 1958-1968", Dwayne Day spells out the actions between two different bureaucratic weapons in the American arsenal during the space race with the Soviet Union.
by space :: 2006-02-15 :: CIA during Cold War

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