Blond Ghost

Based on once-secret government records and interviews with over 100 ex-CIA officers, Blond Ghost offers a fascinating portrait of Ted Shackley - a real-life George Smiley. It exposes the inner workings of the CIA and details the failure of the Agency's most important covert enterprises. It reveals dozens of top-secret operations: how the CIA recruited children as agents in Vietnam: how it encouraged perjury before Congress; how it paid off a suspected drug dealer; how it tried to use sex to blackmail communist officials; how it uncovered a Soviet-bloc spy in the German parliament; and more. Washington journalist David Corn discloses that for decades, the CIA's commitment to dirty tricks and secret wars compromised its ability to gather intelligence. Blond Ghost probes the CIA's Cold War record and shows that the Agency's efforts to penetrate the Iron Curtain in the 1950s were utterly unsuccessful, with an appalling and pointless loss of life: that the CIA tried to foment rebellion in Cuba, despite intelligence asserting no uprising was likely; that the CIA foisted on its Laotian allies unrealistic military operations that led to the death and displacement of tens of thousands of Laotians; that the CIA bungled miserably in Vietnam - ignoring intelligence collection for years and then suppressing information on the corruption and ineptness of the Saigon regime. Blond Ghost tells the tale of an important, decorated, and controversial spymaster, unveils the nitty-gritty of life in the Agency, and reveals the real job the CIA did in the Cold War.

Freedom fighters. Guerrilla warriors. Soldiers of fortune. The many civil wars and rebellions against communist governments drew heavily from this cast of characters. Yet from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, Vietnam to Angola, Cuba to the Congo, the connections between these anticommunist groups have remained hazy and their coordination obscure. Yet as Kyle Burke reveals, these conflicts were the product of a rising movement that sought paramilitary action against communism worldwide. Tacking between the United States and many other countries, Burke offers an international history not only of the paramilitaries who started and waged small wars in the second half of the twentieth century but of conservatism in the Cold War era. From the start of the Cold War, Burke shows, leading U.S. conservatives and their allies abroad dreamed of an international anticommunist revolution. They pinned their hopes to armed men, freedom fighters who could unravel communist states from within. And so they fashioned a global network of activists and state officials, guerrillas and mercenaries, ex-spies and ex-soldiers to sponsor paramilitary campaigns in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Blurring the line between state-sanctioned and vigilante violence, this armed crusade helped radicalize right-wing groups in the United States while also generating new forms of privatized warfare abroad.

Arboleya also analyzes the role played by Cuban immigrants to the United States and the perspectives for improvement in relations between the two nations as a result of the generational and social changes that have been occurring in the Cuban-American community."--BOOK JACKET.

Contains 51 supposedly true, classic American ghost stories from newspapers, journals, and magazines.

A fully-revised and updated new edition of a concise and insightful socio-historical analysis of the Cuban revolution, and the course it took over five and a half decades. Now available in a fully-revised second edition, including new material to add to the book’s coverage of Cuba over the past decade under Raul Castro All of the existing chapters have been updated to reflect recent scholarship Balances social and historical insight into the revolution with economic and political analysis extending into the twenty-first century Juxtaposes U.S. and Cuban perspectives on the historical impact of the revolution, engaging and debunking the myths and preconceptions surrounding one of the most formative political events of the twentieth century Incorporates more student-friendly features such as a timeline and glossary

The authoritative, gripping, and sometimes jaw-dropping account of the brothers who shaped a generation, and whose story of tragedy and triumph were intertwined. This year?2003?marks the 40th anniversary of JKF's assassination!

Contrary to its contemporary image, deniable covert operations are not something new. Such activities have been ordered by every president and every administration since the Second World War. In many instances covert operations have relied on surrogates, with American personnel involved only at a distance, insulated by layers of deniability. Shadow Warfare traces the evolution of these covert operations, detailing the tactics and tools used from the Truman era through those of the contemporary Obama Administrations. It also explores the personalities and careers of many of the most noted shadow warriors of the past sixty years, tracing the decade–long relationship between the CIA and the military. Shadow Warfare presents a balanced, non–polemic exploration of American secret warfare, detailing its patterns, consequences and collateral damage and presenting its successes as well as failures. Shadow Wars explores why every president from Franklin Roosevelt on, felt compelled to turn to secret, deniable military action. It also delves into the political dynamic of the president's relationship with Congress and the fact that despite decades of combat, the U.S. Congress has chosen not to exercise its responsibility to declare a single state of war – even for extended and highly visible combat.

In this decisive analysis of the JFK assassination, medical expert Dr. David W. Mantik and New York Times bestselling author Jerome R. Corsi definitively validate the observations of the physicians at Parkland Hospital, who recognized immediately that the wound in JFK’s throat and the massive, avulsed blow-out in the back of his head both involved frontal shots. What distinguishes this book from the myriad of books written on the JFK assassination is that Dr. Mantik’s optical density measurements of the JFK skull X-rays in the National Archives leave no doubt the X-rays were altered to disguise evidence of the two frontal shots. With over four decades of experience reading X-rays, Dr. Mantik has examined the JFK assassination materials more than anyone else. Mantik and Corsi present overwhelming testimonial and documentary evidence that proves the Bethesda surgeons performed pre-autopsy surgery on JFK’s head to remove evidence of the forehead bullet, as well as to gain access to his brain and thus “sanitize the crime scene” by removing bullet fragments and bullet tracks in the brain tissue. “The world is starving for objective science. This book contains objective forensic science for which the world will never be ready. If the X-rays were doctored, the CIA, the FBI, and the US Secret Service have some questions to answer. The public deserves the final analysis of these issues.” —James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, The Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge