Tag: CIA

The Audiobook of The Ghost is on sale

The Ghost

Do you prefer to listen to your books rather than read them? If so, you’ll want to order the audiobook of THE GHOST 2017 biography of CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. For a limited time only, the eBook of THE GHOST is only $2.99! 

Available now at your favorite eBook retailer.

Publisher’s Weekly on Scorpions’ Dance 

In this eye-opening investigation, journalist Morley (The Ghost) scrutinizes the CIA’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. Drawing on taped conversations between Richard Nixon and CIA director Richard Helms, Morley claims that “the Watergate affair originated in the clandestine collaborative relationship” between the two men.

Source: Nonfiction Book Review: Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate by Jefferson Morley

Talking JFK in the desert

Valerie Plame
L to R: Mary Beth Long, Valerie Plame, Jonna Mendez, Lucy Kirk (Jeff Stein photo)

This was an educational experience for me. I thought I was going into the proverbial lions’ den. I was wrong. The secret intelligence professionals in the room were quite open to the way Mowatt-Larssen and I described and explained the events of November 1963.

Russia, Russia, Russia was on our minds, of course, but the talks also included a fascinating discussion on the activities of “rogue” CIA agents surrounding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, presented jointly by investigative journalist Jefferson Morley and former senior CIA officer Rolf Mowatt- Larssen. The audience at the Hacienda del Sol, a hillside luxury resort that once hosted John Wayne, Spencer Tracy. Katharine Hepburn and other Hollywood stars filming Westerns nearby, was also treated to presentations by former female CIA operatives Mary Beth Long, Plame, Jonna Mendez and Lucy Kirk (left to right, above).

Source: A Gathering of Spies in the Desert – by Jeff Stein

Pre-publication sale on Scorpions’ Dance

Publisher’s Weekly calls it an “eye-opening investigation.” …..

…. “Jefferson Morley has captured, in all its surreal conspiratorial glory, the last sinister tango of a pair of wicked Richards. A riveting story that will make you chuckle and shiver.” — John Aloysius Farrell, author of Richard Nixon: The Life…….

Pre-orders are key to my chances of making the best-seller list. ……

Click here, and get 25 percent off with promo code PREORDER25.

…… Would you prefer the audiobook? Click here.

Nothing in the JFK files? Take a look at Birch O’Neal.

Birch O'Neal
Birch O’Neal as a young man. A counterintelligence officer, O’Neal opened the CIA’s Oswald file in November 1959.

As for those 14,000+ JFK files that still contain redactions, some friends tell me, “There’s nothing in there of significance.” This is reassuring. But is it true?

We may find out later this year. President Biden has ordered all JFK files to released by December 15, 2022. I’m looking forward to seeing the unredacted files of those CIA officers most knowledgable about Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK was killed.

For example, Birch Dilworth O’Neal. O’Neal’s 224 page CIA personnel file, released in April 2018, still has scores of redactions.

Why is Birch O’Neal significant?

Oliver Stone explains how JFK’s assassination changed U.S. foreign policy

In this excellent interview Abby Martin actually lets Oliver Stone explain why the JFK assassination story is important today. What emerges is Stone’s earnest and wide-ranging intellect, a likable quality in a man so often slandered and libeled by critics fearful of his conviction that President Kennedy was killed by his enemies. His interpretation is succinct and, for some, too disturbing to believed: “The president is removed for political reasons.”

Watergate @ 50: a new history

In the New York Times, historian Douglas Brinkley praises Garrett Graff’s new history of Watergate scandal, that convulsion of American politics in 1972-74 that culminated in the only resignation of an American president. Brinkley also notes some key questions that Graff’s book does not answer. He asks:

Were such central players as Howard Hunt and James McCord cooperating with the C.I.A. even as they orchestrated the break-in?

It’s a central issue that my forthcoming book on the CIA and Watergate, Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate, answers that question with a definitive yes.  Both Hunt and McCord had backchannel relationships with CIA director Richard Helms before their arrest.

To get the whole story, pre-order Scorpions’ Dance here.

Source: Book Review: ‘Watergate,’ by Garrett M. Graff – The New York Times

Lost in Silence

Jacobin magazine astutely assesses the JFK story in 2022, starting with Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited.

While the original 1991 movie was met with a full-on media pushback at the time, the response in 2021 to the documentary has been far more fitting for our era: ignored or waved away as pure conspiracizing and fake news. For months after it came out, the closest thing to a politically minded legacy media outlet in the United States that actually reviewed the film was the Daily Beast; the country’s major establishment news outlets simply pretended it didn’t exist. It has fared better across the Atlantic, where it got positive reviews from the Financial Times and Telegraph, and negative ones from the Irish Times, Guardian, and the London Times.

Source: Oliver Stone’s JFK Assassination Documentary Shouldn’t Be Dismissed

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