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Frances Stonor Saunders obituary

Author and documentary-maker best known for her 1999 book about CIA-funded cultural espionage Who Paid the Piper? The 1999 book Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders’s exposé of CIA-funded cultural espionage during the cold war, “single-handedly established a new branch of sub-history”, according to the novelist Ian McEwan. Translated into 17 languages, the book established Frances, then in her early 30s, as one of the most exciting nonfiction writers of her generation. Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Lisa Allardice13 Sept

TNT’s Iraq War Drama ‘High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam’ Is Dull and Deeply Disturbing: TV Review

Twenty-three years after the United States invaded Iraq, the American public now knows that despite his horrific reign and brutal dictatorship, Saddam Hussein never had any weapons of mass destruction. Based on former CIA analyst John Nixon’s 2016 memoir “Debriefing the President,” and adapted for television by Daniel Stiepleman and Jonathan Wakeham, TNT’s limited series, […]

VarietyVariety•Aramide Tinubu13 Sept

Ex-CIA officer accused of stealing gold bars reaches tentative plea deal

David Rush accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth over $40m and hiding them in his basement Federal prosecutors have reached a tentative plea agreement with a former CIA officer accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth more than $40m from the US spy agency and hiding them in his basement, court records show. David Rush and federal justice department prosecutors have a “plea agreement in principle”, the parties said in a Friday court filing . The parties also asked a judge to extend the 17 September deadline for three weeks through 8 October to allow them time to “resolve the matter prior to an indictment”. Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Lucy Campbell11 Sept

CIA releases dozens of presidential daily briefs on Bin Laden and al-Qaida from before 9/11

The presidential briefing documents were declassified on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks Several dozen presidential briefing documents declassified on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks , detail intelligence that government officials had gathered about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida leading up to the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people and upended American national security . The documents illustrate security analysts’ tracking of Bin Laden’s movements and support system, as well as concerns about possible threats to US targets. They also detail officials’ understanding of his network in the United States and other countries, including how his operations were financed. Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Associated Press11 Sept

‘It was all hands on deck’: how the CIA responded to 9/11

Veterans recall chaos and confusion as the attacks unfolded – followed by a ‘war on terror’ that left agency with a tarnished reputation A generation of spies had lost an enemy but not yet found a role. Then came 9/11. A decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, al-Qaida’s devastating attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 announced to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that the long era of battling communism, for which it had been founded, was officially at an end. Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Robert Tait in Washington10 Sept

DAU review – Ilya Krzhanovsky’s crazed Soviet inferno reaches its central character

Venice film festival: The director’s bleak epic project about the scientist Lev Landau finally focuses on the genius maudit who inspired the series How would it be if Christopher Nolan got sidetracked while making Oppenheimer, and decided to spend 20 years and millions of dollars of other people’s money reconstructing the Los Alamos HQ in all its minute detail, which would be the site of a gigantic immersive multimedia project, releasing epic and sexually explicit sidebar movies about … someone who worked in the commissary … or a scary incidental guy from the CIA … before finally getting round to the fundamental main-event movie with Cillian Murphy as the A-bomb’s father? Perhaps it would be something like Ilya Krzhanovsky’s authentically mad, obsessively sexual, and spectacularly pessimistic epic project about the Soviet scientist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau, or “Dau”, whose work spanned the 1920s to the postwar and cold war eras, and whose notional endorsement of free love the DAU movies escalate into a dissolute sex addiction. Khrzhanovsky gives this a kind of classical Hellenic distinction by fictionalising a Greek background for our mysterious horny hero, whose indulgences coexist with his self-questioning obsession with his own genius and loneliness. It would be vulgar and irrelevant to wonder if Khrzhanovsky, like any artist, is in fact working on a self-portrait. But you surely can’t work on a (still unfinished) project like this without a strong personal connection. Here, at all events, is the latest Dau iteration, a more conventionally conceived biopic about Lev Landau (although we don’t see him getting the Nobel – perhaps that’s a separate film). Apparently this is the feature that Khrzhanovsky originally envisioned before the creative Big Bang that created the Dau multimedia universe. His first offshoot picture DAU. Natasha (2020) was about two women who work in the canteen of Dau’s research institute, a place drenched in sexual tension and political paranoia and violence. The next film to come was the grisly epic DAU. Degeneration (2020), set in the late 60s with Dau himself – still here a peripheral character – on his deathbed. Continue reading...

The GuardianThe Guardian•Peter Bradshaw9 Sept