An audio file serving as the final testimony of CIA veteran and convicted Watergate conspirator, E. Howard Hunt on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has surfaced.
It has been distilled down from a 20-minute tape made by Hunt at his home in Miami, according to his oldest son with whom E. Howard Hunt had enjoyed a good relationship in later life.
The unmarked cassette was received in the mail by his oldest son, Saint John Hunt, in Janurary 2004. At the ti... (more)
Japan's abhorrent practice of enslaving women to provide sex for its troops in World War II has a little-known sequel: After its surrender -- with tacit approval by U.S. occupation authorities -- Japan set up a similar "comfort women" system for American GIs.
An Associated Press review of historical documents and records -- some never before translated into English -- shows that American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that wom... (more)
Giles MacDonogh is a bon viveur and a historian of wine and gastronomy, but in this book, pursuing his other consuming interest - German history - he serves a dish to turn the strongest of stomachs. It makes particularly uncomfortable reading for those who compare the disastrous occupation of Iraq unfavourably to the post-war settlement of Germany and Austria.
MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler's Reich, but ... (more)
DOZENS OF people drank, inhaled or were injected with radioactivity as part of a series of secret experiments carried out by the nuclear industry in the 1960s, according to official documents passed to the Sunday Herald.
Tests exposing humans to radioactive caesium, iodine, strontium and uranium were conducted despite doubts about their legal and ethical implications. One proposal even envisaged injecting plutonium into elderly people to help assess contamination risks. ... (more)
For four decades there have been rumours that Marilyn Monroe's death was not a simple suicide. Now a Los Angeles-based Australian writer and director, Philippe Mora, has uncovered an FBI document that throws up a chilling new scenario.
BOBBY KENNEDY'S affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late US attorney-general was aware of - and perhaps even a participant in - a plan "to induce" her suicide.
Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- In 1969, a year after he was elected U.S. president, Richard Nixon renounced the ``use of any form of deadly biological weapons that either kill or incapacitate.''
Nixon's declaration is one of the few cheerful spots in ``The Living Weapon,'' a PBS program that airs Feb. 5 at 9 p.m. New York time.
The U.S. got into the germ-warfare business in 1942 at the request of Britain, which feared that Adolf Hitler was cooking up world-class pes... (more)
Did Saddam Gas the Kurds? Retired Army War College professor and CIA analyst Stephen Pelletiere answers questions about Saddams alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction and about the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja. [Iraq was not responsible, nor was it genocide by the Iranians] ... (more)
A BRITISH secret agent who offered to blow up Adolf Hitler at the height of World War II was dissuaded from carrying out the assassination by MI5, according to newly released wartime archives.
The offer to kill Hitler in a suicide mission was made by Eddie Chapman, a professional criminal and safe-breaker who was trained by the Nazis as a spy and went on to become one of Britain’s most successful double agents, codenamed Agent Zigzag.
Iran and US signed an agreement in 1978 which allowed Tehran to seek nuclear technology in order to meet its future energy demands but no one now talks about the agreement, said a political science professor on Tuesday. Addressing an international conference of world geologists in this ancient city, central Iran, Professor of Political Geography and Geopolitics Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh said it was the US that encouraged Iran to develop nuclear energy.
Around this time every year, Joe Fenton’s mind wanders back to the preview he had of the destruction that would be unleashed on Pearl Harbor.
Just 17 years old and six months removed from boot camp, Fenton was an oiler on the USS Boise as it escorted five merchant ships carrying air base construction materials across the Pacific to the Philippines. After midnight on the morning of Nov. 28, 1941, the light cruiser’s loudspeakers blared with orders for crew members to ma... (more)
Now that Iran looms on our horizon, here's a story that every American should know. Journalist Sandra Mackey tells it in "The Iranians," as does Daniel Yergin in "The Prize," his monumental history of oil. But the best extended version of the story that I've read is in "All the Shah's Men" by Stephen Kinzer. Although other historians have told this story as well, I suspect that the average American has never heard of Mohammad Mossadegh and Operation Ajax. To make a long story short:
It was 1940, the Nazis were in the ascendant, the Blitz at its deadliest, and Britain's last hope was to bring a reluctant United States into the war. So it was that the largest covert operation in UK history was launched.
"British Security Coordination". The phrase is bland, almost defiantly ordinary, depicting perhaps some sub-committee of a minor department in a lowly Whitehall ministry. In fact BSC, as it was generally known, represented one of the largest covert operations in... (more)
IT was 1967. The counterrevolution in Cuba had been crushed. The JM-Wave CIA station in Miami gradually began limiting its dirty war operations against Cuba after long years of crime and aggression. The communications radar and heavy machine guns were dismantled, along with the 57mm recoilless rif... (more)
CNSNews.com - 17 April, 2000 - North Korea's nuclear production capacity will increase from a dozen nuclear bombs a year to 65 a year by 2010, thanks in large part to American taxpayer money, two renowned U.S. nuclear scientists told congressional leaders last week.
North Korea observers have long suspected the communist dictatorship is using Western humanitarian aid to starving North Koreans to feed Kim Jong Il's million-man army.
A strange Associated Press article about presidential scribblings makes a bizarre reference to a John F. Kennedy doodle in which he seemingly predicted a "9-11 conspiracy" 40 years before it happened.
"President Kennedy, known for separating his life into compartments, would enclose words and numbers inside circles and boxes. Events long after his death ... (more)
American and West German intelligence remained silent about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s to protect anti-communist operations, according to newly declassified US archives.
The United States and West Germany knew of the location and alias of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann two years before his capture, according to CIA documents released on Tuesday.
The newly declassified intelligence archives reveal that the CIA was told by West ... (more)
When Cortez led the Spanish to victory over the Aztecs 500 years ago, the indigenous population gave up without a fight. Or so the story goes. But new evidence suggests that some of the invaders suffered a grisly fate.
As every Mexican schoolchild knows, theirs is a nation forged nearly 500 years ago by the conquests of a Spanish adventurer named Hernando Cortez who subdued the once-proud Aztec Empire with just a few hundred men. They also know that Cortez was helped by European d... (more)
It is perhaps not the best omen for US foreign affairs. Local historians in Wexford have discovered that George Bush is a descendant of Strongbow, the power-hungry warlord who led the Norman invasion of Ireland thus heralding 800 years of mutual misery. With a long line of Scots Irish presidents including Woodrow Wilson, the Irish are normally quick to claim US leaders as their own. But, despite President Bush's large Ulster Scots vote in the American Bible belt, Ireland had let his family escap... (more)
It was 1940, the Nazis were in the ascendant, the Blitz at its deadliest, and Britain's last hope was to bring a reluctant United States into the war. So it was that the largest covert operation in UK history was launched. William Boyd sheds light on a forgotten spy ring
"British Security Coordination". The phrase is bland, almost defiantly ordinary, depicting perhaps some sub-committee of a minor department in a lowly Whitehall ministry. In fact BSC, as it was generally kn... (more)
