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Edward Snowden is not the first - nor will he be the last - disgruntled US intelligence officer to spill the beans. Using newly declassified materials, private papers and interviews, this article explores how the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA) dealt with whistleblowers and disillusioned staff in the 1970s, a period often described as the Agency's 'Time of Troubles'. It will be argued that ugly revelations by former employees caused more distress to the CIA than disclosures that emerged in the press and on Capitol Hill. At Langley, there was genuine shock that supposedly trusted insiders would write tell-it-all books and betray the Agency's code of 'never celebrate successes, never explain failures'. Focusing on the CIA's attempts to manage three intelligence apostates - Victor Marchetti, Phillip Agee and Frank Snepp - it will be shown that the Agency invariably made a rod for its own back. As well as ham-fisted efforts to spy on them and steal manuscripts, the CIA constitutionally frogmarched certain whistleblowers off to court, provoking widespread criticism that it was an enemy of free speech. By looking at how the CIA responded to the challenge of leaks in the 1970s, this article places into long-term perspective the contemporary struggle between intelligence agencies and rebellious insiders who use electronic media to promote transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between secret services and the press is an enduring one. Although the CIA did not seek the kind of salient media profile enjoyed by the FBI, it nevertheless maintained an informal press office from its foundation in 1947. Directors of the CIA and their senior staff devoted significant time to the public profile of the Agency. Their efforts to engage with the world of newspapers divided journalists. Some saw it as their patriotic duty to assist the Agency, even reporting for it overseas, while other saw it as their constitutional role to oppose the Agency. This was especially true during the Vietnam War and Watergate. Thereafter, a more nuanced relationship developed in which the press saw themselves as an informal wing of new accountability processes that provided the intelligence community with oversight. This was ambiguous terrain and its complexities are explored here by focusing on the example of the prominent New York Times journalist Tad Szulc, whose complex relationship with the CIA spanned several decades and connected closely with the vexed issue of Kennedy and Cuba. Szulc played a number of roles including outrider, renegade and overseer, but there was confusion about who was servant and who was master. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Bill Clinton's willingness to engage with popular culture, such as appearing on MTV, reinforced the claim he made that as a New Democrat he represented something new ideologically. With his 1963 meeting with John Kennedy, his admiration for Martin Luther King, and his association with (and controversial opposition to) the Vietnam War, he became a symbol of the 1960s. He was described as the first black president in terms of what he represented culturally and was strongly identified with the feminist agenda. His regional identification with the South was another ingredient in his image. Overall his image created a sense of Clinton as something new in American politics and this was a crucial ingredient in his political success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the tensions brought to the relationship between two of the major figures of post-war American journalism, Cyrus L. Sulzberger and Harrison E. Salisbury, during the late 1970s by the accusation that Sulzberger had been a long-standing 'asset' of the CIA. The relentless efforts of Salisbury to pursue the story during the research for his 1980 book Without Fear or Favor, which dealt with the recent history of the New York Times, brought his previous friendship with Sulzberger to a breaking point, but also produced the revelation that Salisbury himself had once been regarded by the CIA as a willing and cooperative source of information on the communist bloc. This personal story serves to bring out the wider themes of the ambiguous relationship between journalism and intelligence and the connections between the CIA and the media that began to be exposed during the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the efforts of Allen Dulles, upon his forced retirement from the Central Intelligence Agency in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, to promote his former agency in the face of mounting public criticism of its activities. It argues that the first wave of critical press regarding the CIA in the early 1960s was an early indication of the breakdown of the Cold War consensus - a phenomenon usually identified as occurring later in the decade in response to the escalation of the Vietnam War. Dulles, who as head of the CIA for most of the 1950s relied upon a compliant media to maintain the CIA's anonymity in public life, was confronted by an increasingly recalcitrant American media in the following decade that were beginning to question the logics of government secrecy, CIA covert action and US foreign policy more generally. In this respect the Bay of Pigs and the media scrutiny of the CIA and US foreign policy that it inspired can be regarded as an early precursor to the later emergence of adversarial journalism and a post-consensus American culture that contested the Vietnam War and America's conduct in the Cold War more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article broaches the thorny issue of how we may study the history of the CIA by utilizing oral history interviews. This article argues that while oral history interviews impose particular demands upon the researcher, they are particularly pronounced in relation to studying the history of intelligence services. This article, nevertheless, also argues that while intelligence history and oral history each harbour their own epistemological perils and biases, pitfalls which may in fact be pronounced when they are conjoined, the relationship between them may nevertheless be a productive one. Indeed, each field may enrich the other provided we have thought carefully about the linkages between them: this article's point of departure. The first part of this article outlines some of the problems encountered in studying the CIA by relating them to the author's own work. This involved researching the CIA's role in US foreign policy towards Afghanistan since a landmark year in the history of the late Cold War, 1979 (i.e. the year the Soviet Union invaded that country). The second part of this article then considers some of the issues historians must confront when applying oral history to the study of the CIA. To bring this within the sphere of cognition of the reader the author recounts some of his own experiences interviewing CIA officers in and around Washington DC. The third part then looks at some of the contributions oral history in particular can make towards a better understanding of the history of intelligence services and the CIA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reeling from the revelations about its operations in the 1970s, the CIA set up an Office of Public Affairs to improve its public image. Among its activities was greater engagement with television producers, but it largely failed to lead to more US drama series portraying the CIA in a better light. This article, however, analyses those few TV dramas that did characterize the CIA in the 1980s and 1990s - Scarecrow and Mrs King, The Equalizer and The X- Files. Each series gave a critique of the CIA and its practices while offering alternative pathways to redeeming the organization so that it could better serve US security and domestic safety. They are examples of how television dramas can ask questions, engage with critical issues in contemporary society, and push the boundaries of what we expect to see in our televisual entertainment. They may not have offered very much insight into what the CIA was actually doing globally, but their storylines did confront the public image of the CIA, question its ethos and its methods, and offer some alternative viewpoints on how the Agency might develop its role and approach. Each series attempted to push beyond stereotypes of the CIA and its agents, upset the usual balance between gender roles and refused to give the kind of closed, unambiguous viewpoints that so many US television dramas offered their audiences during the period. They contributed significantly to the cultural representation of the CIA as the Cold War drew to a close. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses topics within the issue, including U.S. intelligence history, the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and U.S. foreign policy with Great Britain after 1947.

The article discusses the question of whether the American Civil War should be considered the first modern war, which historian John Frederick Charles Fuller postulated in his 1929 book "The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant." An overview of the modern technologies, weaponry and means of transportation used during the U.S. Civil War, including railways, torpedoes, landmines, submarine mines and the electric telegraph, is provided. An overview of the U.S. and Confederate generals' strategic use of modern weapons and technology is also provided.

This article explores the connections between Chartism, the most important popular reform mobilization in nineteenth-century Britain, and the United States of America, a source of hope and inspiration for many British radicals of the period, by focusing on the ideas and publications of James Bronterre O'Brien. The article explains why Chartists admired America's political system and social condition, why Britain seemed to them to be so flawed and corrupt in comparison, and how O'Brien - Chartism's 'schoolmaster'- used America in his political activities. Despite his key role in Chartism, especially in its early stages, O'Brien's reputation suffered thereafter, and among historians he has attracted only limited interest. His career merits another look. This article highlights in particular the ways in which he endorsed and increased the relevance of America to British radicals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]