Category: History

10 articles in this category

From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Espionage Act — A lineage John Kiriakou endorsed on the In Limine podcast: that language was lifted from the Alien and Sedition Acts into the Espionage Act of 1917 during the anti-radical hysteria of that period, making a straight line from the earliest American political prosecutions to the statute used against modern whistleblowers.
Kermit Roosevelt and Mosaddegh — The CIA officer John Kiriakou names as the man who ran the 1953 overthrow of Iran's Prime Minister Mosaddegh on behalf of British Petroleum — who called it the gravest mistake of his life in the only interview he ever gave, and who, according to the documents Kiriakou has since read in the archives, did not actually run it at all.
Lincoln's candlelight pardons — The historical contrast John Kiriakou drew while discussing a mass grant of clemency: stories of Abraham Lincoln staying up late into the night pardoning Civil War deserters by candlelight, on the principle that nobody should be executed for cowardice — set against a modern president who Kiriakou says has pardoned more people than anyone in American history, whenever the mood strikes him.
The C-130 resettlements — John Kiriakou's confirmation that the Hmong communities of Minnesota were former CIA assets brought to the United States as refugees, and his extension of a rule Ted Rall proposed — that refugee populations end up wherever the aircraft carrying them happened to land — to the Kurds of Bismarck, North Dakota and St Louis.
The Communist Party of Greece — John Kiriakou's account of Greek communism: a civil war from 1946 to 1949 whose bitterness still scars families, a party banned outright until Andreas Papandreou legalised it in 1980, and a present-day remnant polling between three and five per cent — enough for parliamentary representation and not enough to be a factor.
The denials after Dallas — John Kiriakou's account, drawn from CIA historical files he read as a junior analyst, of how fast foreign governments moved to clear themselves after the assassination of John F. Kennedy: the Soviets came to the Americans within minutes, the Chinese did the same, and the Cubans asked the Mexicans to pass on that it was not them.
The Espionage Act and the Rosenbergs — John Kiriakou's short legislative history of the Espionage Act: written in 1917 to counter German saboteurs, slightly amended in 1950 after the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and never meaningfully updated since. It does not use the words classified information, because the classification system did not exist when it was drafted.
The Greek offer for the Bamiyan Buddhas — John Kiriakou's account that the Greek government, in the depths of its own economic depression, tried to buy the Bamiyan Buddhas from the Taliban in order to save them — intending to donate the statues back to a post-Taliban Afghan government. The offer was refused and the fifteen-hundred-year-old figures were destroyed.
The Truman broadcast — An address by Harry Truman announcing American recognition of Israel that John Kiriakou says he watched on YouTube — in which Truman took the hatred of both sides as proof of his own success, and said recognition of a Palestinian state would follow further negotiations. Kiriakou's comment: that was 1948, and we are still waiting.
Thomas Dewey — New York prosecutor, governor and twice-defeated Republican presidential candidate, discussed by John Kiriakou for two reasons: the explanation he encountered for Dewey's 1948 loss to Harry Truman — that Dewey's short-cropped moustache reminded an intensely anti-fascist American public of Adolf Hitler — and Dewey's refusal, at sixty-seven, of Richard Nixon's 1969 offer to make him Chief Justice of the United States.