Free Republic

The CIA put four bottles of "vintage wine" and a basket containing wine and cognac given by undisclosed foreign parties to "official use," while destroying other items like wristwatches given as gifts to agency employees. Because the CIA is a clandestine intelligence service, many of the details about gifts given to CIA employees from foreign dignitaries and sources are kept secret. But a foreign gift disclosure document released by the State Department Thursday shows gifts many CIA employees received were destroyed, including watches ranging in value from $500 to $10,000. Gift-giving is a major part of foreign relations, a sign...

Obvious examples of Central Intelligence Agency covert action abroad are difficult to identify today, save for occasional acknowledged calamities, such as the long-running $1 billion effort to overthrow the government of Syria, via funding, training and arming barbarous jihadist groups. In part, this stems from many of the CIA’s traditional responsibilities and activities being farmed out to “overt” organizations, most significantly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Founded in November 1983, then-CIA director William Casey was at the heart of NED’s creation. He sought to construct a public mechanism to support opposition groups, activist movements and media outlets overseas that...

DISTURBING details of secret mind-control experiments carried out by the CIA have been revealed in newly released documents - that officials have been trying to hide for decades. The new documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal how the CIA experimented on both humans and animals using drugs, hypnosis and electronic devices as part of the top secret - and illegal - mind control project MKUltra. Shockingly the swathes of information still missing or redacted in the records could mean the CIA is STILL carrying out the experiments to this day, according to experts. One document details how...

For three long years, the United States, Britain, and France kept the secret while their intelligence services shared information they had been gathering on what appeared to be a top secret underground nuclear weapons plant near Qom. At the very last minute, just four days before the allies planned to shock the world by revealing detailed information on the secret nuclear plant, the Iranian government sent a tersely worded letter acknowledging the existence of the site to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and pledged to open it for future inspections. “Someone leaked,” says Danielle Pletka, vice president of the...