With the arrival of each new emergency, previous emergencies are dropped from the propaganda push and the masses unconsciously forget they ever happened. When the cold war ended, humanitarian interventions became the excuse for aggressive war. That was replaced by the war on terror and bioterror, later to be sidelined by the “pivot to Asia,” which was code for making China and Russia cold war “rival power” enemies again. One part of this policy was the psychological operation carried out on NATO’s citizens to demonize Russia and Putin by convincing the domestic audience that Russia had contaminated American democracy’s precious bodily fluids. When that story collapsed, the pandemic emergency arrived, and when that had run its course, Russia had finally been provoked into launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine. The unconscious civilization, living in an eternal present, obediently swallowed the official narrative about the conflict, forgetting how it had been massaged and manipulated for two decades by entertainment and news media to view Russia as a demonic force on the world stage.

The transcript below is an interview from May 2019 with the historian Stephen F. Cohen. I’m posting it now, four years later, because it serves as a reminder of what has been so easily forgotten—an absurd manufactured crisis called Russiagate that American media was obsessed with for four years. As a Russian-speaking American historian, with direct experience of life in the USSR and Russia, Stephen Cohen provides a thorough explanation of why the Russiagate propaganda drive was so implausible, ridiculous and dangerous.

And yes, this interview appeared on Russia Today. To those who protest that this makes the interview Russian propaganda, I say, “So what?” Many American journalists worked for RT only because their reasonable critiques of US foreign policy, which used to have a small place in US media, were no longer welcome. Instead of viewing RT as a “state propaganda organ,” we could consider its presence in the world as fair play in a global media landscape where the BBC and Voice of America have operated freely for decades. People of the world deserve to hear all voices so they can decide for themselves where the truth lies, and which journalists lie.

One editorial comment I have about Stephen Cohen’s statements about détente and operations of the CIA against presidents is that he overlooked the Kennedy administration. In the interview, he pointed out that all the détente initiatives were led by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. He did not mention that JFK ended atmospheric nuclear testing, rejected the pressure to invade Cuba during the Bay of Pigs event and the Cuban Missile Crisis, established back-channel communications with Khrushchev, and made speeches announcing his intent to pursue and end of the cold war and peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union. It could be that Stephen Cohen didn’t count this as a successful period of détente because JFK’s presidency was cut short. Democratic presidents could never succeed with détente because they always had opposition from the right. For the Republican presidents, there was no opposition from the right, so when they decided it was time for détente, there was no significant opposition. Their supporters, who would have opposed détente by a Democratic president, supported détente by Republicans, choosing to see it as wise, pragmatic statecraft.

Stephen Cohen also missed something significant about JFK when he claimed that the CIA had possibly tried, for the first time ever, to sabotage an American president in the 2015-2019 period. He declared that the intelligence services appear to have gone “off the reservation to the point that they can try to destroy first a presidential candidate and then a president [with such a thing as the Russiagate fabrication]… If they do this, they can do this [to anyone],and we need to know it, and not tomorrow but yesterday.” Well, yesterday was November 22, 1963. It is a curious thing that so many establishment historians and established journalists like Chris Hedges (the interviewer here) refuse to “go off the reservation” and read the volumes of solidly referenced and researched works on the political assassinations of the 1960s. Do they really think that the 2015 to 2020 period was the first time that US intelligence services interfered with elected officials and election processes? A reading list for willfully blind historians and journalists can be found after the transcript below.

With these criticisms in mind, it is still worth reading the interview to be reminded of the mass idiocy that prepared NATO’s citizenry for the next phase of propaganda that started in December 2021.

War with Russia? Interview with Stephen F. Cohen

Interviewer: Chris Hedges, May 26, 2019

Book discussed: Stephen F. Cohen, War with Russia?: From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate (Hot Books/Skyhorse Publishing, 2019).

Stephen F. Cohen passed away in September 2020, age 81.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Chris Hedges (CH): Welcome to On Contact. Today we discuss the new cold war with Russia with Professor Stephen Cohen.

Excerpt

Stephen Cohen (SC): You have to think logically. Was this begun somewhere high up in America by people who didn’t want a pro-détente president and thought that Trump, however inept he might be and however small [the possibility] seemed at the time that he could win, people who really didn’t like this talk of cooperation with Russia and so set into motion these things we call Russiagate today?

CH: Despite the Mueller Report’s determination that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, the new cold war with Moscow shows little sign of abating. This new cold war, enthusiastically embraced by the leaders of the two major political parties and championed by the press, has roots that precede the Trump campaign. It is used to justify the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, a move that has made billions in profits for US arms manufacturers. It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets at home as agents of a foreign power and used to paper over the betrayal by the Democratic Party of the American working class to further corporate power. It is also a trope employed to justify the curtailment of civil liberties and interventions overseas, including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela. This new cold war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers is not only foolish but very dangerous. Joining me to discuss the new cold war with Russia is Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University where he was also the director of the Russian studies program and professor emeritus of Russian studies and history at New York University. He is the author of numerous books on the Soviet Union and Russia, including his latest, War with Russia?: From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate.

Interview

CH: In your book you lay out the antecedents for this demonization of Russia and Putin that go back aways, long before Trump ever appeared on the political scene. Lay the groundwork for us.

SC: If we talk about the demonization of Putin, you’re right, and it’s important to remember this. This began long before Trump and Russiagate. And you have to ask yourself: why was it that Washington had no problem doing productive diplomacy with Soviet communist leaders? Remember Nixon and Brezhnev. It was a lovefest. They went hunting together and all this, and yet along comes a post-Soviet leader, Putin, who is not only not a communist but an anti-communist, a professed anti-communist, and Washington has been hating him ever since about 2003. It requires some explanation of why we like communist leaders of Russia better than we like Russia’s anti-communist leaders. It’s a kind of riddle, isn’t it? A puzzle?

CH: You go back to the Clinton administration, and you say that the Clinton administration essentially viewed Putin and Moscow as weak, and of course in 1996 they were pushing Yeltsin quite overtly as the candidate. And there’s that story of $10 billion and an IMF loan which—who knows?—I’ve heard estimates of $1.5 billion having gone to the Yeltsin campaign—but in your book you argue that there was a kind of belittling of him, a humiliation of Russia because they thought with the end of the cold war, “We are the big superpower and we can do anything we want.”

SC: I think you’re right. If you’re trying to explain how the Washington establishment has dealt with Putin in a hateful, demonizing way, you have to go back to the 1990s before Putin. The first post-Soviet leader was Boris Yeltsin. Clinton was president, and they had this kind of fake pseudo-partnership and friendship where essentially the Clinton administration took advantage of the fact that Russia was in collapse. It almost lost its sovereignty.

CH: The statistics in the book are quite [stark] in terms of the economic devastation. It really was the evisceration of the middle class. It was economically catastrophic.

SC: I lived there a good deal in the 90s and we saw it. Middle class people lost their professions. Elderly people lost their pensions. I think it’s correct to say that industrial production fell more in Russia in the 1990s than it did during our own great depression. It was catastrophic. It was the worst economic and social depression ever in peacetime. It was a catastrophe for Russia.

CH: And Yeltsin mismanaged the economy. He was selling state enterprise off to the oligarchs.

SC: Yeltsin turned out to be a very bad ruler for Russia, and when he left finally, he was forced out. He was sick. He was a crazy alcoholic. His popularity ratings in Russia were two or three percent. Meanwhile, Washington continued to say that he was a combination and Abraham Lincoln and…

CH: You quoted the press for whom it just didn’t matter what he did, including surrounding the parliament with tanks. He was “opening up the society, a reformer.”

SC: They called it a transition to democracy. Here’s the thing. If we want to know why they had… not initially… because you remember Putin came to this country and he went to Texas. He had a barbecue with Bush (the second Bush president) and Bush said he had looked into his eyes and seen into his soul. There was this honeymoon. Why did they turn against Putin? I think it was because he turned out not to be Yeltsin, and we have a very interesting comment about this from Nicholas Kristof the New York Times columnist who wrote, I think in 2003, that his own disillusion with Putin was that he had not turned out to be—listen to this—“a sober Yeltsin.” In other words, what Washington was hoping for was a submissive, supplicant, post-Soviet Russian leader but one was who was younger, healthier, and not a drinker. And they thought they had that in Putin because Yeltsin had put Putin in power, or at least the people around Yeltsin. When Putin turned out to start talking about Russia’s sovereignty, Russia’s independent course in world affairs, they were aghast. This was not what they expected, and since then my own thinking is we were pretty lucky after the 1990s to get Putin because there were worse contenders in the wings. I knew some of them. I don’t want to name names, but some of these guys were really harsh people. Putin was kind of the right person for the right time, both for Russia and, I think, for Russian world affairs. But now with Russiagate, we have this new kind of demonizing of Putin to the degree that they say that Putin attacked the United States in 2016. I think how dangerous it is to say that.

CH: Brennan—you talk about him in the book. When you think about it, and as you point out, this is unprecedented. He’s accusing Trump of being a traitor, and Brennan was the head of the CIA. I think, as you point out, that you don’t know of another case where this has happened. Trump is somehow Putin’s agent, which has now, despite the Mueller Report [conclusion], they’ve not let this narrative go. Reality and facts don’t seem to matter.

SC: I think we’ve had three years of this, and we’ve kind of lost sight of the essence of what this allegation is. These people who created Russiagate are literally saying, and have been saying for almost three years, that the president of the United States is a Russian agent or has been compromised by the Kremlin. We kind of grin because it’s so fantastic, but the Washington establishment, mainly the Democrats, but not only them, have taken this seriously for nearly three years. But I wake up every day and have to remind myself what the underlying accusation is: that President Trump is controlled by the Kremlin. I don’t know that there’s ever been anything like this in American history. Let me just say that that accusation does such damage to our own institutions, to the presidency, to our electoral system, to Congress, to the American mainstream media, not to mention the damage it’s done to American-Russian relations. And something that’s overlooked is the damage it has done to the way Russians, both elite Russians and young Russians look at America today. This whole Russiagate has not only been fraudulent. It’s been a catastrophe.

CH: You quote Henry Kissinger, not my favorite person: “The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one,” and I think what comes through throughout your book is the inability or the unwillingness on the part of the ruling elites to engage in the hard work of détente which someone like you has done, which requires a cultural, historical, linguistic literacy in the people you are speaking with. It’s now become Mike Pompeo’s binary cartoon vision of the world.

SC: So now we have to think, as you say, historically. Détente. And by the way, the younger American generation may not be familiar with this word, but it was common currency in my day and in your day. Détente was a policy both in Moscow and Washington to reduce the most dangerous aspects of the cold war and replace those conflicts with forms of cooperation.

CH: And it used to be pushed by the Democratic Party.

SC: I would differ with you here. Let’s think about this historically. There were three major episodes of détente in the 20th century. The first was after Stalin died, when the cold war was very dangerous. That was carried out by Eisenhower, a Republican president. The second was by Richard Nixon, advised by Henry Kissinger. It was called the Nixon détente with Brezhnev. And the third, that we thought was most successful, was by Ronald Reagan with Gorbachev where it was such a successful détente that they thought that both Reagan and Gorbachev, then the leader of the Soviet Union, and Reagan’s successor, the first Bush, said the cold war was over forever. What had been an American tradition—follow my argument here—for your generation and mine—I’m older than you are, but we’re talking about the common history—I had considered détente to be a legitimate mainstream policy. Trump comes out of nowhere in 2016 and says, “I think we should cooperate with Russia.” This is a statement of détente. It’s what drew my attention to him, and it’s then that this talk of Trump being an agent of the Kremlin began. One has to wonder. I can’t prove it, but you have to think logically. Was this begun somewhere high up in America by people who didn’t want a pro-détente president and thought that Trump, however inept he might be and however small [the possibility] seemed at the time that he could win, people who really didn’t like this talk of cooperation with Russia and so set into motion these things we call Russiagate today?

CH: When we come back, I’m going to ask you about Brennan because in the book you seem to feel that we should at least be exploring the possibility that a lot of this was driven by the CIA, but before we do, you also point out in the book that traditionally among liberal elites détente was not a dirty word, and it has become the self-identified liberal class along with the Democratic Party who has proven most vociferous about pushing this whole Russiagate.

SC: I’ve made the historical case to you that the forefathers of détente were Republican presidents. I made this just historically: Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. How the Democrats behaved during the periods of détente was mixed. Do you remember there was what used to be called the Henry Jackson wing of the party? This was a very hardline, ideological wing of the Democratic Party. They didn’t believe in détente. Some Democrats did. What’s interesting, by the way is that I lived many years in Moscow, in Soviet and post-Soviet times. Generally speaking, if you talk to Russian and Soviet policymakers, they preferred Republican candidates for the presidency, and if you ask why—it may be this is not correct—but if you want the perception from Moscow, it is that Democrats, when it comes to Russia, tend to be ideological and Republicans tend to be businessmen who want to do business in Russia. And it is true, by the way, that the most important pro-détente lobby group created in the 1970s called the American Committee for East-West Accord was created by American CEOs who wanted to do business in Soviet Russia. They had Pepsico, IMB…

CH: Who was the big magnate who was always over there? I can’t member who it was.

SC: Armand Hammer.

CH: Right. Occidental Petroleum.

SC: You’ve got a memory.

CH: Wasn’t Henry Ford also over there?

SC: And that goes to something about “they’ll hang themselves with the rope”* … I don’t know. But this is very serious, Chris, because for me the single most important relationship the United States has is with Russia, and not only because of the nuclear weapons. This remains the largest territorial country in the world. It abuts every region that we’re concerned about. Therefore, I have believed from early on in my long adult life that détente with Russia, not friendship, not alliance, not partnership, but reducing conflicts is essential. Yet something happened in 2016.

CH: We’re going to come back to that. When we come back, we’ll continue our conversation about the new cold war with professor emeritus Steven F. Cohen.

Welcome back to On Contact. We continue our conversation about the new cold war with professor emeritus Steven F. Cohen. I want to go back to this because you do ask questions in the book about the propagation of this Russiagate demonization of Russia, and you raised the possibility of ties to the CIA, to Brennan, to Clapper. Explain.

SC: I’ve had an intellectual frame of mind most of my life [in which] a good question is a lot better than a bad answer, and unfortunately, we live with orthodoxies that the media gives us which tend to be bad answers, or at least they don’t ask the right questions. Russiagate, having been now for three years such a catastrophic phenomenon and unprecedented, as I said, in American life… as I was working on the book (and, by the way, the book is a kind of chronicle of the years since 2013 with flashbacks to earlier periods, so it was written in realtime, so to speak) as this news was breaking, I began to wonder how these Russiagate allegations began, and we had the Steele Dossier which was spookily floating around American media.

CH: Most of which was discredited.

SC: What isn’t false he could have got from newspapers. He didn’t have anything. I don’t think he had a single source in Russia. He claims… It’s very important. Let me tell you why. So Steele, to remind our viewers, came forward and said in this dossier, “I got this information from a high-level.”

CH: He was hired by the Clinton campaign, right? Or the Democratic Party, originally, to get dirt on Trump?

SC: Yeah, the Clinton campaign was funding this operation, but Steele is very important because he is a former UK intelligence officer (if he is really former) who had served in Russia, had run Russian cases and all the rest. He said that he got this information in the dossier about Trump frolicking with prostitutes, and Trump having been corrupted decades ago, and all this stuff. He got it from quote “high-level criminal sources.” This is preposterous, even logically. It’s illogical. Let me give you one example. The theory is Putin desperately wanted to make Trump president. Correct? That’s the theory, and yet guys in the Kremlin around Putin were feeding dirt on Trump to a guy called Steele, even though [the boss doesn’t want them to]. Does it make any sense to you?

CH: You say he wasn’t in even in Russia. He left Russia in the 90s, right? Is that right?

SC: Early 90s, yeah.

CH: And you said he didn’t go back, that he wasn’t even back there.

SC: He claims he had all these contacts, but Steele’s not important. He was an instrument of other forces, and the dossier itself is bunk. You and I could sit down one night and just based on open sources [do the same]. Yes, the Russian oil company is going to put up 15% of its shares for public auction. It was in the newspapers. How is this a secret? But the important thing of it is that it is not plausible that Steele got this so-called information from Russian sources. Now why is this important? Because right-wing American media outlets today, in particular Fox News, are blaming Russia for this whole Russiagate thing. Are you following me? They’re saying that Russia provided this false information to Steele who pumped it into our system, which led to Russiagate. This is untrue, which leads to the question you’re suggesting: who was behind all this, including the Steele operation? In the book, again, I prefer a good question to an orthodox answer, so I’m not dogmatic. I don’t have the evidence, but all the surface information suggests that this originated with Brennan and the CIA, and long, long before it hit America, maybe as early as late 2015. So one of the problems we have today is that everybody’s hitting on the FBI. We know about the lovers [FBI staff] who sent emails and all this, but the FBI is a squishy organization. Nobody’s afraid of the FBI. It’s not what it used to be under J. Edgar Hoover. Look at Comey! For God’s sake, he’s a patsy. Brennan and Clapper played Comey and he dumped this stuff on Comey, and Comey couldn’t even handle Mrs. Clinton’s emails. He made a mess of everything. Now who were the cunning guys? They were Brennan and Clapper, the head of the CIA, and Clapper, the head of the Office of National Intelligence, who’s supposed to oversee these agencies. So in the book, I ask “War with Russia” with a question mark. They are short commentaries in chapters, and I asked this question: Intelgate or Russiagate? In other words, is there any reality to these Russiagate allegations against Trump and Putin, or was this dreamt up by our intelligence services? Today, as we talk, investigations are being promised, including by the attorney general of the United States and representative Nunes, a Republican, but they all want to investigate the FBI. They need to investigate what Brennan and the CIA did because this is the worst scandal in American history. It’s the worst at least since the civil war, and we need to know how this began because—I don’t need to tell you. You’ve covered this most of your life—if our intelligence services are off the reservation, way off the reservation to the point that they can try to destroy first a presidential candidate and then a president… And I don’t care that it’s Trump. It may be Harry Smith next time, or a woman. If they do this, they can do this [to anyone],and we need to know it, and not tomorrow but yesterday.

CH: Feinstein tried to tangle with them over the torture reports and walked out and gave a press conference. They were just ashen. And it was clear that whatever went on behind the scenes was vicious.

SC: If you want to talk about senators in my history, there aren’t many profiles of courage, as John Kennedy called them, in the United States Senate. There are a handful, and still fewer in the Democratic Party. If we begin to ask which senators are asking the right questions or who cares about the impact of all this on Russia, you come down to maybe somebody like Rand Paul, who is really neither a Republican nor a Democrat but some kind of libertarian. We need leadership because the relationship with Russia remains existential, and it’s in the tank.

CH: And it’s dangerous, as you point out in the book.

SC: It’s existential. It’s a matter of life or death.

CH: As you have pointed out many times, there was a commitment made to Gorbachev that as long as Germany was allowed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to unify, NATO would not expand.

SC: No. Here was the discussion in 1990. The wall had come down. Germany was reunifying. The question became “Where would a united Germany be?” The West wanted Germany in NATO. For Gorbachev, this was an impossible sell back home in the Soviet Union. Twenty-seven point five million Soviet citizens had died in the war against Germany during second world war on the eastern front. Contrary to the bunk were told, the United States didn’t land on Normandy and save Private Ryan, and, according to these guys, then defeat Nazi Germany. The defeat of Nazi Germany was primarily done by the Soviet army, but it cost twenty-seven point five million Soviet citizens. So how could Gorbachev go home in 1990 and say, “Guys, Germany’s reunited. Great, great, great, and it’s going to be in NATO.” It was impossible, so they told Gorbachev, “We promise that if you agree to a reunited Germany in NATO, NATO will not move.” This was Secretary of State Jim Baker’s formulation: “not one inch,” or maybe he said “two inches” to the east. In her words, NATO would not move from Germany eastward toward Russia, and it did. As we speak today, NATO’s all along Russia’s borders, from the Baltics to Ukraine, to the former Soviet republic of Georgia. So what happened? Later they said Gorbachev lied, or he misunderstood that that promise was ever made, but there’s an archive called The National Security Archive in Washington. It has now produced all the documents of the discussion of 1990, and it was not only Bush. It was the French leader Mitterrand. It was Margaret Thatcher of England. Every Western leader promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move eastward. So what do you end up with today? What Russians call betrayal. In any discussion about American-Russian relations today, an informed Russian is going to say, “We worry you will betray us again.”

CH: You quote Putin in here talking about how he had illusions.

SC: That he had illusions, and how often have you ever heard a national leader say publicly, “I had illusions” about anything? Leaders don’t have illusions. They’re immaculate. But Putin said he had illusions about the West when he came to power.

CH: You make the case that if we don’t recover the institutions of diplomacy, the mechanisms of détente, this could go from a cold war to a hot war.

SC: What I am arguing and trying to explain in this book is in no way pro-Russian or pro-Putin. It’s not pro-American, either. It’s pro “avoid a catastrophe.” That’s what this is about. That’s why I say, “War with Russia, question mark.” I have never written a book of or published commentaries, and here I have three volumes of commentaries with such concern and alarm that war with Russia is actually possible. It could happen accidentally. It could be by intention. But let me mention one thing because for some reason the media doesn’t even cover it. At the beginning of 2002, the second Bush left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the ABM treaty. That was a very important treaty because it prevented the deployment of missile defense. If anybody got missile defense that worked, they might think they had a first strike capability, that Russia or the United States could strike the other without retaliation. Bush left the treaty, and we began to deploy missile defense—very dangerous—around Russia. The Russians began a new missile program which we learned about last year, these hypersonic missiles that Russian now has. So here’s where we are today. Russia now has, and Putin announced this, and the smart guys (with a capital S) in Washington said, “Bullshit. They don’t exist,” but they do exist. They’ve been tested. They’ve been shown, and they’ll be deployed very soon. Russian now has nuclear missiles that can evade and elude any missile defense system, so we are now in a new and more perilous point in the fifty-year nuclear arms race. Putin says, “Guys, we’ve developed these because of what you did. We’re now back to [a situation in which] we can destroy each other. Now’s the time for a serious new arms control agreement, a new one.” What do we get? Russiagate instead. Russiagate! I have a piece in the book asking what the gravest threats to American national security are. I have five listed. Russia and China aren’t on there. Russiagate is number one.

Thank you. That was Professor Stephen F. Cohen talking about his book War with Russia?: From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate.

Thank you, Chris.

* Stephen Cohen seems to have been referring to the saying attributed to Vladimir Lenin: Capitalists will sell us the rope that we will use to hang them.

Reading List for Historians and Journalists Willing to “Go off the Reservation”

Cottrell, Richard, Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis (Progressive Press, 2015).

DeHaven-Smith, Lance, Conspiracy Theory in America (‎University of Texas Press, 2013).

DiEugenio, James, “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy,” Kennedys and King, December 15, 1997.

Douglass, James W., JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008).

Garrison, Jim, “Garrison Interview, ‘Some Unauthorized Comments on the State of the Union’ (May 27, 1969),” Kennedys and King, August 6, 2019.

Garrison, Jim, On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy (Sheridan Square, 1988).

Joesten, Joachim, Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? (Iconoclassic Books, 1964, 2012).

Kennedy, Robert F. Jr., American Values: Lessons Learned from My Family (Harper Perennial, 2018), 148-149.

Kinzer, Steven, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret Cold War (Henry Holt and Co., 2013).

Lane, Mark, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (Skyhorse, 2021).

Marks, Stanley J., Murder Most Foul: The Conspiracy that Murdered President Kennedy (Dominant Star, 1967, 2020). 2020 edition with an introduction by Rob Couteau.

Marrs, Jim, Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (Basic Books, 1989, 2013).

O’Neill, Tom, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties (Hachette Book Group, 2019).

Parenti, Michael, The JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State, Berkely, California, November 22,1993. See also Michael Parenti’s book Dirty Truths (City Lights Publishers, 1996, 2001) for a printed version of this lecture.

Pease, Lisa, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Feral House, 2018).

Pepper, William F., The Plot to Kill King: The Truth Behind the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).

Poulgrain, Greg, Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles (Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2015).

Prouty, Fletcher, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (Carol Publishing Group, 1996).

Scott, Peter Dale, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on US Democracy (‎Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

Talbot, David, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (William Collins, 2016).

Valentine, Douglas, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Clarity Press, 2017).