Pictures of terrorism attack
She also documents at great length the role of such figures as the CIA's Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Tom Braden, and Cord Meyer; CCF's executive director, the Estonian-born Michael Josselson, and its general secretary, the emigre Russian composer Nicholas Nabokov; Encounter's unlikely editorial duo Stephen Spender and Melvin Lasky; and a large supporting cast including Schlesinger, Isaiah Berlin, Malcom Muggeridge, Dwight Macdonald, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Diana Trilling, and the Cincinnati yeast-and-gin tycoon Julius ("Junkie") Fleischmann. pictures of terrorism attack Major crimes unit terrorism. The exhaustive research and attention to detail has its merits, particularly as Saunders traces the tortuous money trail of CIA funds. Her accounts of CIA cultural ventures, like Robert Lowell's 1962 South American goodwill tour (during which he stopped taking his medication and in Buenos Aires delivered a pro-Hitler harangue and then stripped naked and mounted an equestrian statue in a city square), are diverting. But her preoccupation with minutia has its drawbacks. pictures of terrorism attack Terrorism training. Saunders sometimes pursues long-ago disputes and personality clashes to the neglect of more substantive interpretive issues. She quotes at length the opinions of participants and observers (often identified only in the endnotes) without fully developing her own assessment. The epilogue, where one hopes for a thoughtful summing-up, simply provides a synopsis of the after-history of her major figures, like the crawl at the end of a movie telling us what happened to the characters. pictures of terrorism attack Terrorism philippines. (The black comedy of Nicholas Nabokov's 1978 funeral, where his four ex-wives competed in their displays of grief, merits a paragraph. ) Saunders's background as an independent film producer is evident throughout, as in the following passage: "Michael [Josselson] sat in silence, his slender, well-manicured fingers drumming the desk. " Of a Foreign Service officer, she writes: "[He was] by all accounts a sinister figure. Physically ugly, he taunted other men with his homosexuality by tweaking their nipples at staff meetings. "The preoccupation with personalities also leads to extended speculations about who knew what when. "Could [Isaiah Berlin] have managed not to know?" she asks rhetorically; others "must have known," she surmises. As for Stephen Spender, she quotes an informant: "I know people who knew he knew. " One is left wishing for less guesswork and gossip, and more reflection and analysis. A more substantive problem is that we learn practically nothing about the actual impact of the many CIA-funded cultural activities described in this book. Thus it becomes difficult to assess Arthur Schlesinger's claim that, overall, the entire effort was "worthwhile and successful. "But for all its flaws, the book is valuable for the way it illuminates this fascinating byway of Cold War history, demonstrating how profoundly that global conflict affected the intellectual and cultural life of the West in general, and the United States in particular. Saunders shows how closely this cultural offensive mirrored-and consciously emulated-the activities of the Communist Information Bureau (COMINFORM) and other Moscow-inspired initiatives. In a key chapter, Saunders digresses from the CCF story to examine the CIA's role in influencing 1950s movies. While delaying the filming of Edna Ferber's Giant for its unflattering portrayal of Texans, the CIA's man in Hollywood also strenuously encouraged the studios to give better, more positive roles to African Americans to counter Soviet exploitation of American racism. This chapter- which can be usefully bracketed with Clayton Koppes's and Gregory D. Black's Hollywood Goes to War (1987), on Washington's role in influencing World War II movies-sheds valuable light on the CIA's extensive (and wholly illegal) domestic activities. Saunders offers illuminating insights on the background and worldview of the CIA figures who launched this cultural offensive and the individuals they recruited. Many were mandarin products of the American establishment. Well- educated and well-connected, they moved easily between Washington and Georgetown, elite universities, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and such cultural institutions as the Boston Symphony Orchestra (which made CIA- subsidized European tours in 1952 and 1956) and the Museum of Modern Art. (Saunders further fleshes out the well-known connection between the CIA's cultural program and the Museum of Modern Art's promotion of abstract expressionism. )Despite a muckraking tendency toward comic-book caricature ("Serving at the top of the pile was every self-respecting WASPIs ambition"), Saunders's account here is generally on target. The OSS, training ground for many CIA leaders, went the joke, stood for "Oh so social. " Convinced of their mission to lead the nation in its new global role, these privileged defenders of democracy and freedom were themselves deeply suspicious of democratic politics. Time and again, in justifying their activities, they insisted that the government's role in secretly funding cultural activities was entirely laudable, promoting the arts and literature and the life of the mind, and that only yahoos in Congress, who would have quickly killed any openly funded government cultural program, made the subterfuge necessary.
Pictures of terrorism attack
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