Category Donald Trump

Auto Added by WPeMatico

‘My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time. Should my family now leave the US?’

When he left the Soviet Union for a new life in America, the novelist never imagined he would live under another authoritarian regime. Then Trump got back into power ... Is it time to move again?

Oh, to have been born in a small, stylish country with good food and favourable sea breezes. No empire, no holy faith, no condescension, no fatal ideologies. The fish is grilled, the extended family roll in on their scooters, the wine looks amber in its glass as the socially democratic sun begins its plunge into the sparkling waters below.

This was not my fortune. I was born to one dying superpower and am now living in another. I was born to an ideology pasted all over enormous granite buildings in enormous Slavic letters and now live in one where the same happens in bold caps on what was once Twitter and what purports to be Truth (Pravda?) Social. America, Russia. Russia, America. Together they were kind enough to give me the material from which I made a decent living as a writer, but they took away any sense of normality, any faith that societies can provide lives without bold-faced slogans, bald-faced lies, leaders with steely set jaws, and crusades against phantom menaces, whether Venezuelan or Ukrainian.

Continue reading...

The Mission by Tim Weiner review – unmasking the CIA

This impeccably sourced account of the secretive agency during a period of global turmoil deserves a Pulitzer

In 1976 when we were both based in Brussels, my BBC mentor, the great Charles Wheeler, came back to the office from a grand US embassy party one evening and remarked: “The cleverest and most entertaining people at these things are always CIA. Makes it all the harder to understand why they get everything wrong.” An exaggeration, of course, but one with a degree of truth to it. Why has an organisation with huge amounts of money at its disposal, a record of recruiting the brightest and the best, and the widest of remits, failed to notch up a better record? It’s true that we may not know about many of the CIA’s successes. But we know about a lot of its failures, and some of them have marked US history ineradicably.

In The Mission, Tim Weiner, whose reporting on the CIA in the New York Times was always essential reading, and whose subsequent books on the US intelligence community have a place on the shelves of anyone interested in international affairs, provides a variety of answers to this essential question. As he showed nearly 20 years ago in Legacy of Ashes, his history of the CIA from its founding in 1947 to the end of the 20th century, the agency’s position by the end of the 90s was pretty desperate. It was starved of cash and bleeding talent. A high-flyer who had been station chief in Bucharest was revealed to be working for the Russians, handing them the names of large numbers of agents and employees. But the new US administration that came in at the start of 2001 wasn’t too worried. In March that year, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, told the joint chiefs of staff: “For the first time in decades, the country faces no strategic challenge.” Six months later came 9/11. The CIA had tried to convince the feckless George W Bush about the looming threat of Islamic ultra-fundamentalism, but no one in the administration listened. The agency was regarded as broken.

Continue reading...

Trending now

Malware Injected Into Code Packages That Get 2 Billion+ Downloads Each Week
Aliquet Lectus Proin Nibhnisl Condimentum Dvenenatis Condimentum
Sed Vulputate Odiout Enimblandit Volutpat Maecenas
Dapibus Ultrices Iaculis Nunc Sedaugue Lacus Viverra Bitae