The CIA, this fascinating new history notes, is ‘possibly the most infamous organisation on the planet’. Its hidden hand is often presumed to be everywhere, pulling the strings. That’s pretty impressive, given that it only has, by most estimates, around 20,000 employees. (The exact number is, naturally, classified.) At the same time, it’s routinely portrayed
Even at the time, I knew it was a deal with the devil. Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, commanding officer of the Welsh Guards and a friend of mine from the late 1990s, had just been killed in Afghanistan. He was the first battalion commander to die in action since the Falklands. Colleagues of his were
Little Rock, Arkansas What can be done to bring order to a fractious Labour party? Inside Little Rock’s Alltel Arena, home of the Arkansas Twisters football team and filled with local Democrats greedily consuming mounds of deep-fried frogs’ legs washed down with vats of iced tea, the question was hardly a burning one. It was
Toby Harnden says that ‘World Trade Center’ ditches Oliver Stone’s left-wing conspiracy theories, but dishonours one of the heroes of 11 September by caricaturing his faith New York Staff Sergeant David Karnes was working as an accountant at DeLoitte & Touche in Wilton, Connecticut, on 11 September 2001 when the first plane flew into the
Lubbock, Texas The candidate is clad in a black Stetson, dark pearl-buttoned shirt and blue jeans, like a shambolic outlaw in some spaghetti western. But if he is inhibited by the audience of corpulent, stony-faced sheriffs glaring out from beneath their ten-gallon hats, he does not show it. Within the first two minutes of his
Lashkar Gar, Afghanistan In a dusty clearing on the outskirts of Helmand’s capital, the US army’s Provincial Reconstruction Team had set up a mobile aid station. As we approached, a Humvee gunner swung his machine-gun towards us and shouted angrily, ‘Get back, get back!’ We were clad in shalwar-kameez and sporting scrubby beards. We may
Toby Harnden accompanies American troops as they fight the insurgents with everything they’ve got Fallujah Slumped in a corner, his face drawn and smeared with grime after five days’ fighting through the city, Specialist Lance Ohle of the US army’s Task Force 2-2 surveyed the room. ‘Can you imagine coming into your house and finding