Spy Culture

Lone Survivor.

What connects the Glazer family, owners of Manchester United football club, and the CIA?

Renowned TV personality Jay Leno is one of the US military’s closest friends, frequently featuring military personnel and equipment on...

When the CIA started formally working with Hollywood in the 1990s, a direct-to-video action comedy about government drug smuggling starring...

The spy movie is dying, despite efforts to reform it in recent years.

Continuing our vaguely Gary Devore-related explorations, in this month’s subscribercast we look at two unconventional bank heist films where the...

Big, western films about the wars in the former Yugoslavia are rare, and to my knowledge the only one that...

True Lies is one of the easier-to-spot blockbusters that enjoyed US military support, and fulfilled a long-term fantasy for the...

Kevin Gosztola joins us to talk about his new Medium publication The Wide Shot, a film review and industry analysis...

What does a military movie with no heroes look like?

They gone and done it – India, perhaps the world’s biggest importer of weapons has produced its own version of...

It isn’t often that you get a long-term inside view of a government propaganda office, but that’s what I’ve got...

Gary Devore and Norman Wexler’s Raw Deal is a typically ridiculous macho action comedy set in the world of covert...

There I was, innocently flicking through hundreds of pages of documents from the Marine Corps entertainment liaison office when all...

Apocalypse Now and Francis Ford Coppola were rejected by the Pentagon when they asked for production support.

15 years after podcasts first became a popular medium, the CIA has cottoned onto the value of pre-recorded audio content....

Two years on from my investigation into over 3000 pages of Bureau of Prisons files on Jeffrey Epstein we return...

Opening battle sequence.

Today I received a very odd response from the DEA to a three year old FOIA request – a denial,...

Dying of the Light.

In this month’s subscriber-only podcast we tackle the final season of The Shield, and do so head on.

In 1986, during the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War tragedy Gardens of Stone, his eldest child Gian-Carlo died...

Netflix’s The Diplomat marks the first time that the British Foreign Office and the US State Department have made a...

For this Christmastime subscribercast we welcome back Henri to discuss the 1980s sci-fi comedy classic Back to the Future.

In late 2020 I put in a FOIA request with the Pentagon for records on their support to Operation Christmas...

Between 2018 and 2022, three major OSS spies have been canonised in film and TV – Julia Child, Moe Berg...

Continuing our review series, on this month’s subscribercast we look at the sixth and penultimate season of The Shield.

The CIA’s Museum is a monument to lies, murder and secret power.

Phil Strub has died, and since I’ve somehow found myself breaking this story I thought I’d let you know how...

How do you hold the police accountable if Internal Affairs are corrupt?

Ted Kaczynski a.k.a. the Unabomber died earlier this year.

In this special report we examine the documentary accusing celebrity Russell Brand of sex crimes.

One thing the Pentagon love to do is ‘showcase’ absurdly costly technologies to the public.

Pissing off the US government is not the aim of what I do here, but it is what you might...

Should the government be allowed to seize people’s property because they think it was bought with the profits from crime?

Life is like this sometimes: you wait ages for a movie to take corporate personhood and turn it into the...

Reality Winner was an NSA contractor who leaked a single document to The Intercept, and received a five year prison...

The Department of Justice’s office of public affairs is the nation’s hub for information on true crime.

Amazon have finally pulled the plug on Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, going out with a smudged inkblot of a final...

The Mafia.

You know how it goes: you wait years for a movie that reframes the war in Afghanistan as a Saving...

Did Joe Colombo approve the script for The Godfather?

1996’s Independence Day is corny, schlocky, nationalistic and pro-nuclear weapons.

Well, Ted Cruz has done it, and the Pentagon has been forced to rewrite its doctrine on working with Hollywood...

Desert Storm.

In this subscribercast we examine how the season-long arc in The Shield is a metaphor for the legacy of Iran-Contra,...

I have no idea whether the Wagner Rebellion in Russia is going to have any lasting impact, but I do...

The CIA helps to make movies, but what does it think of them?

Another one-of-a-kind finding from looking into Courage Under Fire – a film rejected by the US military but still influenced...

File this one under ‘I was not expecting to read that from that person’.