Spy Culture

The CIA have been working in Hollywood since their inception.

The US Department of War – previously the Department of Defense – are a bunch of lazy, haptic, rumble in...

Ephraim invited me onto his podcast to discuss, among other things, UFO and alien invasion films, the CIA – Hollywood...

Laurel Canyon nestles in the Hollywood Hills, between the Sunset Strip and Studio City.

Some of you may be familiar with The Rest is Entertainment, a podcast devoted to news, interesting stories and unusual...

The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark was the last great book on the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks.

The rise of former CIA officers working as consultants to the film and TV business is one of the cultural...

When I started Spy Culture over ten years ago one of my main aims was to end up writing a...

Godzilla movies vary enormously, from goofy to serious, from smart to utterly moronic.

Does the Central Intelligence Agency read my Spy Culture website?

A document recently made available by the CIA shows that an unnamed Ops Center was monitoring news media coverage of...

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 London Bombings, a terrorist mass murder that I investigated for many...

The Lockerbie bombing, which brought down Pan Am 103 and killed 270 people, is one of the most disturbing events...

The latest FOIA releases from the CBP, DEA and LAPD’s Hollywood Offices, including contracts and databases of supported film and...

Zero Day is the latest in CIA-supported Netflix spy dramas, only this time it’s cyberterrorism rather than Arab hijackers or...

I recently joined Malcolm Critcher of This Is Propaganda on his DoubleThink podcast, to discuss the conflicts and collaborations between...

I offer some thoughts on the 90s thriller The Fugitive, honing in on the Tommy Lee Jones character and his...

The Pentagon’s Hollywood offices claim that they don’t pitch, they don’t try to push certain content into the culture industries....

We check in with the recently-released season two of Netflix’s The Recruit, a show supported by the CIA, DOD and...

The 1986 Cannon Films version of Invaders from Mars is one of the weirder Golan and Globus films, and in...

How are government employees portrayed in popular movies?

I joined Don Jeffries on his I Protest podcast for a broad conversation on government influence in Hollywood, the decline...

If you search for ‘Tom Hanks CIA’ then my website is one of the top results, so I thought I...

In 1982 an anti-anarchist pro-SAS movie supported by the real SAS and based on the Iranian embassy siege was released,...

For this end-of-year subscriber podcast I take a look at the 1990s cult classic Point Break.

Over the last decade, data has become the new resource or commodity underpinning the failing global economy.

From the ‘no wonder this was a one season wonder’ file came The Rookie: Feds, a spin off from the...

The murders of Biggie and Tupac remain unsolved.

Netflix’s The Diplomat is cutting edge State Department propaganda, as well as being a Homeland replacement set in and around...

The Union is the latest big spy film to hit streaming and has proven a success despite being a 10...

In 2008 the film-maker Linda Moulton Howe told Robbie Graham that the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood...

In the last 20 years the US military has supported a variety of UFO and/or alien invasion films, from War...

The topic of Israel and Hollywood tends to attract racists and conspiracy theorists but for this month’s subscribercast I put...

I hate reality TV but it’s cheap, nasty and has taken over the TV entertainment industry.

Rumours are circulating that Marvel have made changes to their forthcoming Captain America: Brave New World movie to remove any...

Most of you will have read or heard some of the coverage of the relationship between the military and video...

The government involvement in Hollywood marches on so in today’s episode we examine two films that were released this year,...

1981’s Das Boot is one of the world’s most famous anti-war films as well as one of its longest –...

In the many years I’ve been doing this I’ve got a lot of suggestions and recommendations from listeners.

When you specialise in an area of research you tend to be asked the same questions, or the same kinds...

I honestly wish I didn’t have to write and talk about the plagiarism of my work so frequently but in...

Why did the US military support a film about a drunken, abusive husband and father who is a textbook narcissist?...

Gangster finds God, with the help of a non-linear storyline.

How the US military deals with controversial topics in film and TV, especially where the stories depict crimes by military...

The original TV series of Mission: Impossible was inspired by the life and work of CIA contract agent Robert Maheu,...

As word spreads about the power, influence and cost (both human and financial) of the entertainment liaison offices we’ve got...

Gary Webb is one of the journalists who inspired me, and his Dark Alliance series on the CIA complicity in...

While it is perhaps my least favourite Quentin Tarantino film I was nonetheless curious to see that Kill Bill was...

Very few major films have been made about the wars in Yugoslavia, but two are certainly worth examining.

What connects Kris Kristofferson, Willem Dafoe, Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman?