CIA finds no P.O.W.s in Laos, but M.I.A. families keep hoping The Viet Nam War is long over, and for most Americans, best forgotten. But there remains a nagging concern—and for many families a daily grief—that, when the U.S. got out of Southeast Asia, it may have left dozens, even hundreds of P.O.W.s behind. Past Administrations have tacitly assumed that there may be some survivors among the 2,528 men missing, including 560 lost in Laos. The anguished families believe that ...

In December of 2001, U.S. agents arranged to have a German citizen flown to a Syrian jail called the Palestine Branch, renowned for its use of torture, and later offered to pass written questions to Syrian interrogators to pose to the prisoner, according to a secret German intelligence report shown to TIME on Wednesday. The report is described in the new book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program by British ...

Which is closer to dying: Osama bin Laden or the CIA's effort to catch him? Nothing has characterized the fruitlessness of the hunt for the al-Qaeda leader so much as the recurrent — and mostly inaccurate — reports that he is seriously ailing, or even at death's door. In 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said bin Laden had kidney disease, and that he had required a dialysis machine when he lived in Afghanistan. That same year, the ...

They called him by fanciful code names -- Top Hat, Bourbon, Donald, Roam -- and on the days when his latest cache of secrets would arrive at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a CIA officer says, "it was like Christmas." There was something for everyone. The names of four U.S. military officers working as spies for the Soviet Union. Hard evidence of Beijing's deepening animus toward Moscow, which President Nixon exploited to forge his 1972 opening to China. Technical data ...

Whatever Leon Panetta lacked in formal intel experience he would make up for with his political smarts. That was one of the chief points made in his favor when the Obama Administration named the former California congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff as its first CIA Director. So many CIA veterans were particularly not happy over the summer when they felt that Panetta had failed to protect the Agency from the political backlash over its Bush-era detention ...

Is CIA morale going to suffer from the Justice Department's opening of an investigation into the agency's use of harsh interrogation methods under the Bush Administration? To a degree, yes. But there's a stronger case that the CIA was damaged the moment the White House picked it to conduct the interrogation of "high value" al-Qaeda prisoners. What everyone seems to forget is that the CIA is a civilian intelligence organization never designed, trained, or staffed to interrogate prisoners ...

CIA interrogators threatened an al Qaeda prisoner with a gun and an electric drill to try to scare him into giving up information, according to a long-concealed inspector-general's report due to be made public on Monday, sources familiar with the report confirmed to CNN. The gun and drill were used in two separate interrogation sessions against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, one of the sources said. Al-Nashiri is accused of plotting the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which left 17 U.S. ...

The last thing the CIA needs right now is another scandal, let alone two. Allegations that the CIA chief in Algiers drugged and raped two women is going to hurt badly. The accusations that Harold Nicholson, a former CIA operative in federal prison convicted of spying for the KGB, continued his work from behind bars isn't nearly as serious, but it won't exactly help the agency's reputation. Nicholson, who allegedly enlisted his Nathaniel son to collect his ...

The other shoe has dropped. CIA Director Leon Panetta, it turns out, ran up to up to Capitol Hill this June not simply to confess the CIA had a secret assassination program it never implemented but rather to confess it had sub-contracted the job out. As first reported by the New York Times on its website Wednesday evening, the CIA hired Blackwater to help with a secret program to assassinate top Al Qaeda leaders. Although no one was ultimately ...

CIA Director Leon Panetta recently testified to Congress that the agency concealed information and misled lawmakers repeatedly since 2001, according to a letter from seven House Democrats to Panetta made public Wednesday. The letter to Panetta, dated June 26, was published on the Web site of Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-California. "Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all members of Congress, and misled members for a number of years ...