WILL THEY EVER FORGIVE US? Former UN inspector Scott Ritter admits his latest book: Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein is not a big seller. When last we checked, it was about 1,450,000th on the Amazon best-seller list. So, Ritter went to Russia to promote the book (which includes a foreward by Seymour Hersh.) Russia media watcher Julia Davis provided a video clip of Ritter appearing in St. Petersburg where he thanked Komsomolskya Pravda for publishing the book in Russian. While there, Ritter predicted that Russia would win their war in Ukraine this summer – and wondered whether Russia & China can ever forgive the US for all the terrible things it has done to them. Ritter is likely a believer in forgiveness, having been arrested a couple times and jailed for over two years for attempted sexual contact with minors. After getting out of the slammer he went to work for RT and Sputnik.
MORE UNTOLLED UNTOLD STORIES: The Cipher Brief’s Undercover book operatives are always looking for interesting forthcoming books to review – and we hear they recently stumbled across a book apparently coming out in June, titled The Slant: How the CIA Corrupted American Journalism by author Dan Luzadder. We say “apparently” because the book is not listed on Amazon or even on the website of the publisher supposedly putting it out called the “Radius Book Group.” But they DID find it listed on the Walmart website. The writeup there seems to target not so much the CIA as well-known author Lawrence Wright. Oddly, Wright wrote the book The Looming Tower, which was not very complimentary of the CIA. But he also wrote another book Going Clear, which was highly uncomplimentary of the Church of Scientology…and that may offer a clue about what to expect from The Slant. We found a 2021 tweet from Wright saying, “Friends, if Dan Luzadder contacts you claiming to be a reporter working on a story about me, be advised he’s actually a PI working for Scientology trying to dig up dirt.”
“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62
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