Audiobooks by Douglas Valentine

Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire Audiobook

Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a sweeping critical analysis of Western colonialism, its foundational beliefs in militarism, patriarchy, Christianity, and white supremacy; and its destructive impact on the nations of Southeast Asia and, ultimately, America. Valentine focuses on the “dark arts” of empire: the black bag of CIA covert operations, including bribery, right-wing coups, assassinations, disinformation, and intimate relationships with drug, sex, and artifact traffickers. He pays especially close attention to the CIA’s use of psychological warfare to play upon the beliefs of people to shape their political and social movements. Pisces Moon shines a light on the central role played by missionaries, academics, writers, and filmmakers in assisting and promoting Western imperialism. In the mid-1990s, based on his book The Phoenix Program, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) hired Valentine as a consultant to a documentary series it was making about the CIA’s activities in South Vietnam. Valentine embarked for London in February 1991 as the sun was about to enter Pisces, the astrological sign which rules deception, espionage, foreign things, prisons, and religion. The month-long trip began with five days in London, where Valentine was asked to carry ten thousand dollars in cash to the BBC crew in Vietnam. After a memorable week in Vietnam, Valentine spent two weeks traveling around Thailand interviewing expat CIA officers for his books on CIA drug smuggling. Unique in every respect, Pisces Moon features many prominent, historically significant CIA officers with whom he has interacted with while conducting his original research. Throughout the narrative, Pisces Moon explains how decades of propaganda and disinformation directed against them by war planners, religious leaders, and corporate institutions have made it nearly impossible for Americans to distinguish fact from fiction; a descent into mass delusion that William Burroughs called “the backlash and bad karma of empire.”Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire will grab you from the beginning and won’t let go.

Douglas Valentine (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

Audiobook

TDY

A CIA thriller based on a true Vietnam War story. This novel by Douglas Valentine, author of the nonfiction bestseller The CIA as Organized Crime, is based on a true story, one told to him in his youth by his father, and barely, yet grippingly, fictionalized here. In early 1967, a bored, adventurous photojournalist on an Air Force base in Texas is offered a Temporary Duty (TDY) assignment somewhere overseas. The mission is steeped in secrecy, but Pete is promised a large bonus and hazardous duty pay. So he agrees. He and a small group of photojournalists, each with a special skill, are isolated on a Special Forces base where they are kept under constant surveillance by a group of highly trained and menacing soldiers. The small band of twelve men is flown overseas on a transport plane large enough for 120 men. They are never told where they are going, until they arrive. And when they finally reach their destination, the mission that unfolds is terrifying beyond anything Pete ever imagined. TDY tells how “black operations” are organized and conducted. Meticulous in detail, and accurate in every aspect of “over the fence” missions deep into enemy territory, it reveals for the uninitiated the skill, determination, and self-sacrifice of American soldiers. In stark contrast to the honor and commitment of these soldiers, TDY reveals the unimaginable duplicity and corruption of powerful men for whom American soldiers and civilians are pawns in a ruthless game. Written in sparing prose, TDY is a story of Pete’s journey through the underworld and his awakening to the reality of the Vietnam War and the CIA role in Southeast Asia.

Douglas Valentine (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

Audiobook

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

The author of three books on CIA operations, Douglas Valentine began his research into the agency's activities when CIA director William Colby gave him free access to interview agency officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would eventually rescind it and made every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented an elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture, and assassination in Vietnam. While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence, and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure the unimpeded flow of drugs to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ. Ultimately, portions of his research materials were archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This book includes excerpts from the aforementioned titles, along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extralegal activities. These articles and interviews illustrate how the agency's activities impact social and political movements abroad and at home. A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable, government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability. Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis today. Valentine tracks the agency's steady expansion into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people themselves.

Douglas Valentine (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

Audiobook