The Last Assignment: David Atlee Phillips and the Birth of CIA Public Relations

In recent years, scholars of international history and intelligence have argued that, since the 1990s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been engaged in public-relations campaigns to promote its image. As evidence of this, they point to the CIA's willingness to provide more briefings to the media, its greater engagement with Hollywood, and the appearance of CIA staff historians at academic conferences. Drawing on recently declassified documents and unpublished correspondence from the private papers of CIA officers, this article will argue that efforts by the CIA in the realm of opinion-forming began much earlier than the existing historiography dictates. In the 1970s, embarrassing revelations about CIA domestic operations prompted a host of loyal veterans, most notably David Atlee Phillips, to speak out in favour of the intelligence community as an indispensible, effective, and honourable arm of government. They did this by speaking at universities and by writing memoirs. It will be suggested that the Agency itself was initially reluctant to support the veterans, mindful of the need for secrecy, meaning that the frustrated veterans were required to operate in a strictly private capacity. By the end of the decade, however, attitudes at Langley had changed and perception management was finally put on a formal institutional footing. In charting the birth of CIA public relations, this article provides a fresh vista on the Agency's broader attitudes and policies towards secrecy and openness during the cold war and into the twenty-first century.     

Budgie smuggling or doing bird? Human-animal interactions in carceral space: prison(er) animals as abject and subject

Carceral geography, whilst in dialogue with many aspects of theory-building in contemporary human geography, including notions of affect, mobility and embodiment, has yet to meaningfully engage with animal geographies to consider the nonhuman dimension of carceral experience. Likewise, criminological scholarship of human-animal carceral co-presence has yet to progress far beyond the consideration of animals as mere ‘signifiers’ of human endeavour and meaning. Further, the study of prison animals has thus far considered only those nonhumans intentionally present in carceral space, such as therapeutic animals, eliding completely those considered ‘vermin’. This paper broadens the scope of extant scholarship, considering the parallels between the discourses of the ‘rehabilitation’ both of prisoners and prison animals during incarceration, and of both the prisoner and the prison animal as abject.     

半坡“人面衔鱼”图案再分析

半坡"人面衔鱼"图案表现的是一条俯视视角下的鱼,而非戴有装饰的人,应定名为"人面鱼"纹。对观者来说,它是"对视"和"远观"两种视角的结合,其设计目的在于通过二维的方式表现三维场景。参考玛雅文明关于地下水世界和人化鱼重生的观念,依据此类图形的出土情境,我们推测它很可能表达了半坡人群希望部分死者能够转化为鱼,穿过象征死亡的水域,进而重生或转世的愿望。