AUTHOR
The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark
Buy the book here
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“Watchdogs could be the most important book published so far in the Hot Books series.”
—DAVID TALBOT, Founder of Salon and the Hot Books series
“The authors lay bare… an intelligence failure of historic proportions.”
—JOHN KIRIAKOU, Former CIA Officer and author of The Convenient Terrorist
“Stories of characters in the dark corners of the bureaucracies, where the secrets are kept… Duffy and Nowosielski name names and hold people to account. If only our government had the courage to do the same.”
—ALEX GIBNEY, Co-creator, Hulu’s The Looming Tower
“A devastating portrait of an agency that is almost singularly committed to its own impunity… Has any government agency, anywhere, been as successful as the modern CIA in avoiding accountability for its grotesque failures and abuses, including grave violations of human rights?”
—BEN WIZNER, Legal adviser to Edward Snowden, ACLU
Credits - Companies: Skyhorse Publishing, HotBooks; Author: John Duffy
CO-PRODUCER
Desert One
About - When President Jimmy Carter sends a courageous special ops rescue mission to free the American hostages in Iran, everything that can go wrong does go wrong, in this Barbara Kopple directed half animated action documentary
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Credits - Companies: Cabin Creek Films, HISTORY; Director: Barbara Kopple; Producers: David Cassidy, Eric Forman, Barbara Kopple; Executive Producers: Eli Lehrer, Zachary Behr
DIRECTOR
Press for Truth
About - Released 5 years after 9/11, this feature length documentary with a fervent following tells the story of the “Jersey widows” - made famous in a series of Gail Sheehy-authored New York Post articles - as they grieve their husbands while pushing an inflexible Washington DC to open an investigation into what really went wrong
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Credits - Companies: Al Jazeera, Banded Artists, Globalvision; Producers: John Duffy, Kyle Hence; Executive Producers: Ken Ellis, Kyle Hence, Rory O’Connor
JOURNALIST
Richard Clarke: Interview #07
About - This exclusive interview made headlines from The Daily Beast to WashPo when released on YouTube in 2011, as former Clinton & Bush White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke accused former friend & CIA Director George Tenet of “malfeasance and misfeasance” in the run-up to the September 11th attacks
Credits - Companies: Banded Artists; Creator, Investigator, Host: John Duffy; Producer: Kyle Hence; Executive Producers: Rory O’Connor
CONSULTING PRODUCER
The New Yorker Presents: “The Agent”
About - Part of the 1st episode of Amazon Studios’ docu-series adaptation of The New Yorker magazine investigates how it was that two future 9/11 hijackers came under the CIA’s radar so many times without their plot ever being stopped; this went on to partially inspire the Emmy-nominated Hulu series The Looming Tower
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Check out the Hulu Series, THE LOOMING TOWER, that was based on the story
Credits - Companies: Amazon Studios, Jigsaw Productions, Condé Nast Entertainment, The New Yorker; Series Producers: Amalia Bradstreet, Ryan Miller, Kristen Vaurio; Segment Director: Alex Gibney; Segment Writers: Lawrence Wright (Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower), Alex Gibney; Executive Producers: Alex Gibney, Brad Hebert, Kahane Cooperman, Tim Perell, Dawn Ostroff, Henry Finder, Michael Klein, Dave Snyder
PRODUCER, DIRECTOR, WRITER
Who is Rich Blee?
About - In the pre-9/11 fight against Al Qaeda, the responsibility most lay within the CIA’s small Bin Laden Office, headed by Rich Blee, who had never before seen his actions and inactions detailed until this pioneering 2011 true crime podcast
Read the story behind the podcast here
Credits - Companies: Banded Artists; Creator, Investigator, Host: John Duffy; Executive Producers: Rory O’Connor
ON-CAMERA EXPERT
CIA Declassified “The Real Zero Dark Thirty”
About - The true story of CIA's decade-long human-rights-abusing hunt for the most wanted man on the planet, Osama bin Laden, and how the movie Zero Dark Thirty served as CIA mythologizing propaganda
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Credits - Companies: World Media Rights Productions; Series Producers: Ned Parker; Episode Director: Johanna Gibbon
STORY CONSULTANT, DEVELOPMENT PRODUCER
ThankList “Ron’s Thanklist”
About - A short film about Marine “war on terror” veteran Ron Prince’s relationship with his Marine father and how his admiration kicked to the next level after a cancer diagnosis, part of an award-winning web series about gratitude from America’s largest greeting card company
Credits - Companies: American Greetings, Cabin Creek Films, Mullen Lowe U.S., Nonfiction Unlimited; Director: Barbara Kopple; Executive Producers: Patrick Degan, Loretta Jeneski; Producer: Michael Manacop; Select Promotional Partners: Huffington Post, Ariana Huffington, Elizabeth Banks, Deepak Chopra
CONSULTING PRODUCER
Pulling the Thread
“Conspiracy Theories Are For Losers”
About - 9/11 launched a conspiracy theory movement that eventually ate American politics, amongst the strands explored in this digital documentary series that unravels some of our most popular conspiracy theories and reveals the emotional, cognitive, and social forces that lead rational people to believe irrational things.
Watch the episode here
“The 5 Triggers of Conspiracy Thinking”
About - From the JFK assassination to 9/11, we trace the evolution of American conspiracy thinking in this digital documentary series that reveals the emotional, cognitive, and social forces that lead rational people to believe irrational things.
Watch the episode here
Credits - Companies: Kindling Group, ITVS, PBS, WORLD Channel; Series Producers: Danny Alpert, Kristin Pichaske; Directors: Danny Alpert, Kristin Pichaske; Writers: Kristin Pichaske, David Boudell; Executive Producers: Sally Jo Pifer, Lois Vossen
PRINT JOURNALISM
Truthdig. “Cronyism and Corruption Gave Us Today’s CIA,” 2019.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/cronyism-and-corruption-gave-us-todays-cia/
Newsweek. “CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired to Keep 9/11 Details Secret, New Book Says,” 2018.
Salon. “Outing the CIA's Alfreda Bikowsky: An excerpt from "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark," 2018.
The Daily Beast. “September 11th Anniversary: Richard Clarke's Explosive CIA Cover-up Charge,” 2017.
The Intercept. “Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, The Senior Officer at the Center of the CIA’s Torture Scandals,” 2014.
https://theintercept.com/2014/12/19/senior-cia-officer-center-torture-scandals-alfreda-bikowsky/
Truthout. “Ex-Army Officer Accuses CIA of Obstructing Pre-9/11 Intelligence Gathering,” 2013.
Salon. “Insiders voice doubt about CIA’s 9/11 story,” 2011.
https://www.salon.com/2011/10/14/insiders_voice_doubts_cia_911/
Gawker. “Chief of CIA's 'Global Jihad Unit' Revealed Online,” 2011.
https://gawker.com/5842912/chief-of-cias-global-jihad-unit-revealed-online