If you want to know where Northern Virginia’s data center boom started, you have to go back to the dot-com bust — and a scion of the DuPont family. That’s according to a data center developer I interviewed recently who has been working in the industry since the early 2000s.

For those who don’t know, Northern Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, mostly centered around the small towns of Ashburn, Reston, Gainesville and Manassas. The buildout of these massive server warehouses is still underway, with hundreds more data centers either under construction or in the pipeline waiting to be built.

This data center developer, a senior-level facilities manager of a major company, told me his version of how this occurred. And while it’s just one insider’s version of events, it’s backed up by plenty of reporting and research. He requested his name be kept off the record.

One of the reasons his story is so fascinating is it partially debunks the widespread rumor that data centers are concentrated in Northern Virginia because they need to be near the federal government and the Pentagon. The implication is typically that they need to be close by for surveillance reasons.

I’ve heard this stated as fact, albeit vaguely, many times over the years. It makes sense on an intuitive level — it just feels like too much of a coincidence that the U.S. government’s three-letter agencies and the Pentagon happen to be a few miles away from the data center capital of the world. But there’s been very little evidence of a grand conspiracy.

He offered a much simpler explanation: the region’s data center boom was a direct result of capital rushing in to take advantage of vacant fiber corridors leftover from the dot-com crash in 2000.

“The reason we have all the data centers in Northern Virginia is because of the quantity of dark fiber we had under the ground. Most people don’t know this, but Fairfax County, specifically Reston, had more fiber underground than all of Silicon Valley in the early 2000s.” the data center developer told me.

“It was really because of AOL, which was  headquartered in Reston and had buildings in Ashburn and Gainesville. That’s what drove all that fiber, and that’s the reason we have all the data centers there,” he said.

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It’s often forgotten that Northern Virginia was one of the hubs of the late 1990s tech bubble, especially in regard to telecommunications infrastructure, and this was because of its proximity to the federal government. The Military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, funded much of the early research that created the internet and, crucially, it helped subsidize a vast network of communications infrastructure around the nation’s capital.

With the boom in full swing, telecom companies like AOL created a staggering web of debt-financed fiber optic cable in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. These underground corridors were largely speculative, laid down with the belief that internet traffic would continue to grow exponentially.

When the bubble finally burst, nearly all of that fiber suddenly went dark. And that opened up an expedient way for developers to build data centers along those corridors while bypassing the expensive and time-consuming process of laying down the fiber themselves.

Commercial real estate gets into the data center trade

In addition to the fiber corridors that went into disuse, the bust also abruptly emptied out many of the region’s existing data centers as thousands of startups went bankrupt and no longer needed their servers or server space.

That’s when a company called Dupont Fabros arrived on the scene.

DuPont Fabros was founded in 1997 by Lammot J. DuPont, an heir to the DuPont chemical dynasty, and real estate developer Hussien Fateh, who is now the CEO of CloudHQ. The company began as an upstart commercial real estate developer, but quickly turned to tech.

The way he tells it, Dupont Fabros was one of several real estate companies that rushed in to capitalize on distressed assets that went belly up during the crash.

Among those was an empty data center built by a company called AboveNet, which went bankrupt in 2002. The story goes that AboveNet’s data center designers, Tate Cantrell and Jeff Monroe, didn’t want to see the facility flipped or turned into something else, so they allegedly told Dupont Fabros, “Don’t flip it. We’ll teach you how to turn this into a business.”

He said that’s how DuPont Fabros became one of the world’s first “internet landlords,” an emerging class of real estate developers who moved from acquiring malls, hotels and office buildings to internet infrastructure.

DuPont Fabros then hired Cantrell and Monroe and the former AboveNet data center went back into operation, leasing its entire space to Yahoo! and Google. The company began purchasing other distressed data centers in Ashburn, and then eventually started building their own.

“There was so much money coming in. That’s when they realized there was this absolute need for data centers,” he said.

In the following decade, the company built a dozen data centers across Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley. Its sprawling Ashburn facility was at one point the third largest data center campus in the world. The company merged with Digital Realty in 2017, a $7.8 billion deal that made it one of the largest data center mergers in history.

Monroe and Cantrell went on to lead Verne Global, a data center company that operates in the UK, Iceland and Northern Europe.

What goes boom may go bust

This story begs a rather obvious question: If the AI bubble bursts, will data centers in Northern Virginia go dark like the fiber optic corridors of the early 2000s? And if they do, what happens to all these empty warehouses?

Data centers are heavily debt-financed, much like the fiber optic corridors laid down during the dot-com era, and there is a general sense of fear that a crash would put many data center owners out of business.

I’ve heard plenty of speculation about this. One of the industry’s more prominent local critics in Northern Virginia, the chair of the Prince William County’s board of supervisors, has repeatedly said data centers could end up like the abandoned steel mills of the Rust Belt, while others are convinced they’ll become sprawling logistics warehouses.

The developer I interviewed told me he didn’t see the boom stopping anytime soon, which should come as no surprise. That would be tantamount to admitting you’re fucked. But if a crash did happen, he said data centers could be transformed into warehouses or just about anything else.

“I’ve heard people make jokes about how these older data centers are gonna be so obsolete that they’ll be turned into a Gold’s Gym,” he said. “They can be used as a warehouse. I will say that. There’s not a whole lot inside of them, but every one of these buildings can be retrofitted to something else.”

There’s no shortage of critics who believe a crash is imminent, including many who believe it could dwarf the size of the dot-com bust. Economist L. Randall Wray, who I recently interviewed for a forthcoming print issue of CIA Drugs, just published a working paper in which he tackles this issue at length.

He told me the AI crash is coming, “whether we like it or not.”

“If it follows the path of dot coms, you’re going to have just a few firms, and probably only a few of these data centers will be needed because we’ll finally find out what AI is going to be used for, which is mostly for the military and the government,” Wray said.

With its rampant speculative financing and overbuilding of infrastructure, he said the impending crash could mean many AI data centers will suddenly find themselves with no one to rent server space. When that happens, their owners will be unable to pay off the massive loans used to build their server warehouses.

“Let’s say we do crash,” Wray said. “The owners of those data centers are going to default on their debt.”

If you work in the data center industry and want to talk, hit the tip line at ciadrogs@gmail.com.

1. Templars ‘The Sixties Are Over’

2. The Stooges ‘Gimme Danger’

3. Ween ‘Tried and True’

4. Scott Walker ‘30th Century Man’

5. T2 ‘No More White Horses’

6. Karen Dalton ‘Something On Your Mind’

7. Circuit Rider ‘Just For Today’

There’s a new data center alley in Virginia in western Prince William County situated between Manassas and Haymarket, the last suburban frontier before cows and nothing. Dozens and dozens of data centers are being built here, and the construction is still in its early stages. If you drive out there, you’ll see their monolithic concrete walls, elaborate substations and byzantine transmission lines towering over the skyline.

The last time I was there was 2022, and it was still largely semi-rural. Nothing much to see but fields, forests and nondescript Stanley Martin housing developments. I went back again in early 2026, and the landscape had been twisted into a massive industrial zone that looks like something out of Blade Runner. What was most alarming was the speed with which it was developed. I’ve never seen a physical landscape transformed that radically in such a short amount of time.

As of now, there are 55 data center buildings operating in this corridor, with 29 more under construction. Another 119 data center buildings have been approved by the local board but have not begun construction. If this buildout is completed in its entirety, this corridor will feature over 200 data center buildings.

This project began with relatively little fanfare. There have been articles in national publications, and there have been local protests. But the data centers being constructed today were approved several years ago, long before the issue started receiving the virulent mainstream attention it’s getting today.

Through some weird circumstances, I happen to know exactly how this all occurred, and this is important because the bureaucratic machinations of the U.S. data center and AI buildout often get lost in a tidal wave of flashier news. But the actual, physical buildout is always meted out at the bottom rungs of government.

I can tell you, without a doubt, this sprawling data center zone was green-lit almost entirely by local Democrats starting in 2020.

Trump backlash in the NOVA suburbs swept in a Democratic board majority

The explanation for how this happened requires some background about Prince William County’s torrid local politics.

Until the early 2000s, the county was a relatively small exurban area that served as a bedroom community for Washington D.C. Much of the population was centered around Interstate 95 in the east, while the middle and western parts of the county were largely rural. After 9/11, the federal government ballooned in size, leading to a housing boom in the D.C. suburbs. That led to an explosion in the county’s population, from about 200,000 residents in the late 1990s to more than 500,000 today.

Since the early 1990s, the local board of supervisors had been controlled by a Republican majority, and they held onto it with an iron grip until 2020. Those supervisors were notoriously hostile towards new development, especially in the county’s rural and agricultural areas. That suddenly changed in January 2020. A Democratic board majority was swept into office for the first time in 30 years, riding a wave of anti-Trump backlash in the Northern Virginia suburbs.

What happened next was shocking, in retrospect, and happened with relatively little fanfare. The newly elected Democrats on the county board, many of whom claimed some allegiance to environmental stewardship during the election cycle, immediately opened up the rural areas for development. They did this through a series of profound land-use changes that reversed decades-old policies set up to protect the county’s rural lands. They were especially eager to approve new data centers, which are a local revenue cash cow.

To be clear, the previous, Republican-majority board had also begun approving data centers beginning in the mid-2010s. But they did so at a slow and deliberative pace. In 2016, that board even created a data center overlay district that aimed to keep them near high-voltage transmission lines and away from homes and businesses.

I recently interviewed a former Prince William County official, very high-up, who worked under both boards. She said the previous, Republican-led board had advocated for “slow, controlled growth” in the county, with special attention paid to the county’s rural area. She said they hadn’t been especially hostile to data centers but wanted to a exert a lot of control over where they went.

When the new Democratic majority took over in 2020, she said, “it was like flipping a light switch.”

“The [Democratic] board started allowing data centers outside the overlay district, and it opened them up to all this pressure from the development community. I think that’s where it really went out of control,” she said. “ The prior board wanted to put parameters around it, and the new board just wanted to make deals and it didn’t matter whether they were in the overlay district or not.”

I also reached out to a former county planner, also very high up, who told me the Democratic supervisors approach during this time, between 2020 and 2024, was to approve data center projects as quickly as possible, with little public input. She said the pressure to get quick approvals from planning staff was exceedingly high.

“It was really the speed of it. They wanted things done very quickly, and it didn’t feel like a public discussion anymore,” she said. “I was always left wondering, ‘Why can’t we slow down? Why is this being rushed?’”

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The data center gold rush of the early 2020s

Prince William County’s Democratic board approved thousands of acres of data center campuses in quick succession around this time. But those approvals had a lag, owing to lengthy permitting processes and construction times, so the data centers approved in the early 2020s are just starting to come online today. The most daunting prospect is that it’s only going to get worse.

Many of these data center projects have been approved but haven’t started construction yet. Additionally, the buildout will almost certainly require the extension of new, high-power transmission lines into the area that will likely come from coal and gas plants in southern Virginia and West Virginia.

“What you’re seeing now is just the tip of the spear,” a local environmental activist told me recently. “We haven’t actually, truly seen the physical buildup yet. There are still dozens of data center projects that have been approved but haven’t been built yet, and that’s not to mention the rush to approve all these new energy infrastructure projects.”

[Grid overload: an interview with investigative journalist Peter Cary]

Why the Democratic members of this board pursued data centers so aggressively at that time remains a mystery in some ways.

If you ask them why they did it, they will all deliver the same, stock-standard line, which is slightly compelling, if not sadly misguided. They’ll tell you they did it to fund badly needed social services initiatives, teacher pay raises and high-dollar infrastructure projects for the county.

I refuse to believe this is the full story, but it is absolutely true that data centers have made Prince William County’s government extremely rich in a very short amount of time.

The county budget spiked from $1.2 billion in 2019 to $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2027, nearly doubling. That’s allowed the county to pay for everything from new homeless shelters and mental health facilities to worker pay raises and transportation projects. It’s also worth noting the board has managed to fund those initiatives while simultaneously slashing local real estate taxes, which is basically unheard of.

Today, the board is still controlled by a Democratic majority, but several new board members were voted in that are more skeptical of the data center buildout. The data center approvals have slowed down since then.

A former Democratic supervisor who served from 2020 to 2024 before being voted out in a contentious primary told me she had “no regrets” about approving so many data centers. She pointed to worker pay raises and lower tax rates as some of her proudest accomplishments.

“My goal was to help the county bring in commercial revenue because everyone knew our local taxes were always on the backs of the homeowners, and that is no longer the case,” she said. “Yes, the county landscape has changed, I won’t deny that. But I don’t think it’s the end of the world for the county. I think the county’s well-positioned for the future.”

Prince William County is an extreme example of the data center mess we all find ourselves in now. But it’s also a position more and more local governments are finding themselves in.

Do you allow a wave of convenient but extremely intense industrial development to creep into your county in return for a huge budget spike? Or pass it up and forfeit this cash to the next county over?

You can judge for yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze.

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The following interview is about the impact of data centers on power transmission in Virginia and throughout the Mid Atlantic region. It’s a current issue that remains highly underreported, and I believe that’s because it is extremely boring and technical. Its main characters are blank, 100-foot tall warehouses, rows of shimmering data servers, towering power line corridors and drab electrical substations. Those structures, boring as they may be, are the conduits of the digital revolution. They power, store and transmit the internet, and they’re growing at an exponential rate, especially in the Northern Virginia exurbs.

Peter Cary has been at the forefront of reporting on this issue in Virginia. He’s a veteran investigative reporter who writes for the Piedmont Journalism Foundation, a nonprofit news organization based in Fauquier County. He previously worked for the U.S. News and World Report where he led the investigative team and later became the magazine’s managing editor. After U.S. News, he worked at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, where he investigated injuries and deaths at nuclear bomb plants. He was named the 2025 Outstanding Journalist of the Year by the Virginia Press Association for his series, The New Energy Crisis, which examined Northern Virginia’s rapid data center growth and its impact on the power grid.

This interview is long, but highly important if you want to understand where this is all headed. The data center industry is the engine for artificial intelligence, national security, weapons systems, communication and spying, among many other things. It shouldn’t only be understood as a way to power the internet.

For the uninitiated, Northern Virginia is the data center capital of the world, with around 35% of the world’s data centers. This is largely due to its proximity to the Pentagon and the region’s dense fiber networks. The highest concentration of data centers are sited in Loudoun County’s “Data Center Alley,” but an ever-increasing number of them are being built just south of Manassas. As Peter points out, the rate of construction is speeding up, and it’s maxing out the region’s electrical grid.

The most revelatory information in here, at least to me, is that the risk of blackouts is quickly rising, new transmission lines are being planned that would carry power from West Virginia coal plants to data centers in Northern Virginia, and data center companies are considering building power plants directly on their properties.

Resources: This is a map of the current and planned buildout of a new “data center alley” in Prince William County, Virginia, just south of Loudoun County. This is a map of proposed new high-voltage transmission lines needed to power Northern Virginia’s data center buildout.

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What is the risk of a blackout or brownout happening in Virginia because of the data center build out?

​​ I think it’s high, and it’s growing even higher. Just the other day there was a news report that said that NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which is the watchdog of all U.S. electrical grids, issued a level three warning starting in the month of May from a surge in large power users. They’re very concerned that there’s going to be a shortage of power starting as early as May.  

The grid that we’re mainly concerned with here in Virginia is what’s called the PJM grid. PJM is a huge nonprofit that oversees the entire Mid-Atlantic region. It stands for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland, which were the initials of the states where it started, but it has spread to 13 states. It oversees and coordinates the grid from Chicago all the way east to the eastern shore, and from Pennsylvania and New Jersey down to South Carolina. It fully encompasses Virginia.

 The PJM grid can generate about 165 gigawatts of usable power. That’s different from what’s called the nameplate capacity, which is the steel plate that goes on the side of a generator that would say, “this generator could produce X number of watts or gigawatts or megawatts.” Those are the nameplate numbers. But generators don’t run at full capacity. They break down. They can be inefficient. They have to be taken down from maintenance. So the nameplate capacity in the PJM grid is about 180 gigawatts, but the actual usable capacity is 165 gigawatts. The reason that 165 number is so important is that between June 22nd and 24th, 2025,  the PJM grid load made it up to 162.5 gigawatts. It was that close to the maximum. A little tiny pinch of your fingers would’ve sent it over.

At that point, PJM was pulling out all the stops. They issued all sorts of alerts, including what they call a “max gen” alert,  which means, “stop all maintenance and repairs on your generators and crank them up, baby. We need max generation.” They issued another alert for something called demand response, which means any companies, homes or residents that have signed up for programs to cut back on electricity in times of danger, cut them back now.  So, between demand response and max gen and a couple of other little tricks they had up their sleeve, they were able to keep the power levels slightly above the demand levels. That’s how close we were.

For the last couple of years, everyone has been charting what the future demand is going to be in the PJM grid. All of the charts show these really high demands. They’re predicting they’ll need 30 more gigawatts in the next 10 years. Think about that. Right now we produce 165 gigawatts. It’s taken us about a hundred years to get to that level. In 10 years, we’re gonna need 30 more. It’s not that easy to produce 30 extra gigawatts of power. Your typical nuclear power plant, like North Anna or Surrey, only produces one gigawatt each. You’d have to build 30 new nuclear power plants or do the equivalent of that, which would be even harder.

Everyone recognizes, including NERC, that we are on the dangerous edge of not having enough power right now. In the next five or 10 years, we’re going to be well over that danger limit. About a year ago, PJM suddenly woke up and recognized this problem. There was a PJM filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and I had never seen bureaucratic writing that looked like that. Normally, these filings are couched in highly technical language, and they’re very bureaucratic. They’re very staid and serious. This filing was full of panic.  PJM was saying, “We don’t know what we’re going to do. We have a huge amount of demand and only a very limited amount of supply. Oh, and by the way, we’re retiring coal plants left and right due to regulation and inefficiency, and at the same time, our demand is zooming.”

So PJM then asked FERC for permission to start an emergency program to get more power online, and FERC granted it to them. They then put out a bid for anyone who could come up with new generation. They ended up with 51 projects that were approved to start building, but a lot of them were just improvements to existing power plants or small gas plants. When you look at the whole list of projects, which are supposed to be finished by 2031, that only gets you 11 gigawatts. Remember, the demand is going to be at least 30 gigawatts. So they’re still 20 short and honestly, they don’t know what to do.  

I don’t know if I’ve made this clear, but all of this extra load is caused by the data center surge.  It’s not electrification. It’s not your little Teslas that you’re driving around. It’s not your ring doorbells or anything else. It’s data centers. Anybody who tells you differently is just wrong or doesn’t understand.  The data center load is huge and ever-increasing.

The way  PJM wants to deal with this is to require all new data centers coming online to bring their own generation. It’s become a catchphrase, BYOG, or bring your own generation. The idea is that you cannot operate in PJM territory anymore unless you’re able to bring generation. You can do one of two things: you can sit there as an island and just power yourself, or you can be connected to the grid and as long as it’s equal to what you’re using, then it doesn’t matter. There’s a balance.

But to answer your question about brownouts, if we get even a hair closer to where we were last June,  then PJM is going to have to do rolling brownouts, which would mean that during various periods of time during the day, you’ll lose your power for a while.

Could something like that be triggered by a major heatwave?

 A major heat wave or a major cold wave. Actually winter is an even bigger danger. PJM says it will not be able to produce reliable electricity by 2034 due to insufficient generation, according to a recent report it sent to its own staff. What they’re saying is that, eight years from now, they’re expecting the demand to reach 193 gigawatts in the summer and 186 gigawatts in the winter. And they’re saying they can’t do it. They already tried to put out bids for shovel-ready projects, and they only got 11 gigawatts out of that. But again, just to look at these numbers here, 193 gigawatts by the summer of 2034. That’s like 30 more gigawatts of power that they’re going to need, and they don’t know how to solve that problem. It just seems absolutely ridiculous.

One of the most basic solutions would be to call for a moratorium on data center construction until the grid is able to build itself back up, or until someone studies the problem and figures out what really has to be done and what the timeframe is. It seems that simple, but no one wants to stop the data center surge. Utilities are not really interested in this because utilities make money every time they build a generator or build new transmission lines. They make about 10% on their investments. On the one hand, they’re sort of embarrassed that they keep signing up these data centers. On the other hand, a public utility like Dominion Energy, which is beholden to its shareholders, is not motivated to stop the data center surge.

It’s strange to have a public utility that’s profiting from this data center boom, which also is straining the power supply. In some ways it seems like it will eventually be at odds with their charter. You have this juxtaposition where they want to reward their shareholders, so they don’t want to push back against it, but they’re also tasked with keeping the lights on for their customers.

That’s exactly right. They’re conflicted. They’re conflicted because on the one hand, there’s actually a state law that says they must connect anyone who applies to them for electric power,  and that’s the excuse they usually drag out when people raise questions about why they’re signing up so many data centers. Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC)  did a huge report on this a year and a half ago, and the chair of the committee pointed out that there’s also a section of law that requires utilities to deliver power reliably to all of its customers. To quote him, he said, “In this case, reliability trumps connection,”  meaning it’s more important that the system remain reliable than that it connects everyone who comes in with an application. Nobody seems to be paying any attention to that.

How much of PJM’s generation is being taken up by data centers? Do we have any idea about how much power the data centers are actually using?

This will give you a good idea. The Dominion Zone in Virginia is the zone in which Dominion Energy owns all the power lines. That’s partly the zone where it runs local power delivery, but it also includes the territory of NOVEC, the Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative and a little bit of the Hancock Electric cooperative as well. The Dominion Zone is bigger than just where Dominion sends bills out to its customers.  

Right now, the data center power demand in the Dominion Zone is running around 6.5 gigawatts. It might be up to seven or eight gigawatts by now. The total demand in the Dominion Zone is about 25 gigawatts. So data centers account for about one-third of the power demand. But by the year 2035, Dominion expects that its power demand from data centers will be about 24 gigawatts and its total load will be about 42 gigawatts — more than half the total demand. That’s pretty significant. That indicates how fast it’s growing. It’s pushing up everything. And it’s going to continue to grow. The data center load line, if you think of it on a chart, goes up faster than the overall line, so over time it consumes even higher and higher percentages of the total load. By 2040, it’s estimated data centers will be take up about 35 gigawatts, and the whole load for the Dominion Zone would be about 48 gigawatts. So you’re creeping up to around two-thirds of the load.

You’ve also written about how this is impacting everyday people. How much are the rate payers going to be on the hook for this buildout? Electric bills are going up. There’s plenty of reporting about that already. Where do you see it going?

 It can be confusing and frankly, it varies a lot from utility to utility. Even in the state of Virginia, it varies between what’s going on if you’re a Dominion Energy customer versus whether you’re a NOVEC cooperative customer.  The reason for that is that Dominion produces a lot of its own power. Dominion also makes roughly 10% profit on all the transmission lines it builds, all the power plants that it builds and all the generation improvements it does. All that infrastructure is rewarded with a 10% profit, and all of that transmission and generation is paid for by the ratepayers.

But there are really two aspects to your question. One is the absolute cost of electricity in electricity markets. But the other one, which is easier to grasp, is the cost of all this new infrastructure that has to be built to deal  with the data center load. You can go out and see all the new infrastructure and transmission lines they’re building around data center alley. There are new 500 kilowatt transmission lines being built just to increase the power for these data centers, and there are enormous transmission lines being planned to come up from West Virginia and the southern part of Virginia. All that construction’s being paid for by ratepayers. In some ways, it’s an indirect cost, but it’s a real cost.

So that’s like half of the answer to your question. The other half deals with the actual cost of electricity. All of the utilities that you can think of actually buy electricity every day at an auction, literally in a market. It’s probably all automated, probably all run by software, but nonetheless it happens. Every day, the utilities go to this auction and tell the auction how much power they’re going to need for all of their customers that day. Then all of the suppliers of electricity, the generation plants and nuclear plants and independent generation plants out there, offer their electricity into the market. There’s a bidding process that goes on, and at the end of the session, electricity is bought and sold by the various utilities that need it.

Some utilities, like Dominion, produce almost all of the electricity they need themselves, so they’re not nearly as vulnerable to the volatility of this electricity market. But NOVEC, for instance, doesn’t generate electricity, so it has to buy everything it needs on the market. The cost of electricity is going up on this market rather fast. The reason is that, for all the reasons we just talked about, there’s not enough generation to satisfy the demand. When you have a shortage of generation and a huge demand, what happens? The prices go up.

If you look at your electric bill, and you’re looking for where this electricity cost is, you won’t find it. It’s hidden in the bill somewhere. For Dominion customers, the rising cost of electricity itself is not going to greatly affect your bill. But what is going up on the Dominion bill is the cost of all this construction. Interestingly, since Dominion runs the power lines that permeate and serve the NOVEC territory, Dominion charges NOVEC a tax on the power lines that go through its territory. Dominion keeps raising the tax, so NOVEC customers are paying more and more for that.

I wanted to go back to something you mentioned earlier about new transmission lines coming from southwestern Virginia and West Virginia. Is that power coming from coal plants?

Yes, from coal plants. In fact, West Virginia is cranking up its coal plants. Donald Trump actually decreed that no coal plants should shut down, and West Virginia is rejoicing in its ability to produce coal-powered electricity.  West Virginia is a serious producer of power, and so is southern Ohio.  The problem in Ohio is that the state is now developing its own data center demand, especially around Columbus. I’ve seen PJM’s plans to bring the flow of electricity from West Virginia into Northern Virginia. They’re building two enormous power lines to bring that power. They’re 765 kilowatt lines, the biggest lines that are made. When you drive around Virginia and you look overhead, you’re looking at 500s, maybe 230s, and obviously much smaller lines. But these 765s are enormous. One will run east from Charleston in northern West Virginia across the panhandle into Maryland, and then will head southward so it can serve data center alley. The other one comes across the southern tier of Virginia, turns northeast and ends up in Fauquier County. From there,  it turns into 500 kilowatt lines to pump more electricity into the data centers.

If data centers are going to need to bring their own power generation in the future, does that mean they’re going to site power plants on their properties? Is that even possible? When you say “bring your own generation,” what does that look like?

 That is a great question. In fact, that’s the question. While “bring your own generation” might seem like a logical answer to deal with this crisis, the people who are thinking about it are not considering the fact that in the end, all these decisions are local. If you want to create a huge gas turbine power plant at your data center site, you’ve got to get approval for that from the local board of supervisors in whatever county you want to do this in. I think those approvals are going to be very, very hard to come by.

There’s only one data center in Northern Virginia that’s supplying its own power. It’s a data center up in Loudoun called Vantage, and it’s part of a whole cluster of Vantage data centers up there. One of them has a multi-turbine generation power plant. People in Loudoun County were surprised to learn about it. What happened was that Vantage seemed to have implied in their application that their gas-turbine generation plant was going to be temporary until they got enough power from Dominion Energy. But they kept it running and it’s running right now. People are now learning about that and thinking, “How’d that happen?”

I  can’t imagine that the local board in Prince William County, where there are still data centers in the queue, would allow this to happen. I can’t imagine that any board of supervisors with any conscience would allow local data centers to build gas turbine plants on their property, especially in places like Prince William County, which is highly populated. It just seems so unlikely to me.

The other part of this “bring your own generation” concept entails the idea that maybe you don’t build the diesel plant right there on your own data center lot. You could build it somewhere else and then run the electricity all the way over to your data center, or you could just build an equal amount of generation to what you’re going to use and connect it to the grid. You put it into the grid at one end and it sucks your demand out the other end. How that would actually happen is yet to be figured out.

There’s growing local resistance everywhere, even in rural areas, to building more data centers, so the idea of coupling a data center with a gas turbine generation plant is going to be even harder to get through.

In fact, down in Remington in southern Fauquier County, there’s a data center that was approved several years ago called Remington Technology Park. It recently got a building permit for its first building, and they’ve gone back to the board of supervisors and said, “Dominion Energy is going to be so slow in hooking up the power we need, so we need to build a gas generation plant to power us for the first few years.”  

The board of supervisors is absolutely balking at this idea, and so is the planning commission. They looked through their entire zoning code and couldn’t find even one reference to the idea of someone putting in a gas turbine plant on their property. So they just said, “Look, it’s not in the book. Period.”  That application hasn’t been voted on yet, but I don’t think it’s going to be approved.

So, if they’re forced to build their power plants elsewhere, off-site, does it seem like data centers are going to be forced to get into the business of building power plants?

 I think, in theory, yes. There’s been some concern that data centers are going to end up running the whole power structure in America. It just seems logical that they would be trying to build some power plants elsewhere. I don’t know of any applications though. Maybe I’m missing it because I don’t cover the whole state, but that seems logical.

The other thing that’s happening is that Virginia’s getting filled up with data centers. It already has a power problem. Dominion Energy has told all its applicants that, even if they get final permission and building permits from their local jurisdictions, they will not be able to be hooked up for between four and eight years. That’s because Dominion Energy has not figured out how exactly to run new transmission lines to all these clusters of data centers that are being proposed.  If they haven’t figured that out yet, imagine all the work that has to be done, the engineering work and the public approval work and everything else.

There’ve been reports that more data centers are looking to locate outside Virginia, especially in the Midwest and the South, to any place that has enough power and vacant land. I think that’s where they’re going, or where they’re already going. There’s still a lot of pressure in Virginia, which seems odd to me. I would’ve thought they all would’ve headed out west by now. But not yet. There’s a big queue in Virginia. There’s about 70 gigawatts of data center demand just in Dominion’s queue, waiting to be hooked up. I can’t believe that all of them will make it. I think some will just flee and go elsewhere. They don’t want to wait.

What’s driving the data center growth? Have you come across any information about what percentage of the data centers are leased to AI companies, the federal government, defense contractors or national security agencies?

That data is really, really hard to come by.  I would love to know what percentage of data center racks are now being used by AI. I have not seen that data. In Virginia, at least, it’s not as high as you would think. Up until like three years ago, all the data centers were just ordinary data centers used for data retrieval and storage for everything from the pictures on your phone to Netflix movies to missile guidance systems.

 The scary thing that has happened in the last couple years is the rise of AI. The big seven companies are in this huge race with each other to create AI bots. They’ve gone to the companies that rent out data center space, and they’ve bought up or leased all of that space. They’re also building their own data centers which would be dedicated to nothing but artificial intelligence.

The amount of electricity these AI racks and servers require is many multiples of what the old data centers used. The old data centers were storing their information even on disk drives. But AI uses graphic processing units, GPUs, which are complicated and expensive and use a lot more power. There have been estimates of the amount of power that’s being used in data center racks around the nation. Those estimates have doubled in the last couple years. The average rack density reached 27 kilowatts per rack this year, up from 16 kilowatts last year. The average rack density in 2021 was seven kilowatts. It’s basically quadrupled.

 I was talking to a guy who runs one of the data centers, one of the few guys that’s actually accessible here in Northern Virginia. He told me that people are coming in with incredible requests for 100 kilowatts per rack. He said it used to be 10.

What’s it like to actually go inside a data center?

 If you walk into a data center that rents out space to other entities, you’re in this enormous building and you see these cages that are created by wire fencing. You’ll see cage after cage and doors to go into the cages. When you go into the cage, you’ll see these lines of racks. A typical rack is maybe two feet wide and eight to 10 feet high and it consists of a whole bunch of shelves. On each of these shelves is a data center server, which is something like a hard drive on your computer. Somebody described this to me as pizza boxes all stacked up. That’s what the racks are. Depending on the agency or company, there may be a dozen of these racks or there may be hundreds of them all lined up. They have their own people that come into the data center to serve their own racks. The data center operator I dealt with said he didn’t have any  specialists at all. He didn’t hire anybody.  Everything in his building is serviced by the people who are renting the space from him.  

How difficult is it to report on this topic? The data center industry is very opaque, very secretive. How did you get to tour one?

A lot of what you would need to do a story about them is available, but it’s really annoying how impenetrable their applications are, especially in their early stages. They have developed a habit of getting all the public officials they deal with in the initial stages to sign NDAs so that they cannot talk about their application, which seems fairly contrary to the public information process. In the early stages, like when they come in and talk to public officials in a certain city or town or county, they’re enormously secretive and they want everybody to sign NDAs so that those people can’t tell anybody that that company is sniffing around. I find that enormously annoying, and I don’t see the purpose in it really.

In terms of actually reporting on them, the basic facts eventually become public. After they’ve talked to the local officials and kept everything secret, they eventually have to file their applications to get approval. Sometimes they need zoning approval and building permits and everything else. That all becomes relatively, fairly public.

But some information, like, how many employees will actually work at this place? How many jobs will it provide? How much power will it use? There are lots of instances where they still will not reveal answers to those questions. They just won’t tell you. They consider that proprietary information.

Notably,  Amazon wanted to build a data center in the town of Warrenton. It became clear that it was going to serve the U.S. Army’s Warrenton Training Center, which most people believe is really a CIA training center. That data center became the point of intense focus by citizens and by members of the Town Council and Planning Commission. It was an instance where we really wanted to do in-depth reporting on this building. And yet Amazon, when it released its construction plans, it blacked out whole pages. It’s pretty absurd.

Samuel Bendett is a research analyst who studies emerging technologies and national security at the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded research and development center that provides analysis to the U.S. Department of Defense. He specializes in Russian military modernization, robotics, artificial intelligence and unmanned systems. He’s been at the forefront of the Cambrian explosion of drone technology over the past five years, especially the acceleration of drone production in Ukraine and Russia. Among the most shocking developments in this saga has been the scale at which small, cheaply made drones are now being manufactured. As he notes below, Ukraine and Russia are collectively manufacturing around 8 million drones per year, most of which are one-way “suicide” drones.

What does the battlefield look like in Ukraine right now in terms of drone warfare? How are drones changing the landscape of that war.

This is a wide-ranging question, but if you narrow the aperture of what you’re asking, you have so many drones in the air right now because they’re so much cheaper to manufacture and produce and to put in the air. You can basically view the battlefront and the airspace and ground for many miles beyond the actual front, beyond the fighting and beyond the line of contact. In Ukraine, this gray zone stretches out for 20 clicks in both directions. And with so many ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] UAVs and combat UAVs operating in different altitudes, different speeds and different ranges, nowhere is safe. That extends both to those who attack and those who defend and their logistical supply and support structures. That’s basically what the war in Ukraine boils down to.

Are there any estimates of how many drones are in the air at any given time in Ukraine along that front?

It’s probably in the many thousands. The Ukrainian front is very large and there are sections which have more drones than others. On balance, there are thousands and thousands of different types of assets. Every tactical drone, even as it flies out on a one-way mission, is also basically an ISR UAV by default because it records what it flies over.  So there could be dedicated ISR assets, but there could also be many combat assets as well at any given point.

Can you talk about the gray zone between the front lines? Is it a death sentence to walk into it?

Basically, this area stretches many, many miles behind the line of contact and many miles behind what the military usually thought was safe to operate in, especially for logistics, supply, evacuation and rotation. There are now so many UAVs that any significant movement, any large movement, any large collection of forces is in danger. And so everything boils down to smaller and smaller units, smaller and smaller actions, better and better camouflage and masking, and  any other attempt to basically minimize your presence.

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How many drones are being produced on an annual basis by Ukraine and Russia?

Every year there’s been more and more. Ukraine claims to have manufactured around 4 million UAVs and I think Russia has probably done the same. Most of these are small, cheap, one-way attack drones.  But in that number are also many, many thousands of ISR UAVs and many thousands of long range UAVs. Russia manufactures thousands of long range one-way attack drones each month. I think this year Ukraine is aiming for up to 7 million UAVs.  

In the Middle East it’s a little different because the conflicts are a little different.  It’s not a 4-year continuous conflict. But as we have seen in Iran, you can stock up on cheap one-way attack drones and just launch them on a regular basis.  A lot of these UAVs do not need significant infrastructure to launch, they don’t need dedicated airports. They could be launched off the back of a pickup truck and then essentially disappear into the rubble. This goes for large one-way attack drones, but obviously when it comes to tactical UAVs, a bunch of people can run out of the woods, launch it and run back into the woods. They can launch it from a dugout and you’ll never know exactly who’s operating it and where.

This is what makes interdicting these drone attacks so difficult. You’ve got to identify where they’re being launched and who’s launching them, and that requires signals intelligence, electronics intelligence and human intelligence.

Is the United States far behind it’s adversaries in developing small and mid-sized drones? Are they playing catch up?

 The US military has been observing these conflicts, especially in Ukraine, but they didn’t start setting up similar structures in the Army and the Marine Corps until years after the conflict began. It  took the Department of War bureaucracy some time to turn it around, which is why Hegseth said we need a faster way to acquire these technologies and  put them in the hands of soldiers so they can test them out. Hence all these changes which are happening within the Army and the Marine Corps, especially on drone development,  acquisition and a prioritization of specific types.

Do you see a boom in US drone manufacturing on the horizon?

I  think it’s on the way. There are certainly a few companies which are already working hard to manufacture tactical and operational level drones, and there are lots of companies that manufacture parts. But we don’t yet have a boom, which is why the Department of War has codified changes to how certain technologies can be acquired and tested by soldiers, so that our tech can be put in the hands of soldiers as quickly as possible. The problem is supply and logistics because, for the longest time, China was dominating this area for small scale tactical drones. It’s taken some time to set up the domestic manufacturing of certain parts and components independent of Chinese supply chains.

The Pentagon had placed a ban, or partial ban, on Chinese DJI drones in the US. It looked like that was designed to help reshore drone manufacturing in the US.

 I am not gonna speak on behalf of manufacturing because that’s not my area of expertise. But suffice it to say that China has dominated the tactical drone space for many, many years, and it still does. It’s not always easy to start from scratch. It is necessary to wean yourself off of dependence on a country like China because China is viewed not just as a commercial partner, but also as an adversary. It’s still going to take some time simply because China dominates this market space.

Does it seem like something that’s doable? Is this a race to catch up winnable, or is it already lost?

 It’s not lost. There’s a lot the United States can do, but it may take some time to match tactical drone giants like DJI in production and lower costs. That’s what’s already working in China’s favor.  They are manufacturing so many of these UAVs and their supply chains are so well established that they can drive the cost down, which is why people prefer DJI. It takes time.

Someone else I interviewed mentioned the prospect of drone swarms. Can you tell me a little about what that means?

 We see tons and tons of them flown, but they’re not really swarms.  Most of them are still piloted by operators. I think we need to define what a swarm is, because if it’s just a group of UAVs or a large number of UAVs, then we can sort of caveat that by saying, okay, we designate that as a swarm.  But if a swarm is an intelligent mechanism where UAVs are actually communicating with each other and sharing data about the battlefield, then we’re not quite there yet.

And that would be something that needs to incorporate AI?

That’s on the way. That’s probably on the way in some form or another.

Are there any big lessons being learned in the Middle East right now in regards to drone technology?

Yeah, of course. It’s the fact that any belligerent with even a small military budget can build and field a large number of one-way attack drones that can fly at long distances, and most advanced militaries are probably not ready for that type of threat. Most Middle Eastern countries are not new to this because, if you look back to what was happening in 2018 and 2019 when Houthis were pounding Saudi Arabia and the UAE with one way attack drones, very similar to the ones used right now by Iran, those flew for over a thousand kilometers across the desert. So some countries are not new to this threat, actually.

Do you see any big concern about the domestic threat of these small and mid-sized drones within the U.S.?  We haven’t really seen too much of that in terms of terrorism or assassinations yet.

 The possibility is there since Ukraine launched its Spiderweb operation against the Russians last year. But attacks like that require preparation. They require intel. There could be some lone wolves trying to do something, but we already have problems. We already have drones flying over our military bases, our secure facilities. That’s been in the news. So the threat is already here and the actors are here as well.

The future is here, and it looks like being detained by a drone without a police officer present.

This is a brief rundown of Wrap Technologies, a law enforcement company based in deep Southwest Virginia. Its feature product is a non-lethal law enforcement tool known as the BolaWrap, which looks like a taser but actually shoots a kevlar lasso at its target at a high velocity, cartoonishly ensnaring its victim with a thin cable that wraps around their legs, arms or torso.

Demo videos on Wrap’s website include bodycam footage of police officers chasing and detaining people with it. One of them shows a woman standing on a bed in a motel room who is screaming at the police as they come inside. When the officer finally fires the BolaWrap at her, she stops yelling and starts tugging on the cable, which looks snug but not too snug, and says, “What the fuck is this.” That sounds about right.

The BolaWrap is basically harmless, and a marked improvement over tasers, guns and pepper spray. The company has contracts with numerous U.S. police departments, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Galveston.

Wrap’s recent expansion into drone technology is where things start getting itchy.

The company has rolled out a new product called the Merlin-Interdictor, which is a small quadcopter drone with multiple BolaWrap’s attached to the bottom. It’s being marketed as both a law enforcement tool and a counterdrone system that could be used to disable incoming attack drones. It’s the company’s entry into a nascent industry known as “drones as first responders,” or DFR, which are typically used for surveilling emergency scenes before fire fighters or police arrive.

The difference here is the Merlin-Interdictor goes beyond surveillance, and would “interdict” in an emergency situation. I did an interview with one of the executives of Wrap Technologies for another article I was working on. Here’s what he had to say about it:

How do you envision your drones being used by law enforcement?

The fact that it’s non-lethal gives it an interesting application for law enforcement. They can get eyes on a developing scenario, like if someone is non-compliant. The idea is that the drone could be first on scene, and then in a pain-free, non-lethal way, it could help an officer make an arrest of a subject. US law enforcement is now increasingly using drones. They call them “drones as first responders” or DFR. They’re sending drones in advance so they can become situationally aware of developing circumstances and be better prepared to know how to respond.

We have something called DFR-X. The X represents that, not only do you need eyes on, but you should be able to do something that is lawful in the United States in a non-lethal, pain-free way. The X represents a proactive and lawful action that is done. So it’s not just passively eyes on. If the drone needed to make a decision, a lawful decision-maker who is operating within the confines of the Constitution could deploy the BolaWrap. Or maybe they can deploy a laser that’s non-lethal. Maybe they can deploy a pepper ball. Any solution that you want to do at the end, the X is the variable of doing something from the drone.

What kind of situations could your drone be used for?

I’ll give you some scenarios that we think about. At public events, maybe at a stadium or a gathering, if drones are responding with eyes on, maybe the same drones can help police officers safely and non-lethally control a developing scenario that’s a risk to themselves or the community. Or if there are events that are occurring from other drones, that same drone can mitigate, diffuse or counter a drone threat.

What does the drone do to stave off an incoming drone attack?

That same platform, instead of deploying it towards a person, can be deployed towards another drone. The Kevlar cord could mechanically entangle the propellers of the other drone. And this is unique because many times the military grade technologies are high powered lasers or even kinetic ballistic solutions. We feel like we have a unique solution in a counterdrone application. The same drone that can help police officers on the ground could also potentially respond to a counter drone scenario.

You can see how quickly that could get out of hand.

It’s not difficult to imagine law enforcement drones hunting people down at protests, chasing people through the streets and dispersing crowds with drones jerry-rigged with pepper balls. Philip K. Dick’s nightmarish visions of the future don’t seem so outlandish anymore.

It’s worth noting this company has the state government’s support. Virginia gave $1.2 million to Wrap Technologies in 2024 to help fund their relocation from Arizona to Virginia, a political stamp of approval if I’ve ever seen one.

Matt Farwell is an investigative journalist known for his reporting on war, national security, intelligence issues and military culture. He is a former U.S. Army infantry officer, deployed to Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007 before turning to journalism in the early 2010s. He has written for The New Republic, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Playboy, among others. He co-wrote the book American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan, which examines U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl’s capture by the Taliban.

Matt has since gone on to Substack acclaim with his blog , where his reporting has garnered a following from, as he put it, “paleoconservatives, communists and transgender gun nuts in Colorado.” His writing is mostly told in the first person, earning comparisons to gonzo journalism. That seems fairly accurate to me — I don’t what else you call it when a reporter takes a quarter-ounce of mushrooms and wanders around a Washington D.C. arms expo with an Israeli intelligence asset and a New York Times journalist. He counts New Journalism pioneers Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese among his influences, and perfectly enough, Dante Alighieri.

Getting an interview with Matt was sort of unpleasant, and that was my fault. When I’m trying to get in contact with someone, I tap into a free but antiquated website that spits out the phone numbers of anyone you can think of. This trade secret was given to me by one of my former editors because the newspaper I worked for was too broke to get a white pages subscription. It has about a 50% success rate, which is about the best you can do without shelling out some cash.

Anyway I left a voicemail for Matt on what I thought was his cell phone, but was actually his dad’s phone. The next day I received a confused and slightly annoyed text message from a different number that said something like, “Who are you and why are you contacting my father?” This is not the first time this has happened to me, actually, and it never goes well. It took a few missed phone calls and a rejection before I convinced Matt I was a sane enough to do an interview.

We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, from mainstream publishing and CIA propaganda to his recent dive into the intelligence archives. He told me about his investigation of the Frank Wisner records held at the University of Virginia, and his digging into the archives of American inventor Philo Farnsworth. The interview also ends up reading like a limited profile in some ways, skirting the edges of his childhood and his time spent overseas. I wanted to know what drew him into reporting on intelligence issues, a subject that is notoriously slippery. It’s not something you get into if you’re looking for easy money.

We also talked about Virginia’s three-letter agencies, military installations, data centers and weapons manufacturers. He’s spent time in Hampton Roads, Northern Virginia and Charlottesville, and knows how deeply the U.S. defense industry is embedded in the state, which is where I’m based.

***

I read your Frank Wisner article. I thought it was great.

Oh you did? My one problem with academia is I still want to write in such a way that people want to read what I’m writing. Academics write like shit, and that tends to be a point of conflict. It means a lot to me that you’re like, “Hey, I read that and I liked reading that.” That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Are you working on something similar for your dissertation?

Yeah. I’m interested in the same areas. What Wisner really got me exposed to was the power of media and television as a weapon. Media, television, movies, books. I went back to do my master’s thesis at the University of Virginia because I thought The Hunt For Tom Clancy premise had some legs. As I researched it, I was like, “Holy shit, not only does it have legs, it really has legs.” It was actually US covert policy from the 50s onward to run entertainment, but without telling anyone you were running entertainment.

I’m at the University of Utah now, and that’s where the Philo Farnsworth archives are kept.  If you don’t know who Philo Farnsworth was, he’s a weird Mormon wizard who invented television. He came up with the idea when he was 14 years old while he was farming, digging potato rows up near Rigby, Idaho. He invented television, he invented the smart bomb, he invented the incubator, and he may have solved cold fusion and then just not told anyone because he didn’t think humanity was worth it. During the 40s, his company, the Farnsworth Corporation, was a major defense contractor. They made radios and all sorts of things along that spectrum. Farnsworth is a weird genius  who comes up with these great ideas, and he seems like a good guy to me, on a personal level, but all his ideas were used for evil almost immediately.

Grombach is another spy I’ve been looking into. John Grombach was around during World War II and did early theoretical work  on how to use radio and television as both a weapon and an espionage mechanism. Really, I want to look  at TV as a weapon and argue that the things that English literature scholars conceptualize as novels are today actually like television mini-series. They’re the big cultural artifact that people reference and talk about and use as cultural shorthand. Back in the day that used to be like Tristram Shandy or some shit. But it’s not anymore. It’s Madmen. It’s The Sopranos. It’s Breaking Bad. I’m just interested in the invention of the form, and the covert weaponization of the form. God does that sound too grad school-y?

Nah, it sounds like something a lot of people would be interested in. It seems especially relevant too because we’ve got so much consolidation of media going on right now. I mean, you’ve got a handful of people trying to control a huge swath of mainstream television and media.

Yeah, and this is all probably self-evident to your readers. They understand this immediately in a way that maybe normie people don’t all the time. In a punk scene, you probably understand the power of strong microcosms of culture and the rivalries those can entail, or the cooperation it can generate. It would be like someone saying, “I need to control the punk scene, I need to control the jazz scene, I need to control the big band scene. I need to run it all so that I can get everyone playing on the same sheet of music.” That’s what Wisner was doing. In that thesis I wrote, I referenced a small sample of how he was conducting his orchestra. You can look at the Helen MacInnes stuff and extrapolate that out to about 10 other journalists, writers, artists and people who were culturally important in that time. And that method is still around to this day.

What else are you working on right now? Are you pitching stories for any outlets or just doing the blog?

I’m still writing for the blog. I’m working on a couple of book projects, both fiction and nonfiction. Actually, I’ve been out of pitching for about a year-and-a-half  because I make more money in less time on the blog and it’s more fun not have to deal with some square in New York that thinks he’s really up on the scene  because he’s gone to a cocktail party and been told this or that is cool. It got to where about half of my working time was spent on pitching and getting paid. Pitching is one thing. Getting paid is another act altogether. It’s a shitty business. Also, I’m not conventionally political and to pitch for a lot of places you have to go to one side or the other in a predictable, boring way. I just wasn’t interested in that. Like, what the fuck do I want to pitch the Atlantic for? They’re a bunch of war criminals.

My interest in popular, commercial publishing really started to wane when I realized that it’s just a stamp from a bunch of douchebags that take money from the government on the back-end. I’ve been to that city and I’ve seen that it is hollow. I haven’t fully committed to making my own brand or whatever, but the fact that I can put out my writing on an impulsive basis and people like it and will pay me for it, that surprised me. I made more money off of Substack than I did off of freelancing one year and I was like, “Oh okay I’ll just keep doing this.”

And I guess you’re less hamstrung by having editors tell you that you can or can’t do something.

Well, I don’t have to deal with people who are convinced that I’m crazy because my perspective doesn’t match up with their perceptions. I would get sent to do stories about people that the New York or DC media typically had a hard time getting to. I’m good at talking with conservatives. I was in the military. My family’s from Idaho. I understand them and I can hang with them. But that scared some of the big name people I would work with. I remember being down at the Trump Doral Hotel in Miami. Whatever else you think about the guy, he has nice hotels. My photo editor was like, “Do you feel safe down there with all the white supremacists?” I’m like, I’m at a country club in Miami wearing a searsucker suit. I’m a white, male combat veteran. And by the way, everyone here isn’t white. There are a lot of Cubans, Arabs, Latinos, Black people. I understand you have this image in your mind of what things are supposed to look like, but when I tell you what I’m seeing right in front of me, it doesn’t match up. And also, why should I feel scared here? I had watermelon salad by the pool.

I was a reporter in the DC exurbs and I met so many conservatives who didn’t match up at all with the identity that’s been created for them.

Yeah. You can’t explain the concept of a Black Virginia redneck to a New York editor and have them understand it. It just doesn’t compute. I had another one where I did a story about my Afghan interpreters down in Fort Worth, Texas. The whole village had gotten out of Afghanistan, and about half of them worked for the CIA. The CIA did a good job getting their people out. Now they’re all truckers. Anyway, I wrote this story about how Dallas-Fort Worth is the “Medina of America.” I’m asking all of them things like, “Do you want to go to Idaho? Do you want to go to New York? Do you want to go to California?” And they’re like, “No, we’re in Texas. Texas is America. Don’t you understand this?” This blew my Brooklyn-based editors’ mind. I was like, yeah, Dallas-Fort Worth actually has more halal markets than the New York metro area, and I know that blows your red-blue paradigm perspective. It just got annoying fighting with them.

You wrote a story for your Substack where you ate a God dose of mushrooms and went to an arms convention in DC. Did you pitch that to anyone first? Did it get rejected?

That one got rejected. I actually pitched it to the New Republic, and it got approved. But I did not tell them I was going to do an incredible dose of psychedelics. I sent the editor a 6,000-word draft and he was like, “you have to trim this down to 1,000 words.” But it was a lot of fun. No one expects you to be on an incredible amount of drugs while you’re wearing a suit at an arms convention. The guy I call the Commodore in the piece, he’s one of my best friends, he was like, “I cannot believe how high you are. You’re so high. You told me we were going to walk around here together, you didn’t tell me you were going to take a shitload of mushrooms.” But God bless him, he embraced it and just went with it. At one point he said, “You should take your tape recorder and just put it in your front pocket.” So, all those quotes are pulled directly from the tape. Yael is still pitching Israeli drone tech, I believe.

It seems like you got along with her pretty well.

Listen, she was a beautiful woman whose task was to be professionally nice, presumably to get to my friend who was with the Times. It’s the only reason I can think of that she was there. He was flying out with the Secretary of Defense the next day, and I was just some fucking idiot that was walking around with him. She was trying to get something, or  maybe she was legit PR. But Iran had gotten her family out of Israel, and they were from a really rich part of Southern California and she looked like a model and she was super interested in me. And that’s all weird.  I’m not an unconfident man and I have not done poorly with women throughout my life, but a lifetime of being around women also had me like, “Oh, that was pretend.”

What journalists or writers would you say have influenced your writing style?

 I learned the ins and outs and the nitty gritty of reporting from Michael Hastings. He was a Rolling Stone writer that got killed in 2013. He would be number one because he was my mentor. He was my friend, and helped me out a lot. Historically, I like Tom Wolfe. Gay Talese influenced me a lot early on.

I also read a lot of Dante. Weirdly enough, Dante was what got me to realize that I liked using first person because it lets me get inside someone else’s head. Dante’s journeys around hell, purgatory and paradise, they’re all done in first person. But he’s making asides and doing witty banter. That influenced me a lot. It was mostly a permission structure. This is the greatest poem in the world and it’s just a dude walking around talking about what he sees.

I get the sense that a lot of reporters and writers actually hate their readers. I like my readers and I think they’re funny and smart, and I want to tell them a story the same way I’d tell a story at the bar.  With The Hunt of Tom Clancy, my audience is so bizarre that I don’t know that I can really find a specific segment of this audience to piss on. I appeal equally to paleoconservatives, communists and transgender gun nuts in Colorado. These are some of my biggest fan bases. I don’t know where that puts me. But I think it’s cool and I’m going to keep shoveling it out for them.

What drew you toward the type of reporting and research that you’re doing now? Did you have contact with intelligence agencies while you were in the military?

 I’ve asked myself this question in a therapy type of way because I was a regular line infantry guy, and professionally, I’ve never done any spy stuff or espionage stuff. But that’s what I’m more interested in, and it’s because I realize those are the forces that directly shaped my life.

My dad was a submarine sailor in Vietnam that did spy work. I didn’t understand that when I was little.  It was a diesel electric boat that would deliver SEALS and forest recon guys up and down the shore and map Soviet radars in North Vietnam.  My dad was a member of the silent service. When I was six we moved from Utah to Turkey, in 1989, and we were Mormon, so we went to a Mormon church and half the people at the church were in some way, shape or form involved in covert action, reconnaissance and eavesdropping.

This was the environment I grew up in. I would go over to my friend’s house and their dad was the Army intelligence representative to the NATO detachment. This guy had at one point stolen a tank for the US government. The guy that baptized me worked on an early drone program. Another guy worked in the Pentagon’s black ops coordination center. Then we moved to Germany where we lived off post, about 30 minutes outside the base. Some days, school would get out and I would walk over to my dad’s office to get a ride home. I figured out pretty quickly that he never knew which days I would be coming over to the office to get a ride home, so I basically had two or three hours of free time on base. That all came to a screeching halt when I asked an airman to give me a ride to the airfield and they found me trying to get into one of the bunkers that stored chemical weapons. This was when I was like 10.

Then we moved to Yorktown, Virginia, just down the street from Camp Peary, which is where the CIA trains their people. It’s next to the Yorktown Naval Weapons Depot, which is where the Navy stores all of its nukes, and it’s up the street from Fort Monroe where the Army’s training and doctrine command was. There are secret units at Fort Eustis and secret units down at Little Creek. The whole area is infused with government stuff. You can’t  criticize Northrop Grumman at school because half your classmates parents work with Northrop Grumman or Raytheon or Newport News Ship Building or L3 communications. It’s just in the water down there. So when they tell you to write what you know, this is what I know.

For a long time, I didn’t understand how weird it was that I knew all this stuff. Like, “Oh, you didn’t grow up in a weird expatriate military diplomat spy community too?”

What about when you were deployed in Afghanistan? Did you have any contact with intelligence then?

Yeah. We worked with those guys over there. Like, CIA and Afghan militia paramilitary guys. I didn’t realize until well after we got back that about half the early missions we were doing where you have to drive some fucking weirdo named Spike from point A to point B was related to this. Who does Spike probably work for? I think we were an intelligence agency taxi service for a little while. That’s where I first encountered practitioners that weren’t in my family or social circles, that is, practitioners doing the practice and not practitioners in their normal life.

What did they look like?

They could drink, they had beards and they were running an entirely different war. But they didn’t look especially competent either. The more I worked with the Army intel people we had, you could see they didn’t really know much about the area, didn’t know much about the culture and didn’t know the language. They seemed to get rolled pretty quickly. As intelligence officers, they would have made bad journalists.

In Virginia, we’re surrounded by the defense industry and the federal government. I know you’ve lived and worked in Virginia at various points. Can you talk about that a little bit?

In Virginia, the Confederacy didn’t lose the Civil War, and the Nazis didn’t lose World War II. And in some ways that’s true. The University of Virginia and William & Mary are weird imperial academies. The state itself, from the get-go, has made a lot of money through weapons and defense contracting. And the data centers going up in Northern Virginia, those are weapons systems. We don’t think of them as weapons, but they are because they’re the backbone of certain internet tools. So if you drive from the tip of southeast Virginia right up to DC, you will pass every company that has a role in the American military industrial complex. They’re all there and Virginia is their headquarters. It’s why their economy is so good. It’s why there was no recession between Charlottesville and DC in the past 20 years. Northern Virginia keeps growing, and it’s growing with blood. It’s just so baked in. In most places, you don’t pass 30 different military bases if you drive around on the highway. You do in Virginia.

What were you doing at the University of Virginia? Did that deepen your interest in intelligence agencies at all?

 I took classes from Fred Hitz, who was the CIA’s inspector General and an old field officer.  I took a seminar from Gerald Haynes who was the CIA’s chief historian. He took us on a field trip up to CIA headquarters. I learned the main curriculum that these guys would be learning too, although a lot of them probably don’t even know much about the history. The military has a pretty good idea of its own history, like the rank and file people. The spy services don’t really, and I think that’s deliberate. It’s deliberately concealed in the same way that  some religion’s origin stories are not always front and center in their narratives about themselves.

Like, they wouldn’t know about some of the more nefarious things the CIA has done?

Yeah. Or even the people. If I went and told the graduating class at The Farm about Frank Wisner, most of them wouldn’t know he was, even though his mind crafted the world they now inhabit.

How did you stumble upon the Frank Wisner archives?

The first thing I stumbled on down in the archives was this old pamphlet from 1776. It was a 30-page booklet that had a little play in it about the Battle of Bunker Hill so Patriot families could go around and show a little demonstration of why we should fight the hated British.

I had a distant relative that was shot in the Battle of Bunker Hill, so I’m interested in that.  It turns out the paper this pamphlet was printed on was from the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania,  and my great-great-great-great-great grandparents on my mom’s side had made that. That was my weird happenstance discovery down there, and I was like, “Shit, there’s magic afoot here. Let’s see what else I can find.”

I was then told they had the papers of Frank Wisner. I knew a little bit of who he was, but he wasn’t one of my focuses. As soon as I started going through those, I was just in a whole different world. It was luck and circumstance. I mean, I only wound up in Virginia because I’d gotten a divorce in Arkansas. I had to get the fuck out of Arkansas for a little while. I had gone to DC to do that story where I took the mushrooms and I’d driven through Shenandoah in the fall, and I was just like, “Oh fuck, it’s so beautiful out here.”  

Your essay on Frank Wisner reminded me of some of the writing that’s been done about Encounter magazine in the UK, which was really about how the United States was trying to project soft power across the world at that time.

Wisner was in Romania at the tail end of World War II, which had initially been an axis country. The Soviet Union was more powerful in Romania, and the US just had an observer detachment there at the end of the war, and Wisner was on that detachment.  He had made a lot of friends among the ethnic Germans in Romania who the Russians had put on cattle cars and shipped off to Siberia to build houses. That gave Wisner this passionate hatred of Soviet communism, but it also gave him immense respect for their methods. He saw how effective they were.

Essentially, Frank Wisner realized the Soviet Comintern was so fucking effective and worked on all levers of society. And he came back and said, “We have to do the same thing,  but we can’t tell anyone we’re doing the same thing because we’re not a command economy like the Soviet Union. We would undermine ourselves. But we have to do it, otherwise they’re going to do it to us.” That was his argument, and using this argument,  he covertly took over American publishing, academia, scientific research, and even opera and ballet. Any vehicle of mass persuasion you can think of during the 50s, Wisner had his hand in it.

How do you feel about this today? Is the government winning the propaganda battle?

 The most effective propaganda you can use is propaganda that is 90 to 95% true. You either omit a critical detail or shift your focus to make that detail not seem so big. But you have to have a unified template of reality in order for propaganda to work. This might sound too grad school, but I think we’ve essentially destabilized that foundational, shared sense of reality since 9/11. If you just look at it from a broadcast TV model where we used to have three or four different channels of thinking. You  have your ABC model, your NBC model, CNN, Fox. Whatever.  But now that’s fractalized so much that there’s 50,000 of those, and there’s no consensus reality to harness.

 I don’t know if it makes things less or more effective, or if it just renders the need for it completely gone. Like, how much propaganda was needed to sell this war in Iran. Zero. They just did it. They didn’t even take us to dinner. Part of the reason for this is that technological innovation is being driven by those same sectors, the intelligence and military sectors. The iPhone comes from the spy world. They may have won with that, actually. You don’t really need to battle for one’s mind when someone’s mind is elsewhere.

Jefferson Morley has spent more than three decades researching the craven underworld of U.S. intelligence. He is widely recognized for his expertise on the CIA and U.S. national-security policy. His writing offers a mix of archival sleuthing and on-the-record interviews on topics ranging from the Watergate scandal to the JFK assassination and shadowy intelligence figures like James Jesus Angleton. He’s written extensively for national publications, including The Washington Post, The Nation and Harper’s. He currently works for the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non-profit organization that maintains a vast digital archive of documents related to the assassinations of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal and the post-Watergate investigations of the CIA.

The United States government began releasing the final tranches of unreleased JFK assassination files in 2021. Morley has kept an exhaustive record of these releases. He frequently updates his blog, , with new information gleaned from these documents. Our conversation mostly centered on the latest revelations from these files and the likeliest culprits behind the assassination. I fired off as many questions as he had time for. He’s very well-spoken, and offers an excellent overview of where the investigation stands today.

A huge tranche of JFK files have been released in the last two years that had been trapped in purgatory for a long time. What are the biggest revelations in these documents?

With the executive order that President Trump issued in January 2025, all of the redactions on documents that were in the National Archives of the JFK Collection were removed.  So, a lot of CIA and FBI documents and a handful of other agencies’ documents were declassified for the first time. It’s important to understand what the JFK collection is.  What are we talking about when we talk about the JFK Files? We’re talking about several hundred thousand records collected from a dozen federal agencies on anything related to the assassination. These documents were entirely secret for the first 30 years after the assassination, and only in the last 30 years have they been slowly declassified.  

That process of declassifying those records actually came to a pretty complete end with President Trump’s order. We now have most of those records that were in the JFK records collection. These were the records of the first investigation of President Kennedy’s death, the Warren Commission, the official commission that came up with the story that a lone gunman killed the president, and a second investigation 15 years later by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. That investigation determined that there had been some kind of conspiracy, although it could not identify who was behind it. There were other investigations that the government conducted and records generated about the assassination as well. The CIA was investigated by a senate committee in the 1970s, the Church Committee, and there was another commission, the Rockefeller Commission. So all of these records have come to light over the last 60 years.

There’s the official story, where one guy killed the president for no reason or for reasons only known to himself, which is what a minority of people still believe. Then there’s the widespread belief that that story is not true and there must be some other explanation. There’s a million conspiracy theories to explain it.  So how do you make sense of this? What have we learned?  The first thing to remember is there’s no smoking gun. That’s kind of a Hollywood fantasy where you produce one piece of evidence that determines it. That does happen, but it can’t happen in a big complicated case like this. There’s no such thing as a smoking gun. There is a fact pattern.

What do we know now that we didn’t know before?

What we know now is that the story that one guy came out of nowhere and shot the president for no reason, that story’s not true. That guy did not come out of nowhere.  That’s what we’ve learned. Lee Harvey Oswald was under surveillance by top CIA officials for four years before President Kennedy was killed. That’s probably the most significant thing to emerge.  Is it the smoking gun proof of a conspiracy? No, it’s not, but it’s pretty strong evidence that the story of a lone gunman is simplistic to the point of being untrue. So who killed JFK? I don’t know. But it was not Lee Harvey Oswald alone and unaided. It’s much more likely, given what we’ve learned, that it’s what people around the president suspected. They suspected he’d been killed by his enemies who had the ability to make it look like something else. In other words, covert operators. To me, the new evidence does not tend to support or confirm the official story. To the contrary, it undermines it in multiple ways. That’s one thing.  

The second thing is, if you want to know what’s new, a couple things happened in the JFK story in the 1990s that were not noticed that were very important and are still important to understanding the story.  There’s evidence there that is not new. People say, “Oh, it’s 30 years old,” but it’s new to 99% of the people who are interested in the JFK story or might have a passing interest and want to know more.

 In the 1990s, there was a small federal agency called the Assassination Records Review, and they were charged with finding government records related to the assassination and making them public. This was a very effective and good federal agency, and they did a good job of making a lot of records public that had never been seen before. One of the things that they did, the ARRB, as it was known, was they interviewed people who had participated in JFK’s autopsy. There were lots of questions about the autopsy, and this was one of the reasons why people doubted the official story. The autopsy, by all agreement, was not well done and was not well explained. Those were very legitimate questions.

The ARRB interviewed about 15 people who had been present at the autopsy, or had processed photographs of the president’s body or of the autopsy results. What that testimony showed was that the people involved in the autopsy who saw the president’s wounds and took photographs of them believed he had been shot from the front. And those photographs are not in the collection of autopsy records now. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is sworn testimony from professional people who had never spoken before,  who had no axe to grind and who were just describing their experience in a very important event. All of that testimony also undermines the official story. It supports the idea that Kennedy was shot from two different directions. He was caught in the crossfire. That’s what killed him.  So we have strong evidence of that. So who killed Kennedy? I don’t know. But we have strong medical evidence from the people who saw the president’s body in Dallas when they tried to save him, and the people who participated in his autopsy that saw the body that night. That’s a pretty strong set of facts, and now we need to explain what was really going on here.

What about Lee Harvey Oswald’s surveillance? It sounds like he’d been under CIA surveillance for years prior to the assassination.

The release of the CIA’s file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a very extensive file showing how he was surveilled for four years, was a big step forward.  There are smaller things that have emerged that add to the picture of CIA operations converging on the accused assassin showing that he was monitored, he was manipulated and that he was what he said he was, a patsy.  Remember that Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused but never convicted in real life of killing  President Kennedy denied the crime. His denials have some weight because he had no motive. He liked President Kennedy. His wife and his friends said he admired President Kennedy, especially for his stand on civil rights, and that it didn’t make any sense for him to do this.

We have multiple CIA operations around him that they lied about,  that they completely hid from investigators and pretended, “Oh, we didn’t know anything about this guy.”  That’s kind of the foundational lie that has now been exposed.  The story of a lone gunman, quote-unquote, is a cover story. And what it covers up is the fact that these very senior CIA guys were interested in the guy who supposedly killed the president. They monitored him. They followed him. They kept up with him. They made decisions based on his actions. They wrote cables about him. They thought about him. That’s not a lone nut. That’s a known personality to the CIA.

 I don’t have the solution to the crime. I don’t have a smoking gun. I don’t have a sexy answer to who killed the president. I can tell you for certain the official story’s not true. The evidence doesn’t support it, and especially not the new evidence.

I think the most reasonable conclusion is that the president was killed by enemies in his own government. That’s what Bobby Kennedy thought. That’s what Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s secretary, thought. I just published a story on my Substack about Evelyn Lincoln and what she thought about this assassination. It’s a really interesting story. This is a woman who never sought to exploit her position, but she believed and wrote that the president was killed by his enemies. So that’s where we stand on the JFK story. This is ancient history, in a way, but it’s also a shadow on everything going on today.

For those who aren’t so immersed in this subject, why do you think the CIA, or some faction of the CIA, was involved in the assassination. Why would they want to kill him?

 In retrospect, we can see that Kennedy’s administration was deeply divided. The president was on one side and the military and intelligence agencies were on the other. The United States was in a Cold War with the Soviet Union in a stance of armed hostility towards the other nuclear armed superpower.  This made the world very dangerous. Kennedy experienced this in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. If you want to understand Kennedy’s assassination, you need to start with the Cuban Missile Crisis, because in those two weeks, Kennedy came close to being forced to launch a nuclear war.  We were very close to nuclear war, probably within 48 hours.

Kennedy didn’t want a nuclear war, the Soviet Union didn’t want nuclear war, and yet it came very close to happening. That was a come to Jesus moment for Kennedy, so to speak. He was profoundly influenced by that, and he felt afterward that the Cold War, the armed hostility with the Soviet Union, had to be turned down.  We had to recognize the humanity of the other side and not go into war. As a result of that, in 1963, Kennedy gave a famous speech called the Peace Speech, or the Strategy of Peace, in which he called for ending the Cold War and changing the stance of the United States in the world.  He said we don’t want a Pax Americana. We don’t want to impose America’s version of peace on the world.

Now, in 1963, it was eloquent, but it was a very bold thing to say because his generals would’ve said unanimously, vehemently, “No, we do want a Pax Americana. We want our military superiority to convert into our version of peace for the world.” So  Kennedy is going off in a very profound new direction. He’s not cutting their budgets, he’s not attacking them, but he is signaling that he wants to go in a new direction.

People in the military thought this was very dangerous. They thought he was letting communism into the western hemisphere, that he was going soft and that the Soviet Union would take advantage of that, and that the free world would be in danger.  Kennedy’s enemies, by late 1963, regarded him as a mortal peril to US national security.  He was the president, but he was also a problem that people wanted to solve because the challenge he posed was so profound. He was one man trying to turn a giant ship in a new direction, and people were very threatened by that. And that was part of why the events in Dallas happened, because he had very powerful enemies who were very frightened of him.

In the JFK files, is there supporting documentation that shows CIA leadership saying they felt threatened by Kennedy? That he was a problem, or that something needed to be done about him?

That’s not a thought that people commit to paper, but the hostility between Kennedy and the top CIA people and top generals, that’s amply documented. You have  Kennedy saying to one of his aides, “I’m gonna get those CIA bastards if it’s the last thing I do.”  Kennedy even develops a plan for abolishing the CIA and changing it. The whole clandestine service was at risk with Kennedy. The hostility between Kennedy and his national security team, especially in 1963, is very well documented.

CIA officer William Harvey was in charge of the agency’s ZR/RIFLE assassination program. He’s been portrayed both as a real-life James Bond figure, but also a psychotic, raging alcoholic. What do you think his role was in the JFK assassination?

Somebody once said the men who created the CIA were scions of the Ivy League and men who were one generation from the plow. And it’s true. The CIA started as an Ivy League institution, but they recruited widely and picked up highly competent people like Winston Scott, who was the CIA station chief in Mexico and had grown up in a boxcar in rural Alabama.

Bill Harvey came from the men who were one generation from the plow. He grew up in Indiana. His grandfather was a farmer, but his mother was a literature professor and he was a brilliant student. He completed Indiana University and Indiana University Law School in four years. He got an undergraduate degree and a law degree. He was a phenomenally intelligent man.  He went into the FBI. He was a strong-willed man and immediately clashed with J. Edgar Hoover, who fired him, and then he went over to the CIA.

At the CIA, he distinguished himself with his incredible work ethic, working 18 hours a day. He carried a handgun. He was a very rough character for the Ivy League, but was a very impressive intelligence operator who handled the toughest missions. With the rise of these charismatic figures in countries that were asserting their independence, like Fidel Castro in Cuba and Patrice Lumumba in Congo, the CIA decided they needed an assassination capability. They turned to Bill Harvey, this highly competent guy who’s got great contacts in the organized crime syndicates of Europe, the Mafia and the Corsican Mafia, and that’s where he goes to get his assassins. Harvey’s brought on for the job of arranging the assassination of Fidel Castro. They never got close to penetrating Castro’s security, but not for lack of trying.

Harvey hated the Kennedy’s. He hated them before the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he really hated them afterwards. He felt they were cowards and he had complete contempt for them. Like you said, he was a raging alcoholic, but that can give you the wrong impression. Bill Harvey was a highly, highly competent man. Yes, alcoholism eventually ruined him. But that didn’t affect his performance.  He was a very ruthless, very well organized man who operated on the windy side of the law. Given his hatred of the Kennedy’s, he’s a plausible suspect in Kennedy’s assassination. I wouldn’t say he definitely did it, but if you look at his career, he could have done it and he would be able to hide it.  He’s not the only plausible suspect, but he’s one of them.

Who else is on the list of plausible suspects?

Something on the scale of assassinating a president, to my mind, would require buy-in from very senior people, even if it was just a nod. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior uniformed leaders in the Department of Defense, were very disturbed by Kennedy’s policies, and they had plans for false flag operations. One plan was to provoke the invasion of Cuba. They wanted to stage fake incidents in the United States that would create popular support for an invasion, what they called pretext operations or engineered provocations. When Kennedy’s killed, people immediately blamed it on the communists. In a way, it looks like a false flag operation. Given the hostility of the joint chiefs toward Kennedy, and the fact that we now know the joint chiefs took over Kennedy’s autopsy, they could have been behind this. The autopsy was controlled by military commanders and that’s one of the reasons why it was such a bad autopsy.

Given the CIA’s level of interest in Oswald, it seems likely that CIA people were involved. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a CIA plot. One of the great canards of this subject is that, if there was a conspiracy, somebody would have talked. That betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how covert operations work. Covert operations are very tightly held. The most successful operations are sometimes known to only two or three people within the CIA. So the idea of a tightly held conspiracy, especially with the powers of secrecy that these people had, is not hard to imagine. I think another factor is that Kennedy didn’t have friends in law enforcement.  Kennedy had a lot of enemies. He didn’t have friends in the FBI, and he didn’t have friends in the Secret Service in large part because of his civil rights policies, his support for ending Jim Crow. This was very offensive to people in law enforcement, and I think that contributed to the weakness of his security and certainly to the breakdown in Dallas.

What’s the Mafia connection to the JFK assassination?

 If you want to understand the workings of the CIA, you have to understand its relationship to organized crime figures. The people who recur in the JFK story and the surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald are also people who have excellent and amiable contacts with top organized crime figures. It’s an amoral business, and so for these intelligence officials, whether you’re dealing with a Nazi or a communist, morality doesn’t enter into it. It’s, “can these people help you?” In World War II, an agreement with the Mafia  paved the way for the US invasion of Italy in 1943. A formal agreement was reached that the mafia wouldn’t harass the US forces. That continued into the Cold War, and certainly figures in the JFK story. We know organized crime was involved in JFK’s assassination. We know the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby was an action of organized crime. Their part in the plot was to dispose of a key witness. That’s what mafia guys are good at.  But the mafia didn’t arrange the gunfire in Dealey Plaza. Shooting at a moving target in public is not a mafia specialty.

Do you have any information about Kennedy’s assassination that, for whatever reason, you are unable to publish? Maybe because you’re guarding someone’s identity?

No. If  you look at all my books about the CIA, all my JFK reporting, I can only think of one case where I didn’t use the person’s real name. I never use anonymous sources. Everything that I know that I find significant I’ve put out there. I don’t have anything. Now, I have interviewed people who I haven’t written about yet. I’m not sitting on it. I’m thinking about it, and I’ve got to think about it until it’s time to write. I’ve interviewed some people that I’ll report on in the future, but basically everything I know, I put it out as soon as I know it.

Who are those people that you’ve interviewed but haven’t written about yet?

People ask me a lot about a guy named Carl Jenkins, who was a CIA paramilitary trainer. He was very highly regarded, second in his class in the Marine Corps. He was the U.S.’s go-to guy in the 60s for, as he told me, “If you want a dirty job done, call me.” He was one tough son-of-a-bitch.  I’ve spent a lot of time with Carl Jenkins, but I haven’t written about him. Some people say he was involved in the Kennedy assassination. When I’m ready to write about that, I will. I need to get the story right, and that’s not easy.  And it’s not a matter of researching on the internet, which is what people think research is now. It’s going out and talking to real life human beings.