The

The Hi, welcome to Media Roots Radio.

On this week's episode, we'd like to present for you an interview with historian, anti-imperialist, writer William

Bloom. Sadly, William passed away on December 9th, 2018. When Abby and I conducted this interview

originally, we thought we lost it in a hard drive crash.

Turns out while digging around for some old files on some old hard drives that I had lying around,

we found one half of the interview. Back then, we used to record everything we did when we would

interview over Skype anyways as a backup.

So what you're going to hear today is something from our archives that we thought we lost,

a guest that we were supposed to have on our podcast that technically never appeared,

and now he is not with us anymore. So we thought we'd release this episode for you guys

and we hope you enjoy it. This interview was conducted on May 4th, 2015. So without further ado,

here's William Bloom.

All right, William, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

You're one of the foremost experts on the CIA. I mean, this is an agency founded back in 1947,

originally tasked with gathering intelligence around the world.

Was there anything that resembled what the CIA did

that existed in the government before that time?

Not in the form of any specific agency.

I mean, of course, there was intelligence operations during World War II.

In fact, the OSS was created then, the Office of Special Services, I think it was,

and that was the Office of Special Services, I think it was, and that was the forerunner of the CIA.

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