Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian-born Islamist dissident and militant leader who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death in 2011. Ideologically a pan-Islamist, he participated in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union and supported the activities of the Bosnian mujahideen during the Yugoslav Wars. Bin Laden is most widely known as the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks in the United States.
Tora Bora is a cave complex, part of the Spin Ghar mountain range of eastern Afghanistan. It is situated in the Pachir Aw Agam District of Nangarhar, approximately 50 kilometres west of the Khyber Pass and 10 km (6 mi) north of the border of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan. Tora Bora and the surrounding Spin Ghar range had natural caverns formed by streams eating into the limestone, that had later been expanded into a CIA-financed complex built for the Afghan mujahideen. Tora Bora was known to be a stronghold location of the Afghan mujahideen, used by military forces against the Soviet Union during the 1980s.
Operation Fortitude was a military deception operation by the Allied nations as part of Operation Bodyguard, an overall deception strategy during the buildup to the 1944 Normandy landings. Fortitude was divided into two subplans, North and South, and had the aim of misleading the German High Command as to the location of the invasion.
The International Spy Museum is an independent non-profit history museum which documents the tradecraft, history, and contemporary role of espionage. It holds the largest collection of international espionage artifacts on public display. The museum opened in 2002 in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and relocated to L'Enfant Plaza in 2019.
The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The museum's galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, with a new one on the same site. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent. Its scope includes exhibitions, artists-in-residence programs, educational and public programming, and a permanent collection.
The National WWII Museum, formerly known as The NationalD-Day Museum, is a military history museum located in the Central Business District of New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., on Andrew Higgins Drive between Camp Street and Magazine Street. The museum focuses on the contribution made by the United States to Allied victory in World War II. Founded in 2000, it was later designated by the U.S. Congress as America's official National WWII Museum in 2004. The museum is a Smithsonian Institution affiliated museum, as part of the Smithsonian Institution's outreach program. The mission statement of the museum emphasizes the American experience in World War II.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic, and executive.
Sir David Frank Adjaye is a Ghanaian-British architect who has designed many notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.. Adjaye was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. He received the 2021 Royal Gold Medal, making him the first African recipient and one of the youngest recipients. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2022.
Operation Titanic was a series of military deceptions carried out by the Allied Nations during the Second World War. They formed part of tactical element of Operation Bodyguard, the cover plan for the Normandy landings. Titanic was carried out on 5–6 June 1944 by the Royal Air Force and the Special Air Service. Its objective was to drop hundreds of dummy parachutists, noisemakers and small numbers of special forces troops in locations away from the real Normandy drop zones. It hoped to deceive the German defenders into believing that a large force had landed, drawing troops away from the beachheads and other strategic sites.
On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, the founder and first leader of the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda, was shot and killed at his compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad by United States Navy SEALs of SEAL Team Six. The operation, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, was carried out in a CIA-led mission, with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating the Special Mission Units involved in the raid. In addition to SEAL Team Six, participating units under JSOC included the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), also known as the "Night Stalkers," and the CIA's Special Activities Division, which heavily recruits from former JSOC Special Mission Units. The success of the operation ended a nearly decade-long manhunt for bin Laden, who was accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States.
The death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, gave rise to various conspiracy theories, hoaxes and rumors. These include the ideas that he had died earlier, or that he lived beyond the reported date. Doubts about Bin Laden's death were fueled by the U.S. military's supposed disposal of his body at sea, the decision to not release any photographic or DNA evidence of Bin Laden's death to the public, the contradicting accounts of the incident, and the 25-minute blackout during the raid on Bin Laden's compound during which a live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the U.S. special forces was cut off.
Vanessa Nuala Kirby is an English actress. She made her professional acting debut on stage, with acclaimed performances in the plays All My Sons (2010), A Midsummer Night's Dream (2010), Women Beware Women (2011), Three Sisters (2012), and as Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (2014).
Theaster Gates is an American social practice installation artist and a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he still lives and works.
Ops (B) was an Allied military deception planning department, based in the United Kingdom, during the Second World War. It was set up under Colonel Jervis-Read in April 1943 as a department of Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), an operational planning department with a focus on western Europe. That year, Allied high command had decided that the main Allied thrust would be in southern Europe, and Ops (B) was tasked with tying down German forces on the west coast in general, and drawing out the Luftwaffe in particular.
Alfreda Frances Bikowsky is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who has headed the Bin Laden Issue Station and the Global Jihad unit. Bikowsky's identity is not publicly acknowledged by the CIA, but was deduced by independent investigative journalists in 2011. In January 2014, the Washington Post named her and tied her to a pre-9/11 intelligence failure and the extraordinary rendition of Khalid El-Masri. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, released in December 2014, showed that Bikowsky was not only a key part of the torture program but also one of its chief apologists, resulting in the media's giving her the moniker "The Unidentified Queen of Torture."
The Inter–Services Intelligence has been alleged or previously documented by various authors of running an active military intelligence program in the United States, as well as operational activities related to America outside the country.
Biomuseo is a museum focused on the natural history of Panama, whose isthmus was formed very recently in geologic time, with major impact on the ecology of the Western Hemisphere. Located on the Amador Causeway in Panama City, Panama, it was designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. This is Gehry's first design for Latin America. The design was conceived in 1999 and the museum opened on 2 October 2014.
The Berlin Spy Museum is a private museum in Berlin which was created by former journalist Franz-Michael Günther. The museum opened to the public on the 19th of September 2015. Günther's aspirations were to create a museum devoted to the history of spies and espionage in the former spy capital of Germany. The museum is located in the central area of Potsdamer Platz, formerly known as the "death strip", as it lies on the perimeters of the wall which once divided East and West Berlin. The museum acts as an educational institution, with its permanent exhibitions bridging together centuries of espionage stories and tactics, immersing visitors in a multi-media experience. The museum particularly focuses on the World Wars and the Cold War through a range of a 1000 different exhibits and artefacts. Since its opening in 2015, 1,000,000 people have visited the museum and recently in 2020 it was nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award. The Berlin Spy Museum is partnered with the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and many of the artefacts and installations within the museum have captured media attention around the world.
Batman Unburied is an American superhero audio drama podcast series created by David S. Goyer featuring the DC Comics hero Batman. It is the first of a series of Spotify-produced scripted podcasts based on DC's characters. The second, Harley Quinn and The Joker: Sound Mind, was released in 2023.
