His grandmother, who emigrated to the U.S. with his father after World War II, was Victoria Madsen, a Danish communist party official.
Between 1985 and 1989 Madsen held a series of jobs, first working for RCA as a government consultant on contracts for the National Security Agency (NSA).
In 1998, while at EPIC, Madsen was described by journalist Jason Vest in The Village Voice as one of the world's leading SIGINT and computer security experts.
His articles have appeared in publications such as CorpWatch, CounterPunch, CovertAction Quarterly, In These Times, Multinational Monitor, The American Conservative, The Progressive and The Village Voice.
[27] Madsen has asserted in The Palestine Telegraph that hundreds of Iraqi scientists who had been assassinated or died in accidents after the invasion in 2003 were actually murdered by Mossad hit teams operating in Iraq.
[29] In October 2005, he wrote that "an unidentified former CIA agent" claimed that the USS Cole was hit by a Popeye cruise missile launched from an Israeli Dolphin-class submarine.
[30] In a 2008 article published by the Saudi Arab News cited Madsen's claim Mossad ran the Emperors Club as a front (in which former New York State governor Eliot Spitzer was entrapped).
Obama, Madsen says, had homosexual trysts with Representative Artur Davis, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Senate majority leader Bill Frist.
"[36] He claimed in August 2009 that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible for creating the Obama "birther" movement in a broadcast on the RT (formerly known as Russia Today) network.
According to Michael Moynihan of The Daily Beast, shortly after going to press, The Observer "realized that the story's author, Jamie Doward, failed to conduct even the most perfunctory Google search on Madsen.
"[42] In 2002 he suggested to The Guardian newspaper that the United States Navy had aided in an attempted overthrow of Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.
"[43] An OIG report requested by Sen. Christopher Dodd, found no wrongdoing by any U.S. officials either in the State Department or at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas.