Free Syrian Army agent says his agents have been providing the US agency with GPS positions of its leaders and headquarters but the US has failed to act The “spymaster” of a key moderate Syrian rebel group has accused the CIA of failing to act on reams of detailed intelligence his network has been supplying…
Category: Counterintelligence
How the Reagan-Era CIA Predicted Our Drone Dystopia
It is mind numbing how an agency with the resources and manpower like the CIA has can predict things like this but yet miss earth shaking Geo-Political events like the Soviets Invading Afghanistan in 1979 or the Soviet Union Collapse in 1991 or my favorite: being blindsided on 9/11. As a person who understands the…
Cold War Files: The Americans are Coming
…or is it the Russians? The popular FX series premieres episode one of season four on Wednesday. (March 16th). In case you’re not already read in on the cold-war drama, prepare to be taken back to 1980s Virginia and into the household of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, a seemingly normal American couple who are actually…
Russian Hybrid Warfare and Other Dark Arts
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, hybrid warfare has become conversational short form in the West for describing Moscow’s sneaky ways of fighting war. If there’s one thing you’ve learned over the past two years about Russia, it’s that it uses hybrid warfare, a dangerous Kremlin innovation the West must learn to grapple with. In two…
Espionage Files: Spy vs Spies: Why Deciphering Putin is So Hard for U.S. Intelligence
American intelligence officers are trained to tackle tough targets. But there are tough targets, and then there’s Russian President Vladimir Putin, who plays his cards so closely that it’s hard for his own advisers to divine what he’s thinking, says Gregory Treverton, chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “Putin is so isolated that the chances…
Espionage Files: 10 Real ‘HoneyPot’ Operations
The honeypot might be the most glamorized espionage technique in fiction. It’s a tale of hushed phone calls and late-night rendezvous, of secrets whispered through lying lips. But femme fatales and lovers’ plots are not exclusive to fiction. Although the honeypot isn’t used as often as other spy techniques, it still has a place in…
“Predictive Policing”: The Cyber Version of “Stop and Frisk”
Thanks America! How China’s Newest Software Could Track, Predict, and Crush Dissent Armed with data from spying on its citizens, Beijing could turn ‘predictive policing’ into an AI tool of repression. What if the Communist Party could have predicted Tiananmen Square? The Chinese government is deploying a new tool to keep the population from uprising. Beijing is building…
Espionage Files: ‘Spy-Plane’ Crashes in Iraq
When Talal Abdulqadir woke up on March 5, he probably didn’t expect his farm in northern Iraq would end up crawling with American troops guarding a crashed aircraft. In an instant, the green field outside the town of Kawrgosk put on full display some of the more shadowy elements of Washington’s fight against Islamic State….
What the 2016 Presidential Candidates Get Wrong About the Future of War
They fail, they lack, they misunderstand, they pander, they don’t get, and they just don’t know national security – not according to our Future of War roster of experts. “The President shall be Commander in Chief…” This clause that leads Article Two, Section II of the U.S. Constitution is without a doubt the most important of…
Espionage Non-Fiction Book Review: The Rice Paddy Navy
Osprey Publishing; November 2012; 316 pp. Before Navy SEALs stormed mansions in Pakistan, the notion of sailors waging war on land sounded ludicrous to many. So when Gen. George C. Marshall learned that Navy captain Milton Miles intended to train an army of Chinese guerillas to disrupt Japanese army operations in China and create a…