Pakistan’s powerful spy agency may have provided the funding for a deadly 2009 suicide attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan that ranks as one of the deadliest days in the agency’s history, according to a newly declassified State Department cable. The heavily redacted cable, sent about two weeks after the attack on Dec. 30,…
Category: Intelligence Tradecraft
Espionage Files: Naval Espionage in an A2AD Age
U.S. Navy Lt. Edward Lin, a native of Taiwan, speaks about his path to US citizenship at a naturalization ceremony in Honolulu, Hawaii, in this US Navy handout photo taken December 3, 2008. Lin, a US Navy officer with access to sensitive US intelligence, faces espionage charges over accusations he passed state secrets, possibly…
Espionage Files: CIA Funds Cosmetics That Can Collect DNA
SKINCENTIAL SCIENCES, a company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah’s lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of…
World War Two Books Worth A Damn: Church of Spies
“There’s a man who leads a life of danger To everyone he meets he stays a stranger With every move he makes another chance he takes Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow Secret agent man, secret agent man” So said Johnny Rivers in the theme to the ’60s show Secret Agent. Mark Riebling…
Espionage Files: CIA Trained Spy Allegedly Arrested in Russia
The Russian government says it has arrested a senior Ukrainian intelligence officer, who was allegedly trained by the United States Central Intelligence Agency and tasked with infiltrating the Russian secret services. In a statement published on Thursday, Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as FSB, said the alleged infiltrator is a “senior level employee” of the…
Espionage Files: More Foreign Spies in U.S. Now Than At Any Other Time in History
There are currently more foreign intelligence operatives in the United States than at any point in the country’s history, the former head of the House Intelligence Committee claimed on Wednesday. “There are more spies in the United States today from foreign nation states that at any time in our history — including the Cold War,”…
Cold War Files: Tolkachev, The CIA’s Most Valuable Soviet Asset in the 80’s
How a troubled past turned a Soviet military engineer into one of the CIA’s most valuable spies. His family and friends called him Adik. His eyes were the color of ash, under a broad forehead and thick brown hair, with a crook in the bridge of his nose from a boyhood hockey accident. He stood…
Cold War Files: How the CIA Covertly Used Modern Art as A Weapon
For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War….
Espionage Files: The Brave New World of Drone Hacking
The Israel Police and Shin Bet security service arrested a Gaza resident suspected of hacking into the feeds from Air Force drones and collecting information on troop movements and civilian flights for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, police said Wednesday. A police statement named the suspect as Majd Ouida, 22, describing him as an…
Espionage & Cold War Files: Cuba and Operation Northwoods
I have been reading and studying about Espionage and the History of the CIA, KGB, MI6, Mossad, etc. for some time, and although most things I come across really don’t surprise me, this one did. Truth is certainly stranger than Fiction. -SF Did You Know That the US Once Planned to Attack Itself — and…