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….
Category: Spycraft
Cold War Non-Fiction Book Review: Special Tasks – The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster
Published in 1994 by Little Brown and Co.; 509 pp My Administration for Special Tasks,” Sudoplatov begins, “was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping and assassination of our enemies beyond the country’s borders.” The administration to which he refers was one of the key divisions in Stalin’s security police, an agency he headed from the summer 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…
Espionage Files: Time for a New CIA?
By John Sipher of the Cipher Brief Across the Central Intelligence Agency lobby from the iconic stars memorializing officers killed in the line of duty is a less well-known memorial. It is an understated relief in honor of those foreign spies who risked and lost their lives to provide secret information to the United States. …
Is Putin Really Dr. Moriarty?
An excellent article on understanding how Russian Hybrid Warfare manipulates the current geo-political spectrum. -SF We know ISIS is bad because it killed people in San Bernardino and Paris. We know Iran is bad because it’s still developing nuclear weapons. We know Russia is bad…because…well, didn’t Charlie Rose once say something about that? Or was…
The Espionage Files: The “Spider” James Jesus Angleton
Long before Game of Thrones dubbed its spymaster The Spider, James Jesus Angleton earned that name. His internal witch hunts still leave us wondering—madman, genius, or both? “Mr. Dickey? This is Jim Angleton.” I looked at the phone. I wasn’t sure what to say. This was 1978. I was a 26-year-old reporter on the Metro…
Espionage Files: Navy Engineer with Secret Clearance Indicted After Iranian Passports and Illegal Money Found
Well it appears the Iranians are hard at work trying to place people in sensitive positions to spy on us. Wonder how many other yet undiscovered turd “moles” are floating around in the punch bowl? -SF A US Navy electrical engineer who works in the Washington D.C. Navy Yard for the Naval Sea Systems Command…