From Elizabeth I’s court magician John Dee and his experiments in angelic communication to Nazi Germany’s occult programmes and the Cold War’s pursuit of psychic espionage, this account traces a provocative thread
Stephen “Shorty” Menendez has a piece of advice for Israeli troops faced with clearing out Hamas tunnels in Gaza: Don’t. Don’t volunteer to go down there. You will never get over it.
More
On an overcast and chilly late afternoon last February, CIA Director William Burns went to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service to receive an award. After a few brief and typically gracious
More
“The fusion of ultra-conservative Saudi Wahhabite Islam with the Muslim Brotherhood’s fanatical political activism was a deadly and highly shrewd combination that never lost sight of its goal of building a new
More
The Israeli Arrow air defense system intercepted a heavy Houthi missile aimed at Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat. Israel has not said if the intercept was by Arrow 2 or Arrow
More
The ongoing Hamas-Israel conflict has heightened the potential threats of violence in the United States to a high level not seen in several years, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray
More There is no higher priority for intelligence services in a war than locating the enemy. That’s why “find” is the first word in the combat mantra of “find, fix and finish.” For
More
The was a time many years ago that I’d drive past a soccer stadium in South Vietnam looking for a chalk scratch on the wall. Horizontal meant that my net of spies
More
Veteran former CIA analysts well remember the hours and days they spent urgently scrambling to determine exactly who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Like their CIA brothers and sisters assessing
More
“Drug Panic,” “God’s Scalpel,” “Old Classmates in Washington,” “CIA Spy School,” “Sexy Spies,” “Target – Beijing Olympics,” and “Double Agent,” these gripping chapters of the spy novel Fatal Weakness, upon its first release
More
Abu Hind is yet another controversial figure surrounded by the Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka. By all means, Abu Hind made considerable efforts to deliver an early warning to Sri Lankan authorities,
More
I would be remiss in letting September pass without noting the car-bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier along Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., 47 years ago this month. The September 21, 1976 murder of Letelier, a
More
In the spring of 1993 bomb blasts in 12 locations across Mumbai killed 257 people and injured more than a thousand. The perpetrators, members of the underworld in collaboration with Pakistani intelligence,
More In a year, if a friend asks you if the CIA is in your underwear, you’d probably not take the question seriously. You’d be wrong. The CIA is spending millions in tax
More
In the grim depths of the Cold War, Yuri Andropov, the tall, gaunt chairman of the Soviet KGB, came to a stark realization: Moscow had to do something to cope with the
More
On October 6, 1973, an Israeli friend of mine named Amnon Dankner was performing his annual month-long stint of military reserve duty on the Golan Heights when Syrian tanks and artillery launched a
More