National Security

Currently Reading: American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel (2021) A Short History of Russia: How the World’s Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin by Mark Galeotti (2020) Up Next: The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia, by Mark Galeotti Active Measures…

Some say there are 17 agencies comprising the Intelligence Community (IC), but that’s if you include the ODNI, The Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So, that leaves 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. government. …

“Look, theres no secret room somewhere where people are working on this.” It was a phrase I heard before from my boss, an Assistant Secretary at the State Department, who used it to motivate an unwieldy 400-plus bureau into action. In the Fall of 2016, with the election a few…

We were hunched over a near-empty cafe table in the Harry S. Truman building, HQ of the State Department, a little after five o’clock. It was now late into the Trump administration, more than three years in. Although there was no one was around, and there was no risk of…

This article is a difficult one for me to write. However, I think it’s necessary because it shows just how far some cybersecurity experts can fall. Someone who was once a certified cybersecurity expert, a CISSP, who worked for BAE Systems was arrested multiple times for opioid possession, possibly for…

The CIA maintains safe houses, like this abandoned one in Virginia, to house Russian defectors and to keep them safe from GRU assassins while they are debriefed. Some are rented, some are owned by the Agency, but they blend well into the neighborhood. In my spy thrillers, the CIA operates…

By Jamil N. Jaffer, Founder and Executive Director of the National Security Institute The headline: The creation by the Biden Administration of a new domestic terrorism unit within the Justice Department’s National Security Division has generated some controversy because of the potential of such investigations to potentially chill free speech…