espionage stories
By Gordon Corera The new film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week, has been praised for its atmospheric depiction of 1970s London. But how firmly is John Le Carre’s novel rooted in reality? (Spoiler alert: Key plot details revealed below) Trying to establish the precise relationship between…
Russia has drawn up a list of Americans who will be banned from entering Russia. The move comes as a response to Washington’s blacklisting of Russian officials linked to suspected human rights violations. Barack Obama’s much vaunted ‘reset’ of relations between the United States and Russia has suddenly hit a major…
The weeks before President Obama ordered Navy SEALs into Pakistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, administration officials weighed using American warplanes to obliterate the terror mastermind’s fortified compound from the sky or sending commandos on a high-risk mission to assault the structure from the ground. But there’s one option the administration appears to…
What a world! Much of North Africa remains roiled with mass protests against autocratic or crazed leaders. One predictable result has been skyrocketing oil prices with potentially adverse consequences for recovering economies. And, in the United States, a possible shutdown of government looms because America’s two political parties prefer to indulge in a game of…
The CIA has pulled its top spy out of Pakistan after threats were made against his life, current and former U.S. officials said, an unusual move for the U.S. and a complication on the front lines of the fight against al-Qaida.
The First Swedish woman involved in the Julian Assange rape investigation may have stopped cooperating with the prosecution — and moved to the West Bank. According to Australian site Crikey, Anna Ardin, identified back in August by a Swedish paper as one of Assange’s accusers, “may have ceased actively co-operating with the Swedish prosecution service…
Ex-spies ponder N. Korean missile sale to Taliban CIA-supplied Stinger missiles proved to be a game-changer for mujaheddinAccording to one of the intelligence reports obtained by WikiLeaks, one of the Afghan insurgency’s most powerful figures, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, traveled to North Korea in 2005 with a top aide to Osama bin Laden and purchased ground-to-air missiles….
WikiLeaks: The National-Security State Strikes Back By Scott Horton WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the 91,000 U.S. government documents that it labels the “Afghan War Diary” raises a number of vital issues. Most of the discussion so far has focused on the significance of the documents themselves. They make the intelligence community look not so intelligent, and…
– Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear scientist who claimed to have been kidnapped by the U.S. and returned to the Islamic Republic to a hero’s welcome today, was handed more than $5 million by the CIA to provide intelligence on the regime’s atomic program, according to intelligence officials interviewed by The Washington Post. The paper…