From Book Marks John le Carre was the pen name of David Cornwell, a former MI6 intelligence officer, who became a novelist. When John le Carré died in December of last year, not long after completing work on his final novel, he left behind an incomparable body of espionage fiction that includes The Spy Who Came...
Category: Countries
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The Spies Who Hated Us: A Veteran Reporter Dishes on the British Secret State
Richard Norton Taylor is a veteran intelligence reporter for The Guardianwho has spent decades reporting on MI6, the British intelligence service. and he’s got plenty of good stories to show for it. Here’s one. An MI6 officer had told him, he says, that the reason why some MI6 people were against the invasion of Iraq...
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Addicted to Drones: The Overhyping of ‘Over the Horizon’
In the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the Biden Administration has announced the United States has adopted “Over the Horizon” strategy for intervening against suspected terrorists, “We can’t kill our way to success,” notes former CIA officer Douglas London in Just Security. ” Perhaps the greatest flaw in an “Over the Horizon” strategy,...
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A Beginner’s Guide to ‘The Blob’–and the American Way of War
Why has American been at war for the entire 21st century? What accounts for the reality of “endless wars,” a phrase that even President Biden used to justify U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan? One obvious answer is that the Washington foreign policymaking class–a community now known as “the Blob” to critics–favors military interventions and rejects non-military...
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Washington Post Calls for an Investigation of COVID’s Origins
Last August, the Office of Director of National National Intelligence published an unclassified paper on the origins of COVID-19 saying the U.S. intelligence community broadly agreed the virus was not a biological weapons but was more divided on the question of whether the virus was genetically engineered. Given those rather equivocal findings, the editors of...
