Shannon Kent was one of four Americans killed in a suicide bombing in Syria last month. The New York Times profiles her work as cryptological technician who worked linked the National Security Agency to the Syrian battlefront. She was an intelligence officer. Cryptology is code breaking; sigint is signals intelligence, like intercepting and interpreting phone calls and...
Category: United States
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Rules of ‘Regime Change’: The CIA in Iran
In Truthdig Joel Whitney has an excellent recap of the CIA’s coup in Iran in 1953 and its continuing impact on the world we live in today. How is that possible? Read on: As relations between the U.S. and Iran again take on a hostile tone, it’s worth untangling the intricate braid of CIA claims...
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The Only Intelligence Chief Who Didn’t Contradict Trump Has Retired
Robert Cardillo has retired as the chief of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. NGA is the most obscure $5 billion a year organization that you never heard and the departing Cardillo has a knack for avoiding the news. Cardillo, almost alone among the U.S. intelligence chiefs who testified on Capitol HIll this week, did not contradict...
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Barr and Bolton Undermined Congressional Oversight of CIA
The past is prologue to the Trump administration. Thirty years ago, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Attorney General Nominee William Barr were fighting congressional oversight of the CIA. As legal advisers to President Reagan, they insisted that the president did not need to disclose all covert operations to Congress, that Congress’s power of the...
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‘The Report’: Dianne Feinstein’s War With the CIA
This movie premiered recently at the Sundance film festival, which means it might be headed to a theater near you. That depends on whether a studio thinks that a movie that is critical of both the CIA and President Obama has commercial prospects. I hope so. The story of how the CIA–with the help of...