[First of a Five-Part Series.] The Netflix thriller series, “Pine Gap” takes place on a sprawling, top-secret signals intelligence facility in the Australian Outback. On the screen, Pine Gap is depicted as a cockpit of drone strikes, romance, cybersleuthing, basketball, blackmail, office politics, and paranoia. The cribbed-from-the-chyrons first season culminated with a belligerent American president...
Category: <span>Morley</span>
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Dan Jones: How ODNI Nominee Avril Haines Whitewashed Torture
Spencer Ackerman of Daily Beast calls it “a proxy war.” The nomination of Avril Haines to serve as director of the Office of National Intelligence (ODNI) has set off a power struggle between the center-left and center-right factions of the Democratic policy world. This is a consequential fight, the ODNI overseees–but does not actually run–17...
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As Trump Cabal Plots a Coup, Rubio Defends Haspel at CIA
CIA director Gina Haspel (Credit: Politico) This subtext of this POLITICO story is: how does Senator Marco Rubio stand up to President Trump’s attempt to hinder the transition to President-Elect Biden? He doesn’t. Rather than criticize the president, the Florida Republicans is defending Trump’s next target: CIA director Gina Haspel. After President Trump “terminated” Defense...
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‘Last Narc’: How the CIA Did Business With Drug Traffickers
Former Newsweek correspondent and best-selling author Elaine Shannon tries but doesn’t quite succeed in taking down Amazon’s series “The Last Narc.” In an extended take out for SpyTalk, Shannon quotes an impressive series of former U.S. officials who scoff at the premise of the series. But neither she nor her sources mention the story of...
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The Spies Who Predicted COVID-19
Former CIA spokesman Kent Harrington runs down the history of warnings from the intelligence community about pandemics. There were quite a few. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama paid attention. The intelligence community first raised the alert immediately after President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, when then-DNI Dennis Blair testified that, “The most pressing...