Yet Ms. Brookner was among the most skilled and admired case officers in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations — the clandestine service that infiltrates foreign countries and recruits agents to provide secrets to the United States. She was among the few women to ascend the ranks of the department, until her career was derailed in...
Category: Spies
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Sidney Gottlieb: Mastermind of MKULTRA
“He was creator and destroyer, an outlaw who served power, a gentle hearted torturer… above all he was an instrument of history,” writes Stephen Kinzer of Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA’s mind control program notoriously known as MKULTRA. The revelations of Kinzer’s fascinating and disturbing biography, Poisoner in Chief, are unsettling enough. Kinzer, former...
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All About Avril Haines, Biden’s Pick for the Top U.S. Intelligence Job
Avril Haines is President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). if confirmed, she will effectively serve as the chairwoman of the U.S. intelligence community. The ODNI doesn’t control the budgets of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, but it does coordinate and set direction. It is not as...
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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...
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Was Putin’s Former Girlfriend a RAW Agent?
Yatish Yadav, author of a book on Indian intelligence service, the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), says India wanted intelligence on Russian intentions. The Indian spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) might have recruited the younger brother of former Soviet Union Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and an alleged girlfriend of Vladimir Putin, according to...
