One hundred years ago, the most consequential assassination in modern times occurred. It was the most famous too, since the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo set off a chain of events that led, a...
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28 June 1914: Uncovering the Sarajevo Assassination
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ISIS Reaches Kosovo
Today, Kosovo police arrested three ethnic Albanians on charges of terrorism and recruitment. The men, said to be linked to the world’s most infamous rising jihadist group, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), are reported to have...
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SikorskiGate, Part I
A huge story has broken in Poland with the leak of an alleged taped conversation between Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski and a fellow politician. Sikorski, who is married to the American journalist Anne Applebaum, is a staunch supporter of NATO...
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Why Germany Refuses to Play a Bigger Role in NATO
One of the stranger aspects of the slow-motion crisis over Ukraine caused by Russian provocations and aggression is the uneven response from NATO members. While Alliance states located closer to Russia, which experienced Moscow’s occupation during the Cold War, generally have...
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More Evidence Russian Intelligence is Waging Special War Against Ukraine
For months it has been obvious to those who wish to see that Russian intelligence stands behind the campaign of espionage, terrorism, propaganda, and covert action (including raising and arming rebel militias), which I have termed Special War, that is being...
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Facing America’s Failure in Iraq
The last week, which has seen murderously radical Sunni jihadists take over much of Iraq and even threaten Baghdad, has witnessed the unraveling of the past dozen years of U.S. policy in that country, and with it the collapse of...
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Russians and Jihadists: What German domestic intelligence worries about
Recently Hans-Georg Maassen, the chief of the mouthful Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – BfV for short, i.e. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, charged with fighting espionage and terrorism – admitted that, thanks to the Ukraine crisis, “efforts by Russian...
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Exploring Al-Qa’ida’s Russian Connection
[Note: This is an unusually controversial piece, even for my blog, for reasons that will quickly become obvious. Linkages between Al-Qa’ida and Russian intelligence have been discussed in hushed tones among spies in many countries, for years, and this matter...
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Defending NATO’s Eastern Frontier: A Modest Proposal
The Ukraine crisis and Russia’s theft of Crimea have forced NATO to ponder territorial defense seriously again after two decades of neglect. No longer does the Alliance have the luxury of thinking that counterinsurgency in Afghanistan constitutes its top priority....
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The Snowden Operation Meets ECHELON
Today the British website The Register published a detailed expose of “above top secret” signals intelligence operations in the Middle East allegedly conducted by GCHQ, NSA’s British partner. This sensational leak, which appeared under the by-line of Duncan Campbell, is...