Today, Pope Francis is in Istanbul celebrating a rare moment of Catholic-Orthodox unity with a visit to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the head of the Eastern Orthodox Churches (whose authority over his flock is considerably less than the pope’s over Catholics...
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Is This The End of Europe?
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How Many Snowdens Are There?
The sensational case of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor gone rogue, and Russian, with something like 1.5 million highly classified documents, making this the biggest compromise in all intelligence history, has caused embarrassment and worse at NSA and...
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More Silly NSA Criticism
The “surveillance state reform” crowd is in the doldrums, now that their wonder-boy Edward Snowden is in Russia for the long-haul, under Putin’s watchful eye, and it’s been painfully evident for months that major reforms of the National Security Agency...
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Lingering OKBOMB Questions
One of the more curious aspects of our postmodern information age is how stories that are actually known — meaning they have already been reported and can easily be found online — nevertheless fail to develop traction in the public...
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Operation DAMASCUS: The Italian Job
Bosnia-Hercegovina’s troubles with terrorism and extremism were back in the news this week, with police raids leading to the arrest of eleven radicals associated with the Islamic State, several of whom recently waged jihad in Syria. This was the second...
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Why the Islamic State is Winning
Today’s headlines bring word of some sort of ceasefire, or at least modus vivendi, between the Islamic State (*Da’ish) and Al-Qa’ida (AQ) in Syria, where the Salafi jihadists have been bitter enemies, fighting each other often more than the Assad...
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Operation DAMASCUS, Part II
This morning, in a series of coordinated police raids across Bosnia-Hercegovina, authorities arrested eleven Islamist radicals suspected of support for terrorism and the jihad in Syria and Iraq. The raids took place in five Bosnian locations, including Sarajevo, the country’s...
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On Espionage Denial
Yesterday I reported the allegation that top U.S. diplomat and NATO Deputy Secretary General Sandy Vershbow is an agent of influence of Russian intelligence. This explosive charge was leveled by Russian businessman and parliamentarian Konstantin Borovoy, a normally rather sober...
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Is a Top American Diplomat a Russian Agent?
Today the Ukrainian news website GORDON ran an interview with the Russian businessman and sometime politician Konstantin Borovoy. A harsh critic of Vladimir Putin — he recently said Russia’s president is “mentally unstable” while a year ago he pronounced the collapse...
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Five Spy Movies You Must See
I regularly get asked which movies dealing with espionage I would recommend people to see. That’s a tougher question than it might appear, since most of the movies out there that purport to be about spying and intelligence, in any...