Spying & Spies in the USA (merged thread)

[davidbfpo]

Classic story and hat tip to WoTR. It is within a wider article on immigrants and national security.

The FBI, too, has benefitted from the service of immigrants. A particularly striking example in the national security realm is that of Dimitry Droujinsky, the son of Russian immigrants to Palestine who later came to the United States. Droujinsky had a multi-decade career in the FBI; his specialty was impersonating KGB officers to ensnare Americans who had spied for Moscow. His career reached all the way into the late 1990s when he came back from retirement to help bring to justice David Sheldon Boone, a former National Security Agency official who had sold sensitive documents to Moscow in the last days of the Cold War. Boone had Russian-language training and might not have been fooled by an FBI agent who had learned his Russian in a classroom.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2018/02/th...us-hard-power/

[davidbfpo]

A report by Bill Gertz, ex-WaPo, which uses Congressional testimony as the foundation. Two small quotes:

Gone was any dedicated strategic [counterintelligence] program, while elite pockets of proactive capabilities died of neglect....We know surprisingly little about adversary intelligence services relative to the harm they can do.

Link:http://freebeacon.com/national-secur...-s-technology/

[davidbfpo]

A book review by Bruce Reidel that is titled 'Order from Chaos' which starts with:

The former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is the author of 'Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence' at a critical time in our nation’s history, and he offers a crucial insight into the threat we face from a foreign adversary. His great sense of humor also makes the book a pleasure to read.

Link:https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order...ce-challenges/

[davidbfpo]

A devastating IMHO review of Steve Coll's book (see Post 37 on the Pakistani ISI thread) by Edward Luttwak, although it's real focus is the CIA (the other half of the relationship). There several illustrations why:

abysmal “tradecraft”...Raymond Davis had a bank statement listing the CIA as his employer in his car when he was arrested by local police in Lahore on January 27, 2011....the linguistic incompetence of almost all CIA analysts that really matters – an incompetence that goes right to the top....secretaries of state and generals seem to have believed that the cultures of Afghanistan are flexible, fluid and malleable..

He ends with:

ntelligence is an ancillary function, so it may be that the CIA’s systemic shortcomings are irrelevant to the preordained outcome in Afghanistan. This does not diminish the virtues of Steve Coll’s excellent book – a rem#arkable feat of extended reportage soundly constructed out of telling details and a great number of effective character portraits.

Link:https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/p...-coll-luttwak/

[davidbfpo]

Via Newsweek and based on a new audio-only book:

Now we know, according to an posthumously published book by the late David Wise, the authoritative espionage writer who died from pancreatic cancer last month. The informant, Wise writes, was Alexandr Shcherbakov, a down-on-his-luck former KGB officer who delivered the Kremlin’s dossier on Hanssen to an FBI counterspy who had pursued the case for years.

Link:https://www.newsweek.com/who-dimed-o...anssen-1196080

[davidbfpo]

I thought we'd had a post on the ex-USAF lady, a linguist, who appears to have defected to Iran, the search function fails to help. So as a stop gap here is a February 2019 BBC report:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-47230150

So here is an article that appears to have considerable help from "informed persons" in the USA. The title suggests Iran is preparing it's options to say the least.
Link:https://news.yahoo.com/as-trump-escalates-rhetoric-iran-is-making-its-own-plans-for-a-potential-war-084500212.html?