Kat Harrison has taken up the role of Executive Associate Governance. We thank John Schmidt for his work leading the Governance portfolio for the past two years; John remains on the Board in the Governance Team.
Michael Hickey has been seconded to the Board to work in the Events Team.
Regional Reps for Victoria, Gordon Ireland, Hazel D’Cruz and Paul Crapper; and for Western Australia Kosta Lucas. We thank Gill Wilson and Dorothy Seidel Hooke for taking on the additional responsibility of working as the regional reps for Victoria on top of their regular Board roles over the past two years; both Gill and Dorothy remain in their regular Board roles.
By Ralph Hope
In 1990 the Berlin Wall fell and the East German security service folded. By that time, they had amassed over a billion pages of manilla files detailing the lives of their citizens. Overnight, almost a hundred thousand Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what they did next.
Former FBI Agent Ralph Hope uses critical insider knowledge and access to Stasi records to track and expose ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy sector to the police and even the government department tasked with prosecuting Stasi crimes. He examines why the key players have never been called to account and, in doing so, asks whether we have really learned from the past at all.
Learn moreBy Richard H. Cummings
Published for the first time, the history of the CIA’s clandestine short-wave radio broadcasts to Eastern Europe and the USSR during the early Cold War is covered in-depth.
Chapters describe the “gray” broadcasting of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Munich; clandestine or “black” radio broadcasts from Radio Nacional de Espana in Madrid to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine; transmissions to Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Ukraine and the USSR from a secret site near Athens; and broadcasts to Byelorussia and Slovakia.
Infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain through dangerous air drops and boat landings, CIA and other intelligence service agents faced counterespionage, kidnapping, assassination, arrest and imprisonment.
Excerpts from broadcasts taken from monitoring reports of Eastern Europe intelligence agencies are included.
More infoVladimir Putin passes law that may keep him in office until 2036
Presidential terms ‘reset’ to allow Russian leader to run for presidency twice more in his lifetime
Vladimir Putin has signed a law that will allow him to run for the presidency twice more in his lifetime, potentially keeping him in office until 2036.
The Russian president signed the legislation on Monday, ending a year-long process to “reset” his presidential terms by rewriting the constitution through a referendum-like process that his critics have called a crude power grab.
Putin has been Russia’s most powerful politician since he assumed the presidency in 2000, after the resignation of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
How Bellingcat Unmasked Putin’s Assassins
The collective’s innovation has been to recognize that the digital-age panopticon actually works in two directions.
In November, Christo Grozev, a researcher at Bellingcat, an open-source investigation collective, called Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader.
Three months earlier, Navalny had fallen grievously ill on a flight departing the Siberian city of Tomsk; he was evacuated, in a coma, to Berlin, where the substance that had nearly killed him was identified as Novichok, a Russian-made nerve agent, the use of which appeared to lead straight to the Kremlin.
When Grozev reached Navalny, he was recuperating in Ibach, a small town in Germany’s Black Forest.
As Grozev recalled, he told Navalny, “I think I may have found the people who tried to kill you.”
Ransomware tops U.S. cyber priorities, Homeland secretary says
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on Wednesday that dealing with ransomware will be a top priority, highlighting the growing threat of the data-scrambling software.
Ransomware – which effectively holds files and networks hostage unless a payment is made – has steadily climbed to the top of America’s security agenda as the criminals behind it become increasingly well-resourced.
Speaking via a webcast, Mayorkas said that ransomware was “a particularly egregious type of malicious cyber activity” and listed it as the first of several top priorities that his department would tackle in the online sphere.
Australia ‘virtually defenceless’ against China’s new long-range stealth bomber
China is poised to unveil a new hi-tech weapon later this year that will dramatically shift the regional power balance – and leave Australia exposed.
Enormous under-mountain bunkers are being built to shield China’s next-generation stealth bombers from all forms of attack – including a nuclear strike.
Satellite photos have revealed several air bases undergoing extensive modernisation and expansion work to house the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s nuclear-capable H-20 stealth bombers, as well as its existing fleet of H-6N strategic bombers.
Humility is probably not something most intelligence analysts consider to be a central tenet of their work.
The notion of humility and intelligence may create dissonance for many unfamiliar with the intelligence discipline.
This dissonance stems from intelligence analysts staking their reputations on their specialized knowledge, in addition to solid tradecraft and polished communication skills.
There is scant literature devoted to the topic of humility and intelligence analysis.
Ample studies of humility exist in other fields, including medicine, business, and religion, but writings on the intelligence discipline have only addressed humility as a peripheral issue.
Learn moreThis report helps develop an understanding of the quantum of profits being made and where in the value chain they occur. Australians spent approximately A$5.8 billion on methamphetamine and A$470 million on heroin in FY 2019.
Approximately A$1,216,806,017 was paid to international wholesalers overseas for the amphetamine and heroin that was smuggled into Australia in that year.
The profit that remained in Australia’s economy was about A$5,012,150,000. Those funds are undermining Australia’s public health and distorting our economy daily, and ultimately funding drug cartels and traffickers in Southeast Asia.
One key takeaway from the figures presented in this report is that the Australian drug trade is large and growing.
Read the reportThere is plenty of quality academic writing on how the relationship between the CIA and the United States’s special operations forces must evolve.
Conventional wisdom has it that the CIA and SOF were so dedicated to counterterrorism operations since 9/11 that we collectively took our eyes off the ball in countering actions of state actors such as Russia and China, which we now term near-peer competitors.
I view this issue from the unique perspective of my old job as a CIA case officer in the field, where the rubber meets the road with a front-row seat to how we both collect intelligence and fight.
I suggest that we look at the three Rs, relationships, resources, and Russia (and similar foes), as we assess the future CIA-SOF relationship.
Continue reading“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” ― Isaac Asimov
We all make assumptions.
We do so automatically, even unconsciously. Assumptions are the premises that we hold to be true, often without much evidence.
Moreover, they’re the premises that we expect to remain true. We make big assumptions and little assumptions, benign assumptions, and potentially dangerous assumptions.
Each time we make a judgment without complete information — which is practically every single time— we buttress those judgments with one or more underlying assumptions.
Some of these assumptions are relatively safe — we assume, for instance, that the sun will rise again tomorrow because it has done so reliably for something like four and a half billion years.
Others, however, can prove to be far less so.
Keep readingHow we’ve been surprised by our growing ability to predict things.
In the coming days, President Obama will be reviewing intelligence, poring over data, soliciting expert opinions, examining history, mulling options, and fusing analysis with intuition and experience.
No, not to order a drone strike, intervene in Syria, or combat Chinese cyber-hacking.
Instead, Obama, like millions of Americans, will be picking his NCAA men’s basketball teams for March Madness.
Find outHappily, many of the tenets are observed in intelligence analysis, but perhaps not explicitly enough.
Systems thinking’s admonition to look for what isn’t there translates for intelligence into Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown knowns”—things we don’t know we don’t know, as distinguished from “known unknowns,” those things we know we don’t know.
By the same token, while intelligence frequently asks what wildcards might drive the assessment dramatically away from the best bet, explicitly asking what holds the present in place would compel more attention to the present as a system, not simply as a given.
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