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By Craig Unger

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Kompromat n.—Russian for “compromising information”

This is a story of dirty secrets, and the most powerful people in the world.

Craig Unger’s new book, American Kompromat, tells of the spies and salacious events underpinning men’s reputations and riches. It tells how a relatively insignificant targeting operation by the KGB’s New York rezidentura (New York Station) more than forty years ago—an attempt to recruit an influential businessman as a new asset—triggered a sequence of intelligence protocols that morphed into the greatest intelligence bonanza in history. And it tells of a coterie of associates, reaching all the way into the office of the Attorney General, who stood to advance power, and themselves.

Based on extensive, exclusive interviews with dozens of high-level sources—Soviets who resigned from the KGB and moved to the United States, former officers in the CIA, FBI counterintelligence agents, lawyers at white-shoe Washington firms–and analysis of thousands of pages of FBI investigations, police investigations, and news articles in English, Russian, and Ukrainian, American Kompromat shows that something much more sinister and important has been taking place than the public could ever imagine: namely, that from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat operations documented the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world and transformed them into potent weapons.

by Larry Loftis

When Aline Griffith was born in a quiet suburban New York hamlet, no one had any idea that she would go on to live “a life of glamour and danger that Ingrid Bergman only played at in Notorious” (Time).

As the US enters the Second World War, the young college graduate is desperate to aid in the war effort, but no one is interested in a bright-eyed young woman whose only career experience is modeling clothes.

Aline’s life changes when, at a dinner party, she meets a man named Frank Ryan and reveals how desperately she wants to do her part for her country. Within a few weeks, he helps her join the Office of Strategic Services—forerunner of the CIA.

With a code name and expert training under her belt, she is sent to Spain to be a coder, but is soon given the additional assignment of infiltrating the upper echelons of society, mingling with high-ranking officials, diplomats, and titled Europeans, any of whom could be an enemy agent.

Filled with twists, romance, and plenty of white-knuckled adventures fit for a James Bond film, The Princess Spy brings to vivid life the dazzling adventures of a remarkable American woman who risked everything to serve her country.

by Eliot Higgins

The page-turning inside story of the global team wielding the internet to fight for facts and combat autocracy―revealing the extraordinary ability of ordinary people to hold the powerful to account.

In 2018, Russian exile Sergei Skripal and his daughter were nearly killed in an audacious poisoning attempt in Salisbury, England. Soon, the identity of one of the suspects was revealed: he was a Russian spy.

This huge investigative coup wasn’t pulled off by an intelligence agency or a traditional news outlet. Instead, the scoop came from Bellingcat, the open-source investigative team that is redefining the way we think about news, politics, and the digital future.

We Are Bellingcat tells the inspiring story of how a college dropout pioneered a new category of reporting and galvanized citizen journalists―working together from their computer screens around the globe―to crack major cases, at a time when fact-based journalism is under assault from authoritarian forces.

by Majority Staff of the House Committee on the Judiciary (Author), Michael Cohen (Foreword)

In 2019, Donald Trump became only the third US President to be impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of congress. In January 2021, he became the first President in American history to be impeached for a second time. Though no sitting president was ever convicted, will Trump be the first there, too?

More than 300 scientists and scholars are believed to have been recruited by talent recruitment schemes controlled by the Chinese Communist Party over the past decade, further raising concern Australian academics are giving Beijing access to their technologies and inventions.

One professor who was working on drone research in Australia trained a People’s Liberation Army scientist who went on to become the chief technician for a Chinese military drone program.

The Canadian government designated the Proud Boys group as a terrorist entity today, noting they played a pivotal role in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Proud Boys have faced increased scrutiny after seizing on the former Trump administration’s policies and was a major agitator during earlier protests and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

The Proud Boys is a far-right, male chauvinist extremist group known for engaging in violent clashes at political rallies. Canada is the first country to designate them as a terrorist entity.

During a September presidential debate, Donald Trump had urged them to “stand back and stand by” when asked to condemn them by a moderator.

Beijing may “trigger a major crisis” this year to exploit COVID-19 and celebrate its centenary of Communism, a leading strategist warns.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) executive director Peter Jennings was part of a panel of experts invited to address the US Congress.

The US-China Commission was conducting hearings to anticipate what lies ahead for the South and East China Seas and Taiwan.

Mr Jennings said Chairman Xi Jinping stands to lose nothing if he keeps “testing the limits”.

A hacking group with ties to the Indian military adopted a pair of mobile surveillance tools to spy on geopolitical targets in Pakistan and Kashmir amid persistent regional tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours, according to a report from a cyber security company.

The group is known for commandeering legitimate web services in South Asia and embedding surveillance tools or malware inside apps and services to conduct espionage.

Since 2017, and as recently as December, the hackers have relied on spyware to target Pakistani military officials, the country’s top nuclear regulator and Indian election officials in the disputed state of Kashmir, according to the report released by San Francisco-based Lookout Inc on Thursday.

Content will be added to the elementary and middle school curriculum saying that the state will always put the life and safety of its people first.

China is planning to add government-endorsed content about the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and its “fighting spirit” into the national curriculum.

The Ministry of Education said the content will be added to elementary and middle school classes in biology, health and physical education, history, and Chinese literature, and will “help students understand the basic fact that the Party and the state always put the life and safety of its people first”.

“Students will learn about key figures and deeds which emerged during the epidemic prevention and control efforts. They will learn to foster public awareness and dedication, to enrich knowledge about the advantages of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics,” the ministry said.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have created a four-legged soft robot that doesn’t need any electronics to work. The robot only needs a constant source of pressurized air for all its functions, including its controls and locomotion systems.

The team, led by Michael T. Tolley, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, details its findings in the Feb. 17, 2021 issue of the journal Science Robotics.

“This work represents a fundamental yet significant step towards fully-autonomous, electronics-free walking robots,” said Dylan Drotman, a Ph.D. student in Tolley’s research group and the paper’s first author.

The complexity of an intelligence problem determines to a great extent the certainty that can be provided by intelligence and security services.

This article will argue this deductively and validate this claim using a set of intelligence reports produced by the Dutch Intelligence & Security Service (AIVD).

A better understanding of how the level of complexity affects intelligence analysis is helpful for the further (academic) study of analysis methodologies, as well as for managing expectations of intelligence clients, and for informing the debates over legislation that affects intelligence and security services.

As law enforcement authorities continue the process of trying to identify the thousands of U.S. citizens who stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, longer-term questions remain, such as how the federal government can protect itself against radical and violent extremists attempting to gain national security clearances.

The violent assault on the Capitol – intended to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential Electoral College results – resulted in violence, loss of life and destruction of federal property.

Multiple members of known extremist groups – including The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and QAnon – were part of this attack.

The FBI has already made more than 100 arrests across several states connected to the assault on the Capitol, with more expected in the coming weeks as the FBI parses additional information gathered from images and videos taken inside of the building.

But those who stormed the Capitol on that day were not just known members of radical and violent fringe groups. They included municipal employees, police officers, current and former members of the military and school employees.

Many former U.S. intelligence officers like myself have recently been asked some variation of the question, “What should Joe Biden do to restore a broken intelligence community?”

In 2014, the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction at National Defense University published a paper on the future of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It projected WMD-relevant geopolitical and technological trends and made judgments as to how those trends would shape the nature and role of WMD in 2030.

Those projections and judgments, summarized in the next section, largely remain viable. Since 2014, however, significant developments bearing on the future of WMD have occurred, which this paper explores.

Newly declassified documents reveal that in November 1983, at the height of Cold War tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer to nuclear war than historians—and even many officials at the time—have known until now.

The revelations aren’t mere details of history; they also hold relevant lessons for how leaders should think and act in ongoing crises in hot spots around the world today.

The documents, released this week by the State Department historian’s office, focus on a massive military training exercise known as Able Archer, in which NATO simulated the transition from conventional to nuclear conflict in the event of a war in Europe.

It turned out, top Soviet leaders thought that the war game was real—that the U.S. and NATO really were about to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR—and top Soviet military commanders took steps to retaliate.

Managers who focus on developing sensemaking capabilities can make better decisions in a complex and unpredictable world.

Ask executives to list traits of great leaders and they will probably name vision, honesty, or the ability to execute change.

Rarely mentioned is one critical capability that leaders need most in turbulent times: sensemaking, the ability to create and update maps of a complex environment in order to act more effectively in it.

Assessments of President Donald Trump in any future history of the U.S. intelligence Community (IC) will differ dramatically from those of any of his predecessors.

While Trump made little use of the IC to inform or implement policy, he abused and ignored it incessantly.

The closest precedent is Richard Nixon. Yet Nixon reserved his scorn largely for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and kept it private.

Trump is an equal-opportunity abuser and rages publicly. The IC struggled mightily to recover from the Nixon years. The same can be said for the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy and the flawed National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The damage done by Trump and his enablers may prove irreparable.

Cognitive scientists and corporations alike see human minds as predictive machines. Right or wrong, they will change how we think.

The machine they built is hungry. As far back as 2016, Facebook’s engineers could brag that their creation ‘ingests trillions of data points every day’ and produces ‘more than 6 million predictions per second’. Undoubtedly Facebook’s prediction engines are even more potent now, making relentless conjectures about your brand loyalties, your cravings, the arc of your desires.

The company’s core market is what the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff describes as ‘prediction products’: guesses about the future, assembled from ever-deeper forays into our lives and minds, and sold on to someone who wants to manipulate that future.

How a team of spies in Mexico got their hands on Russia’s space secrets—and tried to change the course of the Cold War.

In late October 1959, a Mexican spy named Eduardo Diaz Silveti slipped into the US Embassy in Mexico City. Tall and well-spoken with slicked-back hair, Silveti, 30, descended from a family of bullfighters.

He had learned spycraft at the Federal Security Directorate, or DFS, Mexico’s secret police. During the Cold War, the capital had become so overrun by Communist spies that the CIA had enlisted the help of the Mexican secret services in their fight against the Soviet Union. “I had to go … to the seventh floor,” Silveti recalled during an interview with Tercer Milenio, a Mexican television program that aired in 2019. “And there was Scott.”

We analyzed 193 people arrested in connection with the January 6 riot—and found a new kind of American radicalism.

In late-1950, Joan and Dudley Doherty started to spend a little more time with each other when they began taking part in Operation Smile, ASIO’s first bugging operation.

ASIO’s work on the case began with collecting information on Australians who were passing information to Russia, but agents soon began looking at Russians based in Australia as well.

One such person was Fedor Nosov, who represented Soviet news agency TASS in Australia, but who was thought to be a person identified in intelligence documents operating under the cover name of ‘TEKHNIK’.

By mid-1949, ASIO was opening Nosov’s mail, tapping his phone and occasionally following him. Nosov lived in an apartment in Darlinghurst, in a building on Kings Cross Road called Kaindi.

Starting with our precursor SIGINT agencies during the Second World War, ASD has always operated in the slim area between the difficult and impossible.

While many things have changed over the years, our core functions, and our values, have remained largely unchanged.

ASD’s declassification program will proactively release archived holdings into the public domain. Declassifying highly-classified files is a rigorous process that strikes a balance between keeping the secrets needed to ensure our continuing success, and revealing those that can encourage a greater understanding of the nature of our activities.

Information relating to national security capabilities, as well as sensitive personal information, has been redacted from some documents during the declassification process.

Some Democrats may be eager to use their newfound power in Washington to investigate the misdeeds of the Trump era. But Mark Warner isn’t interested in performing an autopsy of the last four years in the U.S. intelligence community.

QAnon, the fictional right-wing conspiracy theory that alleges Trump is fighting a “deep state” cabal of human traffickers, has had a big couple weeks in Congress.

Members questioned past comments by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has repeatedly endorsed the movement and its associated theories. Greene, who claimed last Thursday that she no longer believed in QAnon, was stripped of her congressional committee assignments on February 5.

The insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was not spontaneous.

The assault that unfolded as Congress convened a joint session to certify the victory of Joe Biden in the 2020 election was the direct result of a months-long effort rooted in disinformation; promoted by President Donald Trump; coordinated by some of his most fervent, conspiratorial supporters; and incorporating a wide range of supporting groups.

The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab constructed a timeline of key events, both online and offline, centered on the coordination of “Stop the Steal” efforts that escalated to violence and threatened the transition of power core to American

Most of the material found in this report was posted in plain sight on social media platforms and online forums, designed to convince more Americans of falsehoods about the 2020 elections.

Cognitive biases are wonderful, awful things. I’ve spent years referencing various resources with lists of biases, whilst going through information collected in ethnographic research.

Wikipedia has a good list, but it’s not the easiest thing to go use.

There’s a few other tools out there which do similar things, but none geared up specifically for researchers which have entirely worked for my needs.

So, at the risk of creating the 15th competing standard, I thought I’d take some time, go through all the ones I like, and assemble something which worked for me.

Date: Sunday, 14 March 2021

Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm (AEDT)

Speaker: Dr. Vince Houghton

The world of intelligence and espionage is one that continues a fascinate and mystify, whether in the world of fiction or non-fiction.

Intelligence history is replete with incredible examples of intelligence agencies, agents, and spies, developing amazing operations and technologies to get the job done. But, sometimes, it does not always go right. Drawing from his book Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Best Left on the Drawing Board, Dr. Vince Houghton will discuss some of history’s less successful intelligence operations.

Mon, 1 March, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm ACDT – ‘The structure and processes of criminal collaboration in organised crime groups as well as an in-depth expose on kidnapping in Mexico City.’

You will hear about research examining the structure and processes of criminal collaboration in organised crime groups as well as an in-depth expose on kidnapping in Mexico City.

Advancing Networked Criminology, Professor David Bright (Flinders University).

Listen to these insane and stranger-than-fiction accounts of their jobs from former intelligence officers, DEA agents, MI5 operatives, undercover ATF agents and more, from our I Spy podcast series.

Michael Herman, the doyen of intelligence studies, passed away 13 February.

Thankfully, he received the news last week that EUP will publish a new collection of his work with David Schaefer of @kclintelligence later this year.

The National Intelligence Postdoctoral Grant (NIPG) is a new initiative, which involves the sponsorship of unclassified academic research designed to achieve Australian Government objectives for research and innovation in national intelligence and security.

The program will offer funding for Postdoctoral Research Fellow positions for early career researchers to undertake academic research in relation to Research Problems – specific areas of interest and relevance to the NIC (National Intelligence Community).

The program will commence in 2021 with 9 Research Topics (see NIPG 2021 Research Topics) and will run annually for the following three years (2021-22 to 2023-24) with each position funded full time for a period of two (2) years (up to $350,000).

Successful Postdoctoral Research Fellows under this grant program will be partnered with a NIC staff member as well as their nominated Research Advisor for the duration of the grant to foster collaboration and engagement between the NIC and the academic community.