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You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight.

Former flight attendant T.J. Newman in her debut novel, ‘Falling.’ This book is a thriller about a flight from LA to New York, wherein the pilot learns about a terrorist plans to kill his family unless he crashes his plane.

History buffs rejoice!

Venezuela, 1992. Unknown colonel Hugo Chávez stages an ill-fated coup against a corrupt government, igniting the passions of Venezuela’s poor and catapulting the oil-rich country to international attention. For two rival spies hurriedly dispatched to Caracas—one from Washington, DC, and the other from Fidel Castro’s Cuba—this is a career-defining mission.

At Slough House—MI5’s London depository for demoted spies—Brexit has taken a toll. The “slow horses” have been pushed further into the cold, Slough House has been erased from official records, and its members are dying in unusual circumstances, at an unusual clip. No wonder Jackson Lamb’s crew is feeling paranoid. But are they actually targets?

In his best and most ambitious novel yet, Mick Herron, “the le Carré of the future” (BBC), offers an unsparing look at the corrupt web of media, global finance, spy craft, and politics that power our modern world.

Moscow, 1985. The Soviet Union and its communist regime are in the last stages of decline, but remain opaque to the rest of the world—and still very dangerous. In this ever-shifting landscape, a senior KGB officer—code name GAMBIT—has approached the CIA Moscow Station chief with top secret military weapons intelligence and asked to be exfiltrated. GAMBIT demands that his handler be a former CIA officer, Alex Garin, a former KGB officer who defected to the American side.

From acclaimed spy novelist Paul Vidich comes a taut new thriller following the attempted exfiltration of a KGB officer from the ever-changing—and always dangerous—USSR in the mid-1980s.

Businesses are on the frontline of an intense geopolitical competition. Their assets—like innovative technologies, complex research and development, and data—are being targeted by nation-states. Many businesses have tried to address this risk by implementing or beefing up their information security programs. But those programs, unfortunately, provide only a partial solution.

Hackers are pioneering new ways of tricking facial-recognition systems, from cutting the eyes out of photos to making a portrait ‘nod’ with artificial intelligence. Facial-recognition systems, credited as a quick and dependable way to identify people, are now in the crosshairs of fraudsters. For years, experts and researchers have warned about technology’s vulnerabilities, but recent schemes have confirmed this warning—and highlighted the arduous but needed task of improving the system.

Russia and Ukraine promised to cooperate and help catch the world’s most successful hackers. But things didn’t quite go to plan.

An international collaborative reporting project has established the frightening extent to which governments around the world, including India, could be using surveillance tools in ways that have nothing to do with national security.

The CIA inspector general is carrying out a review into the agency’s handling of officers sickened by the mysterious “Havana Syndrome,” CNN has learned, a revelation that comes as cases are mushrooming across the globe.

Multiple sources familiar with the intelligence described a ballooning number of reports in recent months. Dozens of victims have been reported in Vienna, a well-known hotspot for spies, and cases have also been reported in Africa this year, according to two people familiar with the intelligence.

The US government is investigating a series of health incidents in the Austrian capital Vienna involving its diplomats and other administration staff.

More than 20 officials have reported symptoms similar to Havana Syndrome – a mystery brain illness – since President Joe Biden took office in January.

It is easy to advocate an outright ban on “supersoldiers.” But augmentation has been around in one form or other for a long time – in life and war alike.

Terrorists have joined an arms race that cannot be ignored. Summer days in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, are unbearably hot. But this year, for the city’s residents the 44-degree heat is the least of their concerns. In recent weeks, this usually safe municipality has become a chaotic front in the Middle East’s increasingly deadly drone wars, as new technologies are exploited by Iranian-backed Iraqi militias.

Several factors make it harder to use publicly available information in all-source assessment than classified information.

Indeed, in an era in which the United States can no longer rely on economic or military overmatch to guarantee its security, we need a more intimate understanding of an adversary’s goals, intentions, capabilities, and actions to safeguard our national interests. The chairman’s challenge begs important questions.

How do we ensure that our civilian and military leaders enjoy decision advantage in an increasingly contested environment? Channeling the mindset of Sun Tzu, how can we win before the first shot is fired—or prevail without any shots at all?

The espionage movies every man should watch.

Here we’ve collated our favourite spy films of all time, from le Carré-style gritty realism to the outlandish espionage fantasises of Jason Bourne and (of course) James Bond, meaning there is something there for everyone – wherever your allegiances lie.

It’s been six months since the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This year’s insurrection represented one of the lowest days in American democracy and has ignited debate in the United States about how America should handle extremism within its borders.

Congressional hearings have ensued, and extremists and those inciting violence at the Capitol that day have been removed from mainstream social media applications. The FBI has arrested hundreds of Americans, some associated with extremist groups—namely the Oath Keepers, III%ers and Proud Boys—who played a role in one of the United States’s most embarrassing days.

Author: Clint Watts | 7 July 2021

Read the report(Click the pdf link in the article)

The National Skills Commission of the Australian Government lists ‘Intelligence Officer’ as an “Occupation not in national shortage, with strong future demand.” There is an interactive page to explore the details.

When ideas get out from academia into the wild, they can be surprisingly dangerous.

A political science lab leak might seem as much of a punchline as the concept of a mad social scientist. Nevertheless, the notion that scholarly ideas and findings can escape the nuanced, cautious world of the academic seminar and transform into new forms, even becoming threats, becomes more of a compelling metaphor if you think of academics as professional crafters of ideas intended to survive in a hostile environment.

Given the importance of the study, from nuclear war to international economics to democratization and genocide, the escape of a faulty idea could have—and has had—dangerous consequences for the world.

When I was a CIA officer, one thing about work I could actually share with my family was a tour of the museum at headquarters in Langley. Visitors would marvel at the concealment devices and exclaim over tales of derring-do in the name of gathering hidden information. When we arrived at the section on Directorate of Analysis, however, they would feign interest. Printed copies of reports weren’t as interesting as the exhibit on robot spy fish.

Stealing secrets has always captured the public imagination about the intelligence profession, with good reason. Secrets were the claim to fame of the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. Ahead of D-Day, it was “Wild Bill” Donovan’s placement of spies throughout European ports and behind enemy lines that gathered information needed to support a successful invasion. As President Dwight Eisenhower said of the Office of Strategic Services: “If [it] had done nothing else, the intelligence gathered alone before D-Day justified its existence.”