The Soviet Defector Who Did the Most Damage

During the past 30 years, extraordinary material released from American and Russian archives has enormously expanded our understanding about Soviet espionage directed at the United States and its allies during the 20th century. The Venona decryptions were the product of American decoding of KGB messages. The Vassiliev Notebooks were based on documents the KGB provided to a researcher as part of a negotiated book deal. The only material provided by a genuine spy was the Mitrokhin material, several thousand pages of notes made surreptitiously by a KGB archivist. While British historian Christopher Andrew collaborated with Vasili Mitrokhin to write two books based on his notes, Mitrokhin himself has not received the attention he merits. Venona and Vassiliev exposed a great deal about Soviet espionage from the 1930s and ’40s. Mitrokhin’s information covered more recent operations and did far more damage to Soviet intelligence than any other defector.

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Aldrich Ames and the Enemy Within

I had a friend, a Soviet-East Europe Division case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency who served in Moscow in the 1980s. He was extremely well-suited to operations behind the Iron Curtain: He had a preternatural capacity to know where he was even in areas of Moscow he’d never been to. Maps and photographs once seen were never forgotten, giving him a continuous visual feed as he ran endurance contests against the omnipresent possibility of KGB surveillance. After a few runs, something dawned on him: His agent never made mistakes in his clandestine communications and routines. Everything was perfect.

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Cold War Interlude

Is there a more purely entertaining British novelist writing today than William Boyd? I doubt it, and I would even go a step further than that. Since his crowning achievement with 2002’s whole-life novel Any Human Heart, Boyd has pivoted from the witty, Evelyn Waugh-ish literary books with which he began his career to a series of period-set spy novels that focus on what it’s like to be an innocent caught up in events beyond their comprehension. From 2006’s mega-bestseller Restless to 2012’s Waiting for Sunrise, Boyd has consistently proved himself the purveyor of high-class, page-turning espionage fiction. Warmer and funnier than le Carré, less jaded than Mick Herron, his novels are page-turners par excellence.

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Spies Like Us?

The legendary American spymaster James Jesus Angleton famously described counterintelligence as a "wilderness of mirrors." In his new book The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West, journalist Shaun Walker charts the fascinating history of a unique group of Russian intelligence operatives who inhabited that wilderness—and, more often than not, were consumed by it.

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Good Riddance, Christopher Wray

Dragging the bureau 'into the fray' seemed to be Wray's operating order.

Sleeping With the Enemy

If Martha Dodd Stern had been a minimally important or competent Soviet spy, her story would make a rip-roaring Hollywood movie. But despite Brendan McNally’s effort to inflate the damage she did to American interests—Traitor’s Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage—the fact remains that her career as a spy was relatively brief and largely unsuccessful. Soviet intelligence agencies had high hopes for her, mostly because of her society connections, but were disappointed enough that they eventually tried their best to fob her off on other communist countries.

Even calling her a traitor vastly misstates what she did. Martha never gave aid and comfort to enemies of the United States. Her most sustained assistance to the Soviet Union came in the mid-1930s when she regularly ransacked the Berlin office of her father, William Dodd, FDR’s ambassador to Nazi Germany, and handed confidential memos and letters to her lover, a low-level Soviet diplomat and KGB foot-soldier named Boris Vinogradov. It was surely espionage, but hardly treason. The Soviets were impressed, however. Lavrenti Beria sent news of her recruitment to Stalin himself.

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Stalin Would Have Killed For The FISA Reform Congress Just Passed

Stalin didn't need warrants, but he would have wished for the U.S. government’s ability to buy American citizens' data from data brokers.

Why Gutting Title IX Is Psychological Warfare

It’s evident that gender revolutionaries are championing the Soviet model to destabilize existing institutions and re-educate the masses.

There Is Only One U.S. Leader Putin Actually Fears

Trump has already established a reputation with Putin that he is not to be messed with and won’t shy away from a battle with the Kremlin.

In Protecting The KGB, Gorbachev Laid The Foundation For Putin’s Gangster-State

Gorbachev has died, but the KGB that he nurtured and protected lives on under an ungrateful Vladimir Putin.