When Trotsky Got the Axe

Most readers of Josh Ireland's Death of Trotsky will already know the basic outline of the story: Leon Trotsky falls out with Joseph Stalin after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924. He proves no match to Stalin; his faction loses critical Politburo debates; he is exiled, eventually lands in Mexico City, where he is assassinated on August 20, 1940, by a Stalin agent, wielding a pickaxe to the skull, no less. His assassin, Ramon Mercader, had wormed his way into Trotsky's inner circle while at the same time serving as an agent of Stalin's secret police. He would be jailed in Mexico while treated like a hero in the Soviet Union.

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Leftists’ Favorite Streamer Calls Fall Of Soviet Union ‘One Of The Greatest Catastrophes Of 20th Century’

'America was no longer contested around the globe'

Some Soviets Were Less Equal Than Others

It is the easiest of questions, it is the most difficult of questions: "Why are the Jews leaving the Soviet Union?" asks Emil Bezverkhny. He writes throughout the latter half of the 20th century, each chapter in his posthumously published The Penny is Gone a capsule preserving the maddening, almost otherworldly qualities of being a Jew, a scientist, just a man, in that time and place. It's easy to see why Jews are leaving the Soviet Union. They are second-class citizens in the nation that promised such a concept was anathema to its very existence. They are kept out of jobs they deserve, left to destitution and dishonor, neither allowed to practice the Mosaic law nor the new secular religion of science and development of the rational faculties.

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New Book Exposes Soviet Russia As A Parasitic Regime Built On Plunder

In Bogdan Musial's Stalin’s Great Raid, the author presents eye-opening research showing how Soviet industrial capacity was dependent on looting, not economic prosperity.

How David Keene’s Charisma Served The Right — And Kept Me Out Of A Soviet Gulag

The conservative movement was fortunate to have had David Keene as one of its leaders and is better for it. We will miss him greatly.

NASA Is Broken. It’s Time For A New One

One small step in restructuring NASA now could lead to one giant leap for the American space program in the years to come.
The Real Reason Conservatives Are Rethinking Ronald Reagan | Presidents Series | Michael Knowles
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The Real Reason Conservatives Are Rethinking Ronald Reagan | Presidents Series | Michael Knowles

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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Infamous CIA officer turned Soviet spy dies in prison



After more than 30 years since pleading guilty to espionage that reportedly compromised several United States assets during the Cold War, an infamous Central Intelligence Agency officer has died in prison.

Aldrich Ames died on Monday, according to the Bureau of Prisons website.

Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve 'financial troubles, immediate and continuing.'

Ames was held in the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, where he was serving a life sentence without parole.

Ames, a career CIA agent, was arrested in 1994 on espionage charges years after he began cooperating with KGB agents in 1985. The information he provided to the Soviets is thought to have directly contributed to the compromising of several CIA and FBI sources, some of whom were executed after their discovery.

RELATED: Unveiling ‘Big Intel’: How the CIA and FBI became deep state villains

Photo by Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images

Over nearly a decade, Moscow paid him $2.5 million in exchange for betraying state secrets to the Soviets during and after the Cold War. Ames claimed he needed the money simply to pay debts and relieve "financial troubles, immediate and continuing."

"Well, the reasons that I did what I did in April of 1985 were personal, banal, and amounted really to kind of greed and folly. As simple as that," Ames said in an interview archived by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, according to Fox News.

"I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution, and capital punishment, certainly, in the case of KGB and GRU officers who would be tried in a military court, and certainly others, that they were almost all at least potentially liable to capital punishment," he added. "There's simply no question about this."

Ames' wife, Rosario, was sentenced to 63 months in prison on charges of assisting his espionage.

Ames was 84 years old at the time of his death.

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