Linda Weissgold gives “Trust Me” four out of four trenchcoats in her @thecipherbrief.bsky.social review. www.thecipherbrief.com/security-cle...

“The result is a fuller portrait of a committed Cold Warrior confronting both communism and an equally deadly enemy in the form of bipolar disorder, which psychiatry had yet to diagnose and manage.” doi.org/10.1080/0268...

He would have fit right in with the post-Smiley group of righteous Circus officers in the Le Carré canon. I’m thinking of Ned from “The Russia House” or Leonard Burr from “The Night Manager.”

This isn’t really new. www.ursi.org/proceedings/...

Congratulations, Filip. Your book got an impressive three out of three trench coats in the @thecipherbrief.bsky.social review. www.thecipherbrief.com/kgb-literati...

I’m reminded of another quote from a spymaster named Richard.

“We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts, we would have joined the Boy Scouts.” - Richard Helms

“I’m not very keen on people being over-moralistic about the fact of spying.”

I love this quote from Sir Richard.

This specific type of suspension among FVEY partners (or any multilateral sharing alliance) happens more often than one might suspect. And it’s usually resolved fairly quickly or worked around.

In the early years, the Agency conducted an internal course on FI using Gordon Stewart’s classic tome “Foreign Intelligence” as its textbook.

“Stewart himself seems to have completed his manuscript in 1983. Of course, readers should always be careful about memoirs, but particular caution is probably in order here.” doi.org/10.1080/0268...

“David McCloskey’s ‘The Persian’ may be the finest of his four spy novels, with a rich and exceptionally well-crafted plot.”

Four out of four trenchcoats in this @thecipherbrief.bsky.social review. www.thecipherbrief.com/iran-israel-...

I’m re-reading “Angler” right now.

This is pretty bad. Peer review is often more of a cursory sanity check than a fine-tuned fact check.

Indeed, a recently published article contains a glaring error about Golitsin: He was *not* the KGB “station chief” (rezident) in Helsinki. doi.org/10.1080/0885...

While the encrypted comm was secure, the unencrypted portion of a call before the “go secure” sync command could offer adversaries valuable SIGINT.