Ex-CIA Chief Michael Hayden: Yes, We Spy

Jeff Stein at Newsweek offers a piece on former CIA and NSA director retired Air Force General Michael V. Hayden's response to the current CIA director's assertion that the CIA "does not steal secrets."

Former CIA chief Michael Hayden drew laughs from a banquet room full of former intelligence officers Friday when he was asked about an assertion by the current spy agency’s head, John Brennan, that the CIA doesn’t “steal secrets.”

In a February 24 interview on National Public Radio that drew public ridicule from some former spies, Brennan was asked about hints from President Barack Obama that he’d like to get the CIA back to “its traditional roots—espionage, stealing secrets—reversing this trend we've seen toward a paramilitary force,” as NPR interviewer Mary Louise Kelly put it.

“We don’t steal secrets,” Brennan responded. “We uncover, we discover, we reveal, we obtain, we elicit, we solicit. All of that.”

That came as a surprise to former operatives who spent their careers stealing secrets.

"Is he joking?" a former CIA senior manager, John Sipher, complained in an essay on The Cipher Brief, a national security-oriented website. “Let me be clear…what my colleagues and I did in the CIA was espionage—stealing secrets. We didn’t ‘discover,’ we stole.”

In reality, CIA operatives—case officers in spy argot—actually get other people—foreigners, for the most part—to steal secrets for them. Or as Sipher put it: “People with access to secrets who were well aware that they were risking their lives, and possibly those of their families, to steal information for the U.S.”

... “One of the things that distinguishes the CIA from the State Department,” Hayden said, “is that the CIA is both asked to, and authorized to, steal secrets. So if the question is whether the CIA steals secrets, the answer is yes.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:  

http://www.newsweek.com/michael-hayden-cia-spying-438635

Note: General Hayden's new book is called Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror 

A New Spy Novelist For Vladimir Putin's World

I enjoyed Red Sparrow, the first spy thriller written by former CIA officer Jason Matthews, so I look forward to reading his second novel, Palace of Treason.

Jeff Stein, the author of a fine nonfiction book about the Vietnam War called A Murder in Wartime, and a writer for Newsweek, offers a piece on Jason Matthews.

The spy was going to be late. In Jason Matthews’s line of work, that was cause for worry. But on this rainy afternoon in Washington, D.C., the former CIA officer was merely dodging traffic, not a Russian trap. And he was rushing to meet a reporter, not a secret agent.

 

But shedding the cloak and dagger, it turns out, isn’t as easy as trading wingtips for Top-Siders. Both Matthews and his wife, Suzanne, also a former CIA secret agent handler, still look over their shoulders for hostile intelligence agents. It comes from three decades of dodging Russian, Chinese and other adversaries’ counterspies.

 

“Yeah, the old habits die hard, proving that there is no such thing as a former ops officer,” jokes Matthews, in town to promote his second, much anticipated spy novel, Palace of Treason. ”Suzanne and I notice cars behind us, we come home from parties with the same assessments of people, we still pick up a phone and think, 'It's tapped.'”  

 

... Like his CIA hero in Red Sparrow, which The New York Times called a “startling debut,” Matthews has shed one identity for another with hardly a stutter step. One day shortly after his 2008 retirement, he picked up a pen and started writing. Out came a thriller that drew widespread, even ecstatic praise, with the inevitable comparisons to not just John le Carré and Ian Fleming but Cormac McCarthy and even T.S. Eliot.  

 

At its center is Dominika Egorova, a once promising ballerina forced into training as a professional seductress by cretinous Kremlin intelligence bureaucrats. Egorova is back, of course, in Palace of Treason, this time at the behest of her handsome, self-effacing, equally idealistic CIA handler and rules-breaking lover Nate Nash, for whom she takes nerve-shattering risks, including a stab at seducing Vladimir Putin, who turns out to be plagued by EDS. (Trust me: This is high dark humor.)

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.newsweek.com/spy-novelist-vladimir-putin-world-340400 

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: The Men Behind The Mole War

Jeff Stein offers a brief history of the real story behind John le Carre's spy novel, which was made into a classic miniseries and is now a feature film starring Gary Oldman.

Stein's piece in the Washington Post covers the Cambridge spy ring, a group of British men who spied for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Included in the ring was a senior British Secret Intelligence Service officer named Kim Philby (seen in the above photo).

Beautifully directed, wonderfully acted and darkly stylized, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” the latest rendition of John le Carré’s iconic spy thriller, is drawn from real events that shook the British establishment decades ago.

But for two-plus hours, moviegoers — especially those born after the last hammer and sickle flew from the Kremlin in 1991 — might wonder what all the fuss was about.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-the-men-behind-the-mole-war/2011/12/07/gIQABf942O_story.html

You can also read an earlier piece on John le Carre and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy via the below link;

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2011/12/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-almost.html

And you can read a BBC account of the Cambridge spy ring via the below link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1999/09/99/britain_betrayed/444058.stm

Former Top Intelligence Official Blasts Lobbying Effort To Release Convicted Spy Jonathan Pollard

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Jeff Stein's column at The Washington Post offers the critical response of a former top U.S. intelligence official to the lobbying effort to have convicted spy Jonathan Pollard released from prison.
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(Pollard is seen in the above FBI/NCIS surveillance photos).
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You can read the column via the below link:
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/12/former_top_intelligence_offici.html
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You can also read my piece on Ronald J. Olive, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) Special Agent who investigated Pollard via the below links:
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http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/PollardSpyCase1.jpg
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http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/PollardSpyCase2.jpg
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http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/PollardSpyCase3.jpg
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http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/PollardSpyCase4.jpg
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Below is a link to my 1999 commentary concerning the Pollard case in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
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http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/PardonPollard.jpg