Tracks the militarization of the CIA and its use of special forces after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a secret army, and a war at the ends of the Earth.Bill and James Houston are American enlistees, widowed Canadian Kathy Jones nurses casualties, and Vietnamese Trung becomes a communist spy. William "Skip" Sands joins the CIA and works for his uncle, the legendary "Colonel," in Vietnam. Night Journey, Monday through Fridays 7 PM.I think that we need to set up a new open-source intelligence agency specializing in commercially available intelligence, not clandestine intelligence. The future of this cold war and the intelligence and national security challenge for Western countries, including the U.S., from Chinese intelligence lies with commercial, open-source intelligence. And the third lesson, it seems to me, Geoff, is that, although history is important, and I would argue and I paint a picture in the book about how we are in a new cold war, as far as intelligence is concerned, with China, the answers to this cold war don't lie in the past. They conduct espionage in a far more sweeping way than even the Soviet intelligence services did. The second lesson is that the Chinese intelligence services are like the KGB on steroids. They wanted to completely upturn the existing rules. When you look at and understand the Chinese intelligence perspective, there was no such understanding that they wanted to be part of the Western club. In recent years, there's been an attempt by which Western governments thought that, through economic development, China would perhaps democratize. This, it seems to me, is exactly the same position that we're in with China at the moment. This was one of the things that came through loud and clear in my research for the book, that in the post-war years, Western governments were thinking about how they could try to continue relations with the Soviet Union in a good way, and, in fact, Stalin and his intelligence services had dramatically different ideas. The first lesson, it seems to me, from the first Cold War in the post-war years is that Western governments can effectively be in a cold war before they know it, before they're prepared for it. And it all fed into this part of his calculation about what he thought he could get away with on Western soil. My big question, which I have not been able to answer, but other investigative journalists, I hope, are on the case, Geoff, is, did this risk calculation on his part, his emboldened behavior, contribute also to Putin's risk calculation about Ukraine? What does it say about him? It shows that he was prepared to take risks, and that he was emboldened. And, as I showed in the book, Putin was and his intelligence services were in the late-stage planning of an assassination on U.S. And Putin has - until this story came out in my book, has adhered to that bright red line. Europe and Britain were different matters.Īnd this continued on into the post-Soviet era. During the Cold War, there was always a bright red line by which Soviet intelligence would not conduct assassinations on U.S. It absolutely does represent a dramatic escalation.ĭuring the Cold War - and we have to remember that Putin is a former KGB officer, so his world view is shaped by his KGB experience. I'm afraid that history suggests it's exactly in those situations where dictators lash out and do something - quote, unquote - "bold." Will he now try to do something dramatic in order to try to prove his strength to the Russian people and the rest of the world? Putin's regime and his rule himself has been wounded. History shows that a wounded dictator is often a very dangerous dictator. I'm looking at events with a degree of pessimism, I'm afraid. That seems to have been challenged over the last weekend by Prigozhin. For two decades and counting, Putin has ruled Russia with an iron fist, literally often eliminating his rivals. What does it say about Putin's rule himself? Well, first and foremost, there, there was, is a challenger to his rule, it seems. Why didn't the Russian security service know about this? I think we can definitely say that it was a colossal intelligence failure on the part of Putin, his regime and his intelligence services.
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