Tag Archives: Secret Intelligence Service

Should Syria’s New Rulers Be on the Terrorism List?

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 11 December 2024

Continue reading

The CIA: In Theory and In Practice

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 31 December 2023

Continue reading

Remembering Korea: The First “Hot War” of the Cold War

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 20 September 2023

Continue reading

The Soviet Capture of Australia’s Intelligence System

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 25 June 2023

Continue reading

“Socialism With A Human Face” Was Always Impossible

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 August 2022

It was on this day in 1968, fifty-four years ago, that the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, one of its colonies in the “Warsaw Pact”, which had embarked on a program of liberalising reforms. The Czech leadership did not intend to depart from the socialist path, merely to soften its edges—and ran into the brute fact that this was not possible. Continue reading

Britain Won the Spy War with the Irish Republican Army

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 3 July 2022

An IRA parade in Belfast || Image source

Continue reading

Signs of Improvement in the Media Coverage of Pakistan’s Role in Afghanistan

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 August 2021

Taliban patrol in Wazir Akbar Khan, Kabul, 18 August 2021 [image source]

Having recently complained about the lack of emphasis in the media coverage of Afghanistan on the fact that Pakistan controls the Taliban, it is only right to note that there have been some recent signs of improvement. Continue reading

The Memoir of a British Spy in Al-Qaeda

By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 July 2019

This article was originally published at the European Eye on Radicalization

The main issue that Nine Lives has to overcome is the one that has attended Aimen Dean (a pseudonym) since he went public in March 2015 with an interview he gave to the BBC, claiming he had been a British spy within Al-Qaeda between 1998 and 2006. That issue is overcoming the doubts about his story. Nine Lives goes a long way to solving this by bringing in Paul Cruickshank, the editor-in-chief of CTC Sentinel, one of the premier academic resources in the terrorism field, and Tim Lister, a terrorism-focused journalist with CNN, as co-authors. As well as helping structure the book from Dean’s memories, the two co-authors note they had been able to “corroborate key details” that convinced them: “In the years immediately leading up to and following 9/11, Aimen Dean was by far the most important spy the West had inside al-Qaeda”.

Continue reading