By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 April 2024
The Petrov Affair: Soviet Spies and Australian Reaction in the Early Cold War
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Tag Archives: SIS
The CIA: In Theory and In Practice
Remembering Korea: The First “Hot War” of the Cold War
The Soviet Capture of Australia’s Intelligence System
British MP, Soviet Spy: Tom Driberg
“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
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]
Why Was There Ever An American Occupation of Iraq?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 December 2019
Douglas Feith was the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, one of the most senior positions at the Pentagon, during one of the most consequential periods in recent history that covers the 11 September 2001 atrocities and the dawn of the “War on Terror”. Feith later wrote a highly illuminating memoir that tried to drain some of the hysteria out of the public “debate” about Iraq by explaining the internal arguments in the Bush administration leading up to the decision to finish with Saddam Husayn in 2003, and trying to set those arguments in their proper historical context, both in relation to Iraq—where “the war” had begun twelve years earlier—and the altered American threat perceptions in the shadow of 9/11. Unlike a lot of the gossipy tomes that emerged from former officials, Feith’s book is notably light on opinion and contains reams of declassified documents so readers can check his analysis against the source material. One of Feith’s key judgments is that “the chief mistake was maintaining an occupation government in Iraq for over a year”.[1] As Feith explains in great detail in the book, this was never supposed to happen. So how did it?
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”.
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