Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence

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Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, revealed in a rare speech in 2022 that the domestic intelligence agency had “more than doubled” its efforts against China in recent years and was “running seven times as many investigations” over “Chinese activity of concern” than in 2018. Alexander Yuk Ching Ma and his older brother David were both veterans of the CIA's clandestine operations division. David was born in Shanghai in 1935, a time of smoky jazz clubs, bustling casinos, and opium dens. The Pudong District, on the eastern bank of the Huangpu River, became the country's major financial hub, and decades later it would also become its high-tech eavesdropping hub. Also before this, Bamford notes that North Korea was NOT a giant Potemkin village, let alone one without a façade. high level meeting with Trump - See The Mad Hatter, who also connects with Maria.. Disagree that the author is discursive. Thank you for reading. REVIEW — In his new book, Spy Fail, James Bamford posits that there has been a “collapse of American Counterintelligence”.The “extensive politicization and incompetence, under both (Presidents) Obama and Trump” of American counterintelligence (CI) has, he asserts, resulted in the country being “flooded with spies and covert operatives”.

Spy Fail – The Cipher Brief

The irony of testing is this is explained in the texts of the mission result but we tend not to read well. I've had issues with it as well. I've not done many spy missions, probably only single digits actually, and I've never done a mission that had less than 74% chance of success (I'm somewhat conservative, to be honest), if all the odds are less than u4% I'll do a round of gaining resources or setting up a listening post instead, which are 100%. 1 succeeded, all the others failed. By that I mean, one got to the escape screen where you choose how to get away, and succeeded. All the others were either captured or killed, failing the mission.An Israeli army spokesman told reporters there would be discussions regarding intelligence “down the road”, but said the focus was on fighting at the moment. But in 2004 he was nevertheless hired as a Chinese translator since he spoke several Chinese dialects. In many ways, this was an even better position for a spy since he would have access to a very broad range of information, including intercepted Chinese conversations. The day before he started his new job, he called a suspected accomplice, possibly David, to give him the good news that he would now be working full-time for "the other side." My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Twelve Books for an advanced copy of this new book on the world of espionage, global politics and the billions of dollars that are spent tying to learn and kept governmental secrets, some of it well spent, most of it just wasted. Ironically, in 2005 he was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article about Chinese espionage. As China's economy continued to boom, he said, he could understand the temptation of some Chinese Americans who wanted to do business there to help the government any way they could. "I'm not saying all of them are spies," he said. "But for some of them it is outright greed because they need to do business with [the Chinese government]. It's just like barter or exchange."

Why do my spies always suck? : r/civ - Reddit Why do my spies always suck? : r/civ - Reddit

A spying suspect in the FBI may be largely responsible for unraveling the CIA's Chinese spy network. Re the Israeli spying, I had not heard any of the story of Arnon Milchan's various nefarious actions before. When it comes to spying, China’s breaking of rules and breaking of treaties, Britain does nothing. America has the intent to go after spies but do we? The UK has a false dichotomy. The belief is if we say anything China will stop talking. It’s a weak position.” ‘Chinese activity of concern’If you now look at the resultant screen it screams at you that the spy is killed but if you read the text, the mission was successful. Instead, responded Kremlin spokesman Peskov in 2019, “all these discussions of the American media about who [CIA] urgently took out whom [Smolenkov], from whom he saved, and so on – this, you know, is a genre, or rather pulp it’s pulp fiction. So let’s leave it to their imagination.” The author illuminates this “vast breakdown of America’s counterespionage system” by highlighting what he sees as its inability to obviate the peril posed by what he terms ‘saboteurs’, ‘extortionists’, ‘spies’, ‘smugglers’, ‘moles’, ‘infiltrators’, ‘liquidators’, ‘assassins’ and ‘fear mongers’.Writing in a narrative style, Bamford covers each of those threats in separate ‘books’ within his book, using instances of what he portrays as CI failures to support his cumulative argument of systemic collapse. The unidentified source is not the only problem of Bamford’s book. For Bamford and his sources are a symptom of the bigger problem which now infects, disables, and discredits much of what passes for investigative journalism in the US, one of the last holdouts for the practice in the English language – it having been wiped out already in England, Canada, and Australia, surviving only by the skin of its teeth in South Africa.

spy satellite launch crashed into sea North Korea says spy satellite launch crashed into sea

We certainly face major CI challenges today. CI is a tough, imperfect business and our adversaries will have successes in the future. But history would indicate that taking every hostile spy or operation revealed as indicative of a CI collapse, is folly. The disclosure has prompted demands for the UK to toughen its stance on China’s spy network in the UK. Even before getting to the first actual “Spy Fail,” we have Sony execs going racist on Obama in text messages, and worse, they’re Jewish Sony execs. More broadly, in making the case that the failure to detect the hostile intelligence activities he cites before considerable damage was inflicted, is indicative of a ‘collapse’ of American CI, the author seems to postulate that there is an objective historical standard against which we can juxtapose today’s CI performance to determine that such a collapse has occurred. But has there ever been a time in our history when American CI was able obviate the threat spies and leakers posed to the Republic?In fact, there has never been a period of our history when we have not been beset by them.Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. I'm using an audiobook, so I wouldn't have access to citations anyways & this book is more than 20 hours. So then when I saw a review say this book doesn't have citations, that's when I called it DNF. I have access to books with citations & that don't use class collaborationism.

Israeli intelligence must answer for ‘failure of highest

I remember once reading in a book on espionage, that there was an acronym for why people turned traitor. MICE, meaning Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego. Money and Ego seem to be far ahead of coercion or ideology, even using people ideology, or forcing them to do things so that one person can make lots of money. This book has well to paraphrase a popular movie, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum nor villainy. Except for the author who makes an appearance or two, and some other notables whose careers are probably destroyed for making a stand, and or doing their jobs. Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence is another study of the world of espionage by James Bamford whose The Puzzle Palace is one of my favorite books. Bamford looks at the last almost forty years of American politics and world history and reveals that as bad as some people thought America was at keeping secrets, things are a whole lot worse. It must also be said that the author’s clear anti-Israeli biases — views abundantly evident in the book — detract from his argument. For instance, he claims that Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their land; draws uncritical parallels between Israel and apartheid era South Africa and asserts that claims that “phony charges of anti-Semitism” charges levelled against supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are “the tired, go-to weapon used to instantly silence the press and critics of Israel”.Given the histories of the high-profile critics of Israel cited by the author, he might do well to consider the possibility that when people make anti-Semitic remarks, they might actually be anti-Semites. Hachette Book Group is a leading book publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the third-largest publisher in the world. Social Media Further I don't like Hollywood movies, so using that as a framing device in addition to the 2016 election & its aftermath, just felt like it was propping up the same mechanisms that brought Donald Trump to office.

Although the FBI has legal charge of the investigation of cases covered by the Espionage Act, responsibility for the implementation of CI functions, rests with individual agencies in accord with their missions and mandates. This is not the most efficient structure.But the establishment of anything resembling a surveillance state sufficiently robust to obviate all the threats the author cites being anathema to our values, we have rightly opted to prioritize respect for individual rights over efficiency in the way we deal with actual and potential CI threats. Outside the covers of the book, literally? I note all the blurbs are for "James Bamford and his bestselling books," and NOT this book. I think the reason is obvious, and frankly, I wonder how hard it was to get this published. Unfortunately I'm playing just the base game (the Switch is getting the expansions later on), so I'm not sure of what you're referring to, probably R&F/GS mechanics. His treatment of the topic is necessarily a bit selective and somewhat choppy and foreshortened; we could obviously use a whole series of such investigations by serious historians . But he has opened the door — an Explorer indeed. Not to sound bitter or nothin', but espionage missions with an 84 or 90 percent chance of success seem to fail an awful lot, specifically the Fabricate Scandal mission that's supposed to flip envoys out of the city-state.