Haymarket, va.-More than two dozen professional hackers have set up operations in exurban Virginia beside a mock military headquarters made of plywood. Huddled over laptops, they are preparing to launch a vicious barrage of cyberattacks. Once they break into their targets’ computer networks, the nefarious possibilities are myriad: shutting off phone lines, overloading citywide emergency response systems, or simply slinking around to pilfer passwords. Read the rest of this entry »

During one of the most high-profile spy cases in U.S. history, onetime State Department official and accused Communist spy Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury based in part on several rolls of film found inside a pumpkin on a Maryland farm. In 1975, when the film was declassified, one roll was revealed to be completely blank; another contained such mundane information as manuals for military parachutes and fire extinguishers. Hiss claimed until his death in 1996 that the evidence known as the Pumpkin Papers vindicated him, but his claims often fell on deaf ears. Read the rest of this entry »

For a young CIA analyst in the fall of 1962, it was a heady assignment. With President John F. Kennedy contemplating an invasion of Cuba to neutralize the threat of Soviet nuclear weapons on the island, the CIA began planning. At age 27, Charles Allen was a junior intelligence analyst tracking the names of Soviet missile technicians. “I was put on a team assigned to plan a new Cuban government, which would be put in power after the U.S. invasion,” says Allen. He quickly began sorting through dossiers to determine which Cubans would be suitable to place in power. Read the rest of this entry »

Every morning, Barack Obama receives a report called the “President’s Daily Brief,” updating him on the country’s most pressing international threats. The contents-even the titles-of these short summaries are highly classified, but it’s not a stretch to imagine recent PDBs covering the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, the cartel wars in Mexico, and updates on Afghanistan and Iraq. At the top of the list in recent days has been North Korea, which just celebrated the launch of a missile it says was aimed at putting a communications satellite into space. The spy community called it a ruse to test-fire a long-range ballistic missile that could be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Read the rest of this entry »

A stone’s throw from El Paso, Texas, a war is raging. There are almost daily running gun battles, kidnappings, robberies, and a frightening death toll. The northern Mexican town of Ciudad Juárez has gotten so overrun by drug-related violence that Mexico deployed an additional 5,000 soldiers this month, joining thousands of others already on patrol. Normally, fighting crime would be the purview of the local police, but in Juárez, drug traffickers threatened to execute cops last month-one every two days-until the chief of police resigned. After five executions in a week, he quit and hasn’t been replaced. Read the rest of this entry »