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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
AURORA, ILL.–The second time a stray bullet from a gangster’s gun hit one of her children, Mary Fultz had had enough. They were aiming for her nephew, she says, but when the bullets started flying on a Saturday this past March, an errant slug tore through the wall of the family’s duplex and into...
KHANAQIN, IRAQ–The five men led the train of 17 donkeys quietly through the still and clear night. The braying animals, weighed down with explosives, were strung together with ropes, so that a mere handful of men could conduct the entire convoy. The smugglers made their way through the crumbling soil of the desert, choosing...
Jemaah Islamiyah, a militant Islamist group based in Indonesia, was once called “al Qaeda’s Southeast Asia wing” and regarded by many as Osama bin Laden’s most dangerous ally. In 2002, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed reportedly tried to recruit JI members to crash airplanes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. That plot was...