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This essay chronicles my personal journey of uncovering a truth that contradicted my long-held assumptions, resulting in a profound professional reckoning. It began with my discovery of a treasure trove of 350 glass plate negatives, masterpieces captured between 1920 and 1940, which led me to write a biography of the photographer, Benedict Stolz, a German Benedictine monk. A central figure in this biography was Hermann Keller, Stolz's childhood friend and, in his day, a renowned theologian, philosopher, and Hebraist. I portrayed Keller as a Nazi war criminal and associate of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, based on numerous secondary sources. However, shortly before publication, an interview with a nun who had known Keller challenged this narrative, attributing the "erroneous charges" against him to the mistakes of one historian that were subsequently echoed by others. After years of doubting her claims, I was confronted with evidence proving Keller's innocence, prompting a critical reflection on how historians, including myself, can unwittingly propagate inaccuracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Cold War, defectors from the Russian Intelligence Services to the West were of critical importance. They exposed and neutralised hundreds of Soviet agents who had penetrated government departments and democratic institutions. Stretching from Anatoli Granovsky in 1946 to Oleg Gordievsky in 1985, these Soviet defectors were highly prized for the intelligence they provided to security services. Ranked amongst the most valuable at the time was Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov, who defected in Sydney in 1954. Yet he, almost alone, has overwhelmingly been cast by commentators and historians as lazy, inefficient, and incompetent. This article will offer an alternative interpretation of Petrov. My argument has three prongs. First, Petrov's contact with Russian individuals and pro‐Soviet political organisations in Australia was far more extensive than generally assumed. Second, contrary to the historiographical consensus, he withheld intelligence about his contacts and informants from his security service debriefers. Third, rather than Petrov seeing espionage as too dangerous, as suggested, he was a committed and active Soviet intelligence cadre. By reappraising Petrov, the article seeks to provide a fresh understanding of this key episode, the Petrov Affair, in Australia's Cold War history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Douglas London's book, "The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence," provides a detailed account of recruitment operations in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and offers commentary on the agency's contemporary mission. The book emphasizes the importance of building relationships with agents and understanding their motivations for spying. London compares case officers to chameleons, highlighting their ability to adapt and connect with diverse targets. The author also criticizes the CIA's shift towards covert action after 9/11 and discusses issues of diversity and accountability within the agency. Overall, the book provides valuable insights into the world of espionage and the challenges faced by CIA case officers. [Extracted from the article]

"Code Name Blue Wren: The True Story of America's Most Dangerous Female Spy and the Sister She Betrayed" by Jim Popkin is a book that explores the life of Ana Montes, a spy for Cuba who was convicted and served over twenty years in prison. The author provides a narrative of Montes' background, including her Puerto Rican roots and career in the U.S. Intelligence Community. Montes' motivation for spying was ideological, and she provided information to her Cuban handlers that is believed to have led to an attack in El Salvador. The book also discusses the counterintelligence investigation that eventually led to Montes' capture and conviction. Overall, the book offers insights into the world of espionage and the impact it had on Montes' family and the nation. [Extracted from the article]

Ken Conboy's book, "Spies on the Mekong: CIA Clandestine Operations in Laos," provides a historical account of the CIA's espionage operations in Laos from 1954 to 1975. The book focuses on the CIA's station in Vientiane and its interactions with various Laotian factions during the Vietnam Wars. Conboy's narrative is largely chronological and provides insights into the CIA's successes and failures in Laos. The book also highlights the importance of Laos as a diplomatic and intelligence battleground during the Cold War and sheds light on the careers of prominent CIA officers. Overall, "Spies on the Mekong" offers a well-researched and credible history of the CIA's activities in Laos. [Extracted from the article]

"Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away" by Ann Hagedorn is a book that tells the story of George Abramovich Koval, an atomic spy for the Soviet Union during World War II. Koval, a Jewish American from Sioux City, Iowa, was recruited by the Soviet intelligence agency, the GRU, and sent back to the United States to gather information on America's atomic secrets. The book explores Koval's background, his time in the United States, and his contributions to the Soviet atomic bomb program. It also discusses the controversy surrounding Koval's actions and the recognition he received from the Russian government. [Extracted from the article]

Scholars are increasingly aware of the ways in which popular culture, particularly spy fiction and film, mediates public understanding of the clandestine world of espionage and intelligence. This article uses the 1954 Petrov Affair as a case study to argue that spy fiction and representations of espionage performed a mediating and framing process for the Australian public during the early Cold War. The events surrounding the defection of Soviet embassy Third Secretary Vladimir Petrov and his wife, Evdokia, to Australia in April 1954 were shocking and unprecedented; with little experience of the extraordinary events beyond the thrilling espionage narratives of popular culture, the Australian media began to frame the event using the familiar formula of spy fiction. By making the “story” of the Petrov Affair a recognisable narrative, rendering the events understandable and the mysteries decipherable, the media transformed Australia’s unsettling involvement in the world of international espionage into entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Great powers use others' territory for spying. Existing work shows that hosts of spying sometimes enjoy high leverage over great powers in exchange for their cooperation. At other times, hosts wield less leverage. Why? This paper points to the quality of intelligence that great powers glean from a host's territory and the availability of alternatives to account for this variation. In U.S. spying on the Soviet Union from Iran, changes in these factors during the 1960s caused Iran's leverage over the United States to increase. U.S. concessions enabled the Shah's excesses. But the United States retained access to extraordinary intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1939 to 1945, the Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands became an alternative battleground for the intelligence services of the warring powers. US intelligence operated through diplomatic, military, and strategic channels such as consulates, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Office of Strategic Services. The archipelago was integrated into the US intelligence network in Spain but was also considered important in relation to operations in North Africa. This article interprets the role played by US intelligence in the Canary Islands as a case study of Allied intelligence operations in the North Atlantic Ocean during the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decree passed by the socialist Romanian state at the beginning of the 1970s stipulated the need to defend state secrets as a condition for the country's economic and social progress in the context of its growing participation in world commerce. While the law operated with a wide notion of state secrecy, referring to any piece of information which, if disclosed, could jeopardize the Romanian state's interests, it included harsh regulations with regard to personal contacts with foreign citizens and served primarily for establishing a heightened operative control over the local economic life. Following the Romanian State Security Council's encouragement of campaigns for popular education, which should help prevent any trespassing of this decree, the early 1970s saw the commissioning of several instruction films made by the newly founded Film Service of the Ministry of the Interior as a form of 'counterintelligence training of the working class'. The present paper contextualizes and closely analyzes some of these films staging fictional cases of industrial espionage and their subsequent investigation by State Security as a form of useful cinema, arguing that, aside from their main educational mission of raising awareness about the legal responsibilities ensuing from the decrees concerning state secrecy, these films also acted as an instrument of national, geopolitical and institutional self-representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I respond to Lars Christie, David Omand and Stephen Ratner for their thoughtful comments on my book Spying through a Glass Darkly. In that book, I provide a philosophical defence of espionage and counter-intelligence activities. I have little to say about how best to implement the moral norms I defend so that they can help guide intelligence officers' actions, in the world as we know it here and now. Relatedly, I have little if anything to say about whether domestic and international law should reflect and entrench those norms. These are the gaps which David Omand's and Stephen Ratner's contributions seek to fill. First, though, I consider Lars Christie's probing objections to my views on the ethics of deception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her latest book Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence, Cécile Fabre suggests that the deception of third parties during an infiltration operation can be justified as a foreseen but unintended side effect. In this essay, I criticize this view. Such deception, I argue, is better justified paternalistically as a means of preventing third parties from becoming wrongful threats. In the second part of the article, I show that Fabre ignores an important moral complication in deception operations where agents intentionally allow others to be harmed as a means of protecting a secret. I argue that intentionally allowing harm to others as a means is a particularly problematic mode of agency which must be addressed in a normative account of espionage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cecile Fabre's Through a Glass Darkly offers a compelling account of the ethics of espionage drawn from both interpersonal morality and democratic and cosmopolitan political theory. Yet the spying that her theory finds permissible or prohibited does not map onto the spying that states undertake and that international law either explicitly or implicitly authorizes. That law allows or tolerates significant spying to promote compliance with diverse international legal regimes as well as advance other important public order values — well beyond that allowed under Fabre's theory. This disconnect represents a challenge for her theory and ideal theory generally. This essay identifies these gaps and considers alternative approaches to addressing them. It argues that the political morality of spying should be explored through institutional moral reasoning that takes account of the actual practices, expectations, and institutions that states have created; it then offers a set of criteria for the international political morality of espionage. The essay concludes with a discussion of a key feature of all espionage, namely the secrecy of the methods used — as opposed to their goal of find others' secrets. International law is both pushing transparency in many areas yet still allowing secret conduct by states, and these practices should also inform a theory of espionage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines from the point of view of an intelligence practicioner the utility of the philosophical method that Professor Cecile Fabre has applied to intelligence ethics. Her emphasis on the duty that lies on governments to be sufficiently well informed about those who pose a real risk of serious violations of fundamental human rights is seen as a valuable addition to discourse on the ethics of intelligence activity. The just war tradition is put forward as an alternative framing of key ethical issues that can be translated into a practical code for intelligence officers that can be adapted to changing levels of threat in a way that is difficult to derive from a timeless philosophical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crime of espionage is one of the main high-risk crimes that endangers the foreign security of countries and faces the security-oriented criminal policy of all countries, and repressive punishments are usually applied to it, because while violating the independence of countries, it makes them vulnerable to foreigners.The purpose of this article is to discuss the crime of espionage in Iran's criminal laws and shortcomings to address it, which necessitates revision and amendment to the current regulations . This research is a library study in terms of its practical purpose and research method, descriptive, analytical, and information gathering method. The crime of espionage has been addressed in various codes, such as the Islamic Penal Code, the the Punishment of Armed Forces Crimes code, and the Law on Cyber Crimes code, , and the analysis of these laws reveals the ambiguity and contradictions in different articles, which shows the fragmented and partial view of the legislator in this field. It is necessary to review the crime of espionage in different criminal codes under a comprehensive system. The examination of the new bill of the Penal Law also shows that this bill has not solved the problems raised.

CISOs in Southeast Asia should be on alert after the discovery that a suspected Chinese-based cyber espionage campaign that started last year is expanding its scope. The warning today comes [...]

Attackers behind a campaign that targets developers from around the world using fake job interviews have expanded their toolset with an information stealing script that also supports Linux and macOS [...]

NSO Group is an Israeli cyber surveillance firm notorious for Pegasus – an intrusive malware capable of covertly taking control of smartphones and remotely extracting their contents. In 2019, after a series of unflattering reports on governments' use of Pegasus to infiltrate the phones of activists and journalists, NSO embarked on an uncharacteristically public legitimation campaign. This article focuses on this campaign and explores how this otherwise secretive spyware company publicly legitimizes its surveillance. Based on an empirical analysis of hundreds of public documents across various media, we explore NSO's legitimacy management practices and identify the audiences and contexts of this legitimation. Our analysis identified four legitimation practices: securitization, Zionist patriotism, ethics washing, and normalization. We argue that these legitimation strategies operate across two interrelated axes of legitimation: a local axis that echoes a particularly Israeli 'security-driven populism'; and a universal axis that follows Silicon Valley's ethics washing. We show that these legitimation axes are designed to simultaneously ensure the company's survivability and to sustain surveillance realism – the perception of surveillance as the only viable option This article contributes to the emerging literature on cyber surveillance firms and to the burgeoning research on the legitimation of surveillance by shedding light on the discursive infrastructures behind contemporary cyber espionage. Moreover, while surveillance is often understood as a global phenomenon, this article highlights the need to focus on the local contexts from which surveillance originates to understand its sustainability, expansion, and vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the career of the South African undercover agent Craig Williamson in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that the violent acts of men like Williamson must be analysed in terms of the broader strategic aims of the Security Police in the maintenance of apartheid. This means, first, that we must look beyond the smokescreen of Williamson’s notoriety and begin to see Williamson as he was – an operative, working alongside many others, within a vast repressive apparatus. Second, we must analyse the entirety of Williamson’s career and not only the crimes for which he is most infamous. Most of Williamson’s career was spent not as a murderer but as an undercover agent, sabotaging the anti-apartheid struggle through the control and misappropriation of movement funds and through subtle interventions at the ideological level. Williamson’s contributions to counter-insurgency strategy and organisational sabotage are significant in and of themselves and must be analysed by scholars. In this vein, this article offers a glimpse into the parallel and overlapping worlds of the African National Congress (ANC) underground in Botswana and Craig Williamson’s time in Geneva working undercover as the deputy director of the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1944 the State Department attempted to improve its communications security by creating a Division of Cryptography and mechanising the encryption process. This article assesses the effectiveness of these reforms and shows that State's new cipher equipment had cryptographic vulnerabilities. Moreover, the department was unable to maintain physical security at the Moscow embassy and through espionage and technical surveillance the KGB broke the ciphers and read American communications. The paper concludes by analysing the impact of this security failure, including the claim that intercepted messages influenced Stalin's decision to approve the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Second World War, Britain was regarded by neutral Sweden as an important source of intelligence. Swedish service attachés were posted to London to use their diplomatic and service status to collect and report relevant intelligence to Swedish High Command in Stockholm for assessment and circulation. Their collection techniques in Britain meet Wilhelm Agrell's definition of intelligence liaison and this paper describes how they were able to deliver significant results under difficult conditions. At times, they had to contend with a hostile and restrictive host country, communication difficulties (in every sense) with Stockholm and unappreciative diplomats and senior officers. Their efforts have gone largely un-noticed in Swedish Second World War historiography, and readers may be surprised to learn of the results that they achieved and the difficulties that they faced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details Singapore's efforts against disinformation and state-sponsored subversion. The methods examined include both legal and non-legal measures that have been enacted (with the broader canvas, also examined, of what other nations have attempted to shore up their own defences). The article also discusses economic coercion: the issue is not in itself new, but has in recent years been tinged with added potency on account of the wider geopolitical struggle for the commanding heights between the United States and China. Some consideration is also given at the conclusion to the way forward: what nations need to do in the face of emergent challenges (including generative AI) which might further complement the already impressive toolkit of malign actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June of 2010, a Canadian couple, Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley, was arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the KGB "sleeper agents." These KGB agents (Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova) lived in Canada since 1992, and in the United States since 1999, working for the Russian intelligence as "a sleeper cell" of the Russian spies. This story became an inspiration for the American TV show The Americans (2013–2018). Using the reviews of this TV show from the United States and Russia, the interviews with the real participants of the events of 2010 and with the retired KGB officers, the KGB documents from the SBU Archive in Kyiv, Ukraine, this article is an attempt to study how the special KGB/FSB operations in the USA, portrayed in one American TV series became an object of fascination and "fictionalization" on the both—American and Russian—sides of the geo-political conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a book titled "A Cambridge Spy: Jan-Willem Van Den Braak: Hitler's Spy against Churchill" by Nigel West. The book explores the life of Jan Ter Braak, a Dutch journalist and Nazi sympathizer who spied for the Germans during World War II. The author debunks myths surrounding Ter Braak's identity and actions, revealing that he was not a German spy, assassin, or murderer as previously believed. The book also examines the failures of MI5 in apprehending Ter Braak and highlights missed opportunities in the investigation. [Extracted from the article]