Re: Spymaster Pdf
Srikanth Fonseca
As I listened to the conversations between Nixon and Helms, I heard a paranoid president and a supple spymaster: voices of power, intimations of intrigue, reverberations of history. Here was a character and plot come alive.
I went back to Miami and found myself looking at an extraordinary collection of correspondence, photographs, and memoranda compiled by a CIA hit man who worked for Helms. This was the rarest of finds: authentic evidence of CIA covert operations, not concealed or obfuscated by the laws of official secrecy. The Tony Sforza papers added new deadly detail to the story of how Nixon ordered Helms to carry out an assassination in Chile in the 1970s.
Renewables are widely perceived as an opportunity to shatter the hegemony of fossil fuel-rich states and democratize the energy landscape. Virtually all countries have access to some renewable energy resources (especially solar and wind power) and could thus substitute foreign supply with local resources. Our research shows, however, that the role countries are likely to assume in decarbonized energy systems will be based not only on their resource endowment but also on their policy choices.
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his speech during a meeting of the Federal Security Service (FSB) board as FSB director Alexander Bortnikov sits next to him in Moscow, Russia, Feb. 28, 2023.
President Putin is not the spymaster he claims. Last week's news of five Bulgarians arrested in Britain, alleged to be Russian intelligence operatives, fits into a broader trend: since becoming Russian leader more than two decades ago, Putin has presided over a succession of intelligence failures against the West. His spy networks have been rounded up in Europe, North America, and now apparently Britain.
Putin makes much of his KGB past. Indeed, his KGB career shaped his world view. Certainly Putin's campaign to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election was a remarkable operation. It followed an old Soviet tradition of covertly meddling in US elections, stretching back to at least 1948, but now using new social media tools. It injected all manner of toxic uncertainty into the American political system.
But scratch the surface, and we find Putin's intelligence credentials are not what he claims. In the last days of the Soviet empire, he was stationed in Dresden, in East Germany, a KGB sideshow compared with East Berlin, where the real action was. Yevgeny Primakov, the first director of Russia's post-Soviet foreign intelligence service, the SVR, claimed that while heading the service in the 1990s, he had never heard of Putin.
Since coming to power in 2000, Putin has cultivated the image of Russia's intelligence services as highly professional. In reality, they are criminals. Russia's security service, the FSB, which Putin ran in 1998, facilitates massive, systemic, state-run money laundering schemes for his personal enrichment and for Russian oligarchs....
He was a crucial figure in Elizabethan times, running the Secret Service as well as serving as Secretary of State during times of international conflict, including the Spanish Armada. He is perhaps most well-known for his role in securing the grim fate of Mary Queen of Scots, showing his loyalty to his queen as well as his sense of public duty in the face of external threats.
Francis Walsingham was born around 1532 near Chislehurst in Kent to parents William and Joyce Walsingham. His father worked as a lawyer in London and played an important role in the investigation into Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. His mother was the daughter of the courtier Sir Edmund Denny, whilst her brother Sir Anthony Denny was one of the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber of King Henry VIII. The Walsingham family therefore held several important connections to the royal court.
Walsingham was also devoutly Protestant. As a result of his commitment to his faith, he was exiled to Switzerland during the reign of Queen Mary I, a devout Catholic famous for her attempts to reverse the English Reformation. It was not until the death of Mary I and the succession of Protestant Elizabeth as queen that he could return home.
Walsingham returned to England alongside other fellow Protestant exiles including Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, who would help him secure his first role in politics, first as a member of parliament for Bossiney, Cornwall and then as a MP for Lyme Regis in Dorset.
Francis would go on to remarry, this time to another widow, Ursula St Barbe, the former wife of Sir Richard Worsley. It was via this marriage that Walsingham was able to secure the estates of Appuldurcombe and Carisbrooke Priory, both in the Isle of Wight. They had a daughter together, Frances.
In his political career, Walsingham found himself actively engaged in matters he felt strongly about, including support for the plight of the Protestant Huguenots in France. It was during these early political years that he attracted the attention of William Cecil, Lord Burghley who saw his potential.
The threats to the crown had escalated considerably. In 1569 the Northern Uprising involved a number of Catholic nobles attempting to replace Elizabeth with Mary Queen of Scots. Only two years later another plan was foiled, the Ridolfi Plot, named after the instigator Roberto Ridolfi, an international banker who had been gaining support in his plan to assassinate Elizabeth. As the attempts on her life intensified, Francis Walsingham rose to the occasion as spymaster general.
Nevertheless, despite the rocky relationship with the queen, his trustworthiness and loyalty to the crown allowed him to develop a vast network of spies and informants, acquiring intelligence and statistics which he would use to infiltrate Catholic conspiracy circles. Walsingham had created a professional secret service, even resorting to the use of double agents and prison informants.
He was successful in foiling a number of plots, for example the failed Throckmorton plot, foiled in November 1583 thanks to a spy in the French embassy. Walsingham was in contact with the spy who provided him with vital information regarding correspondence with Mary that was being carried through embassy channels.
The plan was subsequently quashed following the arrest of Francis Throckmorton, who was found with incriminating evidence including maps, invasion plans and a list of Catholic supporters. Eventually under torture, he would divulge the plan for Spanish and French troops to invade England. This led to English diplomatic ties to Spain being severed and the expulsion of the Spanish ambassador.
The most famous plot to be foiled was the one that would force Mary to face her executioner in 1587. The Babington Plot was named after Anthony Babington, one of the chief conspirators, who was planning with his accomplice, the Jesuit John Ballard, to assassinate Elizabeth I.
At the Fotheringay trial, the Lord High Treasurer made use of these communications to convict Mary and sentenced her to her execution. To the very end Mary pleaded her innocence but she was fatefully betrayed by her secretaries who validated the letters. She was sentenced to death on 8th February 1587.
Jessica Brain is a freelance writer specialising in history. Based in Kent and a lover of all things historical.
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Queen Elizabeth I gave her name to a golden age of poets, statesmen and adventurers. Known as the Virgin Queen, or Gloriana, her union with her people became a substitute for the marriage she never made...
As sometimes happens, the rascal wrote the better book. Wolf was East Germany's most famous and successful spymaster, and though he does not reveal all, he tells an intriguing tale. Some will be surprised or dismayed to learn that, yes, during the 1980s the East Germans did indeed fund portions of the West German "peace movement" and provide a safe haven for terrorists. Wolf's selective memory, continual attempts at self-exculpation, and specious resort to the argument that the West behaved as badly as the communists are neither convincing nor appetizing.
Murphy and Kondrashev obtrude less in the account they, a retired American and Soviet spy, have written with a former American journalist. All three men in different ways operated in and around Berlin and know the city well. Part of a fascinating Yale University Press series on the Cold War seen in part from the vantage point of the Soviet archives, this book covers primarily the grim glory days of the Cold War in Berlin -- the period up to the building of the Berlin Wall. The lacunae are numerous (there is very little here, for example, from the Soviet side on the operations of Soviet military intelligence), and Bailey's efforts to reconcile his co-authors' views of reality do not always succeed. Nonetheless, this is a major contribution to the intelligence history of the Cold War.
A general view of the building in Madrid, Spain, Friday, Sept. 10, 2021, where the former Venezuelan military spy chief, retired Maj. Gen. Hugo Carvajal was arrested by police. Police in Madrid on Thursday arrested a former Venezuelan spymaster wanted on U.S. narcoterrorism charges, capturing him in a hideout apartment nearly two years after he defied a Spanish extradition order and disappeared. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
The two-year manhunt for Gen. Hugo Carvajal ended Thursday night when police raided a rundown apartment in a quiet Madrid neighborhood where they found the fugitive in a back room holding a sharp knife in what they described as a last desperate attempt to evade arrest.
Gregorie compared Carvajal to another spymaster he investigated, former Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega. Both men, he said, were capable of cutting deals on all sides while scuttling the pursuit of justice.
Spymasters take turns giving clues. Aftera spymaster gives a clue, his or her team startsguessing. Their turn ends when they guesswrong, when they decide to stop, or when theyhave made the maximum number of guessesfor that clue. Then it is the other team's turn"
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