Intelligence

The Final Room-by-Room Hunt For Osama Bin Laden

A senior U.S. intelligence official described Osama bin Laden’s compound with two words that are rarely spoken together: “opaque windows.” Once the U.S. became aware of the compound, a closer look made them even more curious. “The walls around the compound were up to 18 feet high,” a senior U.S. intelligence operative said Monday. …

Bin Laden: Betrayed By His Face, His DNA…And His Wife

Senior U.S. officials say the U.S. government used several sophisticated methods to confirm that the tall man Navy SEALs killed early Monday in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was, indeed, Osama bin Laden:

1. CIA experts compared known photos of bin Laden with photographs of the corpse, and concluded they were 95% sure the dead man was bin

Bin Laden: How They Got Him — And What Happens to al Qaeda Now

The reports started coming in more than a month ago: Osama bin Laden was on the move, and the U.S. had its eye on him. Stressed by the turmoil sweeping his part of the world – tumult he had no roll in sparking – bin Laden was trying to bolster al Qaeda’s credibility as young people Tweeted and Facebooked about a future that …

Pentagon Cites Gains in Afghanistan

Army Gen. David Petraeus is leaving his successor, Marine Lieut. General John Allen, “tangible progress” in Afghanistan to build on, according to the Pentagon’s semi-annual assessment of how the war is going. Easy for him to say, since by fall he’ll be running the CIA in Langley, Va.

Meet The New Boss. Same As The Old Boss.


I remember when Harold Brown was Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary. Heck, I remember when Bob McNamara was JFK’s defense secretary, so let me rephrase that: I covered Harold Brown as Jimmy Carter’s defense secretary.

There’s been a flurry of reports over the last couple of days about how the shift of Leon …

Competition Hyping WikiLeaks’ Gitmo-Docs Dump?

Having skimmed the WikiLeaks release on Guantanamo Bay this morning, still difficult to see why the Times and Post have given it such prominence in their morning editions. You know part of it is the allure of the classified stamp, and the continuing fascination with those who committed 9/11.

But their headlines reveal the dirty little …

The Gitmo Files

As if the Obama Administration’s inability to shutter Guantanamo Bay despite its pledge to do so weren’t bad enough, now it has to deal with a torrent of classified documents about the Cuban detainee prison and its 779 inmates.

Here’s what the 700 documents say, in a nutshell:

A Question For the Obama Administration:

Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that President Obama’s order to cut $400 billion from national-security spending over the next 12 years will force the U.S. military to curtail some of its far-flung duties. “This needs to be a process that is driven by the analysis,” he said, “as well as missions that our elected …

The Predator Feud Drones On

A peek inside the tensions between Islamabad and Washington over the CIA’s use of armed Predator drones over Pakistan to take out Taliban operatives in safe havens along the Af-Pak frontier, from Time’s Omar Waraich in the Pakistani capital.

Mata Hari, Call Your Office!

Moving at the speed of sludge, the CIA this week declared it has finally declassified its oldest still-secret documents it has: spy documents from World War I. One outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another …

  1. 1
  2. ...
  3. 4
  4. 5
  5. 6
  6. 7
  7. Next