Film Exposes the Seduction of Secrecy

“Secrecy is something like forbidden fruit,” former NSA official Mike Levin says in a startling new documentary, aptly named Secrecy. “You can’t have it. It’s classified. That makes you want it more.” But who should determine what a real secret is -- bureaucrats or the press?

CQ Politics (05/09/2008)

State Department Says ‘Missing’ Laptops Located

The State Department says it has found the 400 laptops that were unaccounted for last week. A senior official acknowledged that managers in the Diplomatic Security service had lost track of the computers, which are destined for friendly foreign police services. But he said that they were located “within 24 hours” after CQ reported them missing over the weekend.

CQ Politics (05/06/2008)

Hundreds of State Department Laptops Missing: Audit

As many as 400 of the unaccounted for laptops belong to the department’s Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program, officials say, which provides counterterrorism training and equipment, including laptops, to foreign police, intelligence and security forces.

CQ Politics (05/02/2008)

Israel Might Have Many More Spies Here, Officials Say

The elderly man arrested last week on charges of spying for Israel years ago was probably still working for the Jewish state’s espionage service in tandem with another, as yet unidentified spy, former U.S. intelligence officials say. The case serves as a reminder that the U.S.-Israeli intelligence relationship runs on two tracks.

CQ Politics (04/25/2008)

The CIA's Odd Man Out

It’s not easy to generate a lot of sympathy for a CIA man implicated in a botched kidnapping. But I feel sorry for Bob Lady, the CIA’s man in Milan during the Abu Omar snatch. Lady has been abandoned by his agency while others who insisted on the screwy operation over his objectives get ahead.

CQ Politics (04/18/2008)

Iran’s Top Terrorist Emerges From the Shadows

Brigadier Gen. Qassem Suleimani, head of Iran’s supersecret overseas intelligence and sabotage service, is beginning to show a little more ankle, but he remains pretty much an enigma among Iran experts in Washington — including U.S. intelligence agencies, some say.

CQ Politics (04/11/2008)

Evidence Grows of Drug Use on Detainees

There can be little doubt now that the government has used drugs designed to weaken the resistance of terrorist suspects to interrogation. Another window opened on the practice last week with the declassification of John Yoo’s 2003 memo approving harsh interrogation techniques. But hard evidence that U.S. interrogators are employing hallucinogens, like the LSD the CIA tested on unwitting subjects for at least 20 years beginning in the 1940s, has yet to surface.

CQ Politics (04/04/2008)