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Jeff Stein

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Washington, D.C.
As seen in: SpyTalk, Apple Podcasts, LinkedIn, IMDb, Medium, MSN, MSN Canada, MSN Deutschland, MSN Ireland, The New York Times, UOL and
Covers:  espionage, national security, foreign policy, military affairs, army, fbi, foreign policy, counterinsurgency, nsa, dhs, dni, espionage, spies, pentagon, terrorism, cia, war, counterterrorism, navy
Doesn't Cover: consumer affairs, gadgets, entertainment
Longtime DC intel scribe--Newsweek, WaPo, CQ, UPI, magazines, books. Founding Editor, SpyTalk.co. Podcast: mswmedia.com/show/spytalk
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How Obama is keeping his bumbling intel chief under the rug...at a most crucial moment - Vocativ

How Obama is keeping his bumbling intel chief under the rug...at a most crucial moment - Vocativ

www.vocativ.com — For someone tasked with being the nation's top intelligence officer, James Clapper seems to get an awful lot wrong-and in so many ways. Not only did he notoriously lie to a Senate committee about the National Security Agency's efforts to collect information on the internet habits of American citizens, but over the past few years, he's also had a series of foreign policy gaffes about Iran, North Korea and Pakistan-three of the most lethal threats to the world-that may have relegated him to a mere role player on President Obama's national security team.
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Man On The Run

Man On The Run

www.andmagazine.com — "Argo" this ain't. Edward Snowden is on his own, it appears. The CIA is hunting, not helping him. Unless he's working hand in glove with Chinese or some other spy agency, he has no access to master disguises and clever operational support, as the American diplomats who escaped Tehran did. Moreover, the disillusioned former NSA contractor is a techie, not a trained operative. Assuming he's not working with a foreign intelligence agency, his only hope for evading capture for a few more hours or days, say former CIA operatives, is staying off the grid and holing up in a low-rent bordello or someplace else that doesn't require a credit card.
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Useless Big Brother

Useless Big Brother

www.andmagazine.com — Poor Big Brother: All trussed up and nothing to do. In Boston, the number of people working on terrorism task forces could pack TD Garden for a Bruins game. You've got the the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. You've got the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. You've got the Commonwealth Fusion Center in suburban Maynard, run by the Massachusetts State Police. You've got multiple agencies of the Department of Homeland Security, a hydra-headed bureaucratic monster if there ever was one. There's a CIA office. Evidently, however, they couldn't trade a few words over the coffee machine about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wayward travels.
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Who Are The Spies?

Who Are The Spies?

www.andmagazine.com — Do you know what a spy is? Sure, you say: Clown question. But the fact is most people don't know a "spy" from an "agent"--neither of which terms apply to an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, you might be surprised to learn. It's no wonder: The terms "spy" and "agent" are regularly misused in the news media, sometimes even by CIA people themselves, who seemed resigned to going with the flow. Like Nada Bakos, one of the CIA counterterrorism analysts featured in Manhunt, the HBO documentary on the agency's long pursuit of Osama Bin Laden.
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Cia: No Woman No Cry

Cia: No Woman No Cry

www.andmagazine.com — I can only imagine the wry smile on G's face when she got the news: You gotta take a bullet for the team. It was a moment John Le Carré might have scripted. The CIA denies that "G"-- whose name the agency insists keeping under wraps even though it's "widely known in intelligence, diplomatic and journalistic circles," as the AP put it -- was denied the job of running CIA's corps of spies because she ran a secret interrogation center where at least two accused terrorists were waterboarded multiple times over and lobbied hard to destroy the videotapes.
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Bin Laden At The Movies

Bin Laden At The Movies

www.andmagazine.com — I don't know about you, but I'm not much closer to the ground truth about how we got Bin Laden than I was two years ago this week, when he was killed. Which comes as no surprise, given the material. We're at the mercy of people who will talk to us. Even the most unbiased and seasoned intelligence reporters can hardly report much more than what their sources tell them, on condition of anonymity. And thus their stories inevitably reflect the biases of such people, who may well know only part of the story. Manhunt which debuted on HBO Tuesday night, tries to clear the air.
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Qaeda's Hobbyist Bombers

Qaeda's Hobbyist Bombers

www.andmagazine.com — After 30 months of relative quietude, terrorist bombers literally burst back into the news with the Apr. 15 attacks in Boston, which killed four and wounded about 200 with blasts from BB-packed devices made from pressure-cookers. Where did they learn to make such bombs? And where did they get pressure cookers, a kitchen item that's been out of fashion for decades--yard sales? The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, said he suspected that the Tsarnaev brothers had help from a "trainer or trainers...overseas in the Chechen region or...in the United States."
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New Twist In Old Spy Case

New Twist In Old Spy Case

www.andmagazine.com — Will the mole wars never end? Nearly two decades after his murder on a quiet road outside Tbilisi, Georgia, the late Central Intelligence Agency officer Freddie Woodruff is finally getting the full investigation he deserved. Georgia's Justice Minister Tea Tsulukiani said over the weekend that "the case has not been properly investigated" and that "we have some serious doubts about what really happened." Tsulukiani, along with Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, are supporting a new investigation into Woodruff's 1993 murder, according to The New York Times' Andrew Higgins. As it happens, I've been studying this case for a long time.
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SpyTalk: Hot Shots: Pentagon Power Grab Edition

SpyTalk: Hot Shots: Pentagon Power Grab Edition

spytalkblog.blogspot.com — The Spies vs. the Brass: One of the main reasons the CIA was founded in 1947 was to give the President straight dope on enemy weapon systems, independent of the Pentagon, which had a tendency to inflate Soviet threats in order to scare Congress into funding more and bigger missiles, planes, ships and tanks for itself. Despite--or maybe because of--its rank conflict of interest, the Pentagon has never given up trying to muscle into the CIA's territory. The current effort is centered on its campaign to wrest control of the drone program from the spy agency. Key lawmakers, however, are not buying it.
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SpyTalk: Hot Shots: CIA Contractors Edition

SpyTalk: Hot Shots: CIA Contractors Edition

spytalkblog.blogspot.com — The CIA and other intelligence agencies came under fire for hiring too many contractors, so what did they do? Hire more! That and other nuggets have been dug up from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's biennial report by Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News, who otherwise found the report sadly lacking in details. The report revealed that "a written report on each covert action that is being carried out under a presidential finding is provided to the congressional committees every quarter." It also said the DNI "abruptly cancelled a multi-year effort to establish a single consolidated data center for the entire Intelligence Community a year or so ago, in favor of a migration to cloud computing."
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SpyTalk: CIA's Madame X Waits in the Wings

SpyTalk: CIA's Madame X Waits in the Wings

spytalkblog.blogspot.com — "She knew her CTC work would come back to bite her, and said as much back when we were both on the 7th floor," a former colleague says of Madame X, the undercover woman CIA Director John Brennan is considering to run the National Clandestine Service, the belfry where the spooks hang out. "She was quite nervous when Justice was considering whether to prosecute folks involved in the interrogation program," the colleague added. It "will be interesting to see how this plays out." "She's just an excellent officer," the colleague said. "Very savvy and extremely competent - and would be a great choice."
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SpyTalk: The Leak Dogs Are Gonna Bite Obama in the End

SpyTalk: The Leak Dogs Are Gonna Bite Obama in the End

spytalkblog.blogspot.com — One of the salacious ironies of the John Kiriakou case is that the dogs the Obama administration has let loose on leakers are circling back, teeth bared, toward their owners. "The Obama administration's vigorous prosecution of leaks may yet cost it dearly," Steve Coll writes in "The Spy Who Talked Too Much," his autopsy on the former CIA man who revealed the agency's torture practices and other secrets, in this week's New Yorker. "Recently, FBI agents have been interviewing administration officials about any role they might have had in providing classified information to David Sanger, of the [New York] Times, who last year disclosed the administration's role in cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear program," Coll reported.
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Why was a Navy adviser stripped of her career?

Why was a Navy adviser stripped of her career?

Washington Post — Gwenyth Todd had worked in a lot of places in Washington where powerful men didn't hesitate to use sharp elbows. She had been a Middle East expert for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. She had worked in the office of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, where neoconservative hawks first began planning to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But she was not prepared a few years later in Bahrain when she encountered plans by high-ranking admirals to confront Iran, any one of which, she reckoned, could set the region on fire.
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What makes a perfect spy tick?

What makes a perfect spy tick?

Washington Post — "A Perfect Spy," John le Carre On a rainy day in the spring of 1967, I shuffled into a classroom at the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Md., in a grimy industrial area of East Baltimore. There were about 30 of us, mostly college graduates, including newly minted lawyers and a few erstwhile hippies who had received draft notices. It was the first day of a seven-month course blandly titled "Area Studies." In fact, we were going to learn to be spies. Truth be told, few of us expected to be turned into James Bonds.
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Snowden's Red Dawn

Snowden's Red Dawn

Newsweek Global — Give the hard-liners credit: After one stunning revelation after another about the National Security Agency's Orwellian spying operations, they finally managed to land a punch this week on Edward Snowden, the über-leaking fugitive. Not that shrill words haven't been flung at the former NSA contractor from the get-go, starting with traitor. And Representative Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Michael Hayden, who has headed both the NSA and CIA, joshed openly in an open forum about putting Snowden on a kill list.
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A New Generation of Spy Catchers Shakes Up the FBI

A New Generation of Spy Catchers Shakes Up the FBI

Newsweek Global — Not that long ago, top FBI counterterrorism officials didn't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. And, judging from their public statements, didn't really care. "You don't need subject-matter expertise," the FBI's chief of counterterrorism, Gary Bald, said in one of several risible statements a few years ago by high-level FBI officials. "The subject-matter expertise is helpful, but it isn't a prerequisite. It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an official for a position in the counterterrorism [program]." That was 2005. Now, slowly, and with little notice, the FBI is finally fielding a team of intelligence and counterterrorism leaders who came of age, professionally speaking, in the post-9/11 era.
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Lara Logan's Mystery Man

Lara Logan's Mystery Man

Newsweek Global — Nobody at 60 Minutes has been fired or even publicly disciplined for its odd, inflammatory and dead-wrong October 27 story on the Islamist assault in Benghazi that killed U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But it has apologized. That mea culpa, however, left some large and troubling questions unanswered; the most important one is how CBS's superstar correspondent, Lara Logan, her producer and other network news executives let security contractor Dylan Davies on the air with his explosive tale about what he did and saw during that attack.
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Cranked Up Intelligence

Cranked Up Intelligence

Newsweek Global — In Washington, D.C., they say, your enemies stab you in the back, your friends stab you in the chest. So it was earlier this week, with ex-Defense Secretary Robert Gates's lacerating portrait of President Obama's White House's politics-driven national security team in a memoir entitled Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War . And now the Pentagon's former top expert on Afghanistan is charging that the most recent gloomy intelligence report on the future of that nation was cooked up and leaked by administration officials trying to lay the groundwork for a quicker exit from the war there.
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Some Good Mole Nostalgia

Some Good Mole Nostalgia

Newsweek Global — The CIA mole-catcher's memoir that inspired ABC's The Assets, the espionage miniseries debuting on January 2, has just one brief mention of the National Security Agency - and it's not very flattering. The NSA was such a nonfactor in the CIA's desperate hunt for a Soviet spy in its ranks 25 years ago, says Sandra Grimes - whose astonishing memoir, Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed , was published in 2012 - that she had forgotten about it until I inquired this week.
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Murder Most Fouled: How Pakistani Spy Officials Blocked Justice for Daniel Pearl

Murder Most Fouled: How Pakistani Spy Officials Blocked Justice for Daniel Pearl

spytalk.co — Of all the open sores in the long, painful relationship between the United States and Pakistan, the dragged-out case of Daniel Pearl's murder hurts the worst. Just over 20 years have passed since Pearl, an affable and gifted correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, went missing in Karachi.
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