The Cipher Brief

YOU CAN CALL THIS A LAKE EFFECT – With the stroke of a pen just a few days ago, President Trump renamed Lake Ontario "Lake America," and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has dutifully complied, filing the change into its Geographic Names Server — which NGA's own release describes as the official U.S. repository for foreign geographic names.

Lebanon’s campaign against Hezbollah’s finances may be designed to look tougher than it is. Under pressure from Washington and international regulators, Beirut has done enough to claim progress by tightening the regulated financial sector against Hezbollah-linked entities, but without seriously threatening Hezbollah’s parallel financial apparatus, which operates largely outside it.

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BOOK REVIEW: THE SHADOW FRIENDS By Tess Gerritsen / Thomas & Mercer Reviewed by: Susan Gorgioski The Reviewer — Susan Gorgioski is a writer who has worked in law and publishing in Australia. She is currently researching a novel set in WWII Shanghai. REVIEW: The Russians have been a mainstay of spy thrillers and they are always worthy adversaries. Tess Gerritsen's The Shadow Friends continues with the tradition. Gerritsen has a fine pedigree as a thriller writer.

Andy Burnham was a few weeks into the job as the new Prime Minister of the UK when he found himself exchanging messages with someone claiming to be Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff. The exchange, first reported by Politico last week, was brief and apparently trivial. Burnham grew suspicious, stopped replying and told the right people; the British embassy in Washington quietly informed the White House, which confirmed that Wiles’s own devices hadn’t been touched. No harm done, officially.

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Iranian-American businessman Emad Shargi spent more than five years detained in Iran, enduring solitary confinement, brutal interrogations, a mock execution and a 10-year prison sentence after being accused of cooperating with the United States. Now, Shargi joins The Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly to tell the extraordinary story of his arrest, imprisonment, attempted escape from Iran and eventual release — and to offer a stark warning about how the Iranian regime operates.

“During its 11-month deployment [mostly in the Middle East] which ended in May, and was the longest for a[n aircraft] carrier since the Vietnam War, the USS Gerald R. Ford conducted more than 11,000 aircraft carrier launches using electromagnetic catapults, more than carriers with steam [aircraft launching] systems could achieve…But perhaps the biggest benefit of the electromagnetic catapults are their lower cost and lighter personnel requirements.

BOOK REVIEW: ORTIZ'S WAR: THE ALLIES' SECRET WEAPON AGAINST THE NAZIS IN FRANCE By Nicholas Reynolds and Katie S. Sanders / Harper Horizon Reviewed by: Bill Harlow The Reviewer — Bill Harlow is The Cipher Brief's senior book editor and a former CIA Director of Public Affairs. REVIEW: Some lives sound made up. Peter Ortiz's does.