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Most services divide along three lines: collection, analysis, and covert action. Collection splits by discipline, human intelligence from recruited ag...

Signals intelligence intercepts what machines say to each other: phone calls, emails, radar emissions, satellite links. Human intelligence is what peo...

Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, the Yom Kippur War, September 11: every major service has missed a freight train. The causes repeat. Signal drowned in n...

Defectors are intelligence jackpots and traps in one person. Oleg Gordievsky brought the inner fears of the KGB to London. Oleg Penkovsky carried Wash...

Secret agencies spending public money need babysitters, and democracies built them slowly, usually after scandal. The American Church Committee of 197...

The Five Eyes began as a 1946 agreement between the United States and Britain to divide signals interception and share the raw take, formalized as UKU...