How a U.S. intelligence analyst ended up spying for Cuba for 17 years—all while surrounded by family members who also worked for the FBI: “Montes must have seemed a godsend. She was a leftist with a soft spot for bullied nations. She was bilingual and had dazzled her DOJ supervisors with her ambition and smarts. […]
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From Student to Spy, And Back Again
An American community college student who converted to Islam before 9/11 emails the CIA and volunteers himself as a spy: “At the time of his email, intelligence agencies were eager to exploit an opportunity presented by the capture of John Walker Lindh, a U.S. citizen who had converted to Islam and gone abroad to join […]
Reading List: The Political Mistress
From Monica to the D.C. Madam, some of my all-time favorite stories on politics, sex and power: 1. ‘The Gary Hart Story: How It Happened,’ by Jim McGee, Tom Fiedler and James Savage (The Miami Herald, May 10, 1987) and ‘The Gary Hart Story: Part Two’ Gary Hart was frontrunner for the 1988 Democratic presidential […]
Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Here are our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also save them as a Readlist. 1. Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet Amanda Hess | Pacific Standard | January 6, 2014 | 28 minutes (7,188 words) Women who are harassed online through social media sites like Twitter and in […]
Reading List: The Political Mistress
From Monica to the D.C. Madam, some of my all-time favorite stories on politics, sex and power: 1. ‘The Gary Hart Story: How It Happened,’ by Jim McGee, Tom Fiedler and James Savage (The Miami Herald, May 10, 1987) and ‘The Gary Hart Story: Part Two’ Gary Hart was frontrunner for the 1988 Democratic presidential […]
Resurfaced: Peter Perl’s ‘The Spy Who’s Been Left in the Cold’ (1998)
We’re excited to introduce this new recurring series, in which we work with publishers to dig up notable stories from their archives that were previously unpublished on the web. We’re especially excited to kick this off with The Washington Post. Today’s piece is “The Spy Who’s Been Left in the Cold,” a 1998 Washington Post […]
Confessions of a Corporate Spy
[Not single-page] A competitive intelligence consultant on how he acquires information about competitors for various companies: “As the sales manager and I surfed Talbots’s website together, looking for the green mini my wife saw on the website earlier that day, I mentioned offhand that I had just graduated from business school. I talked about how […]
The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much
On the work of Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old French writer whose pulpy S.A.S. books have turned out to be eerily accurate: “The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, […]
Resurfaced: Peter Perl's 'The Spy Who's Been Left in the Cold' (1998)
We’re excited to introduce a recurring series in which we work with publishers to dig up notable stories from their archives that were previously unpublished on the web. And we’re especially excited to kick this off with The Washington Post. Today’s piece is “The Spy Who’s Been Left in the Cold,” a 1998 Washington Post […]
‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist
“If you survive me, tell them this: I never gave up.”

