Search Results for: spying

Everything in This City Must

Longreads Pick

Before returning to the U.S., the author is asked what he’ll miss about living in Leipzig, Germany and discovers that the answer is complicated:

“Why do I live there, I then ask myself. The recent revelation that the TSA may record every phone call, and hopes to record social media interactions as well, suggests we’re now a nation of suspects—America has become one big terrorist watch list. Everyone is on it. As I think about expatriating, if only to object to a life inside that complex, I know, if they’re monitoring me, it won’t matter if I expatriate. It would only continue, perhaps even increase, the move confirming whatever theory had put them onto me, should that even be the case. It would be enough that I would find it objectionable, and it shouldn’t be.

“I think of the Chinese dissident who, when he learned he was being spied on by the state, said, ‘I’ve been trying to get them to listen to me for years.’ If they were spying on me, I would want to take the TSA on a tour through the Stasi museum.

“See all they did to try to control their citizens, I would say.

“See how it failed them.”

Published: May 14, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,641 words)

Ana Montes: The Most Important Spy You’ve Never Heard Of

Longreads Pick

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. But most important, she had top-secret security clearance and was on the inside. ‘I hadn’t thought about actually doing anything until I was propositioned,’ Montes would later admit to investigators. The Cubans, she revealed, ‘tried to appeal to my conviction that what I was doing was right.'”

Author: Jim Popkin
Source: Washington Post
Published: Apr 18, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,016 words)

Resurfaced: Peter Perl's 'The Spy Who's Been Left in the Cold' (1998)

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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a recurring series in which we work with publishers to dig up notable stories from their archives that were previously unpublished on the web.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 Magazine story by Peter Perl, who just announced he’s retiring from the paper after 32 years. Here’s more from the Post’s Marc Fisher:

“In the Washington Post newsroom in recent years, Peter Perl has been the official mensch, the go-to guy both for reporters trying to figure out their career paths and for editors struggling with how to keep aggressive and smart journalism at the fore even in an ever-tougher economic environment. But beyond his avuncular manner and wise counsel, what made Perl one of the newsroom’s most respected figures was what he’d done for the first quarter century of his time at the paper: Perl, who is retiring from The Post shortly, was a master storyteller, a specialist in the art of profiling people who didn’t want to be profiled and public figures who were assumed by journalists and readers alike to be overexposed. Perl drilled down to the psychological roots of former Washington Mayor Marion Barry’s struggle between the morality of fighting for the poor and the amorality of doing whatever it took to get his way. He discovered and sensitively revealed the hurt child beneath D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’ oddly distant public persona. And in this finely-etched, subtly-shaded profile of a man he didn’t even get to meet, Perl shows us the many facets of Jonathan Pollard, the American intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel and is serving a life sentence in a federal prison. It is a story of deceit and betrayal, but also of devotion and righteousness. It is a typical Peter Perl tale, ignoring the easy conclusions and trusting that readers will come with him on a journey into the grey zone where all the most fascinating stories live.”

Read the story here. 

Pandora’s Briefcase

Longreads Pick

It was a dazzling feat of wartime espionage. But does it argue for or against spying?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 10, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,166 words)

Underground Psychology

Longreads Pick

Researchers have been spying on us on the subway. Here’s what they’ve learned.

Source: Slate
Published: Nov 17, 2009
Length: 14 minutes (3,642 words)