(Sarah Palin. Image: Wikimedia Commons) I wish you could see the banner next to the message screen on my laptop. It startled me when I dragged my butt out of bed this morning to discover that the clocks had moved on me- the aware ones, anyway. The dumb ones still were telling me I was […]

You know, we go back and forth about the issues that really seem important in The Daily. Just this morning I looked at the picture of the pissant current dictator of the DPRK- hell, I will insert it here to show the quality of this surreal Virginia morning as the light is coming up at […]

No story this morning. I (had) fourteen minutes before the inexorable clock has me out the door for the wilds of Chantilly and an important meeting that requires my physical presence. I got up in time- yet still couldn’t get it together. I was going to weave a tale about the new alarmist report of […]

(Pitcher-in-Chief Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, 28 July 1954 – 5 March 2013. RIP.) I think that from the time I left the academy I was oriented toward a revolutionary movement… The Hugo Chávez who entered there was a kid from the hills, a Ilanero with aspirations of playing professional baseball. Four years later, a second-lieutenant […]

(Photo of Big Smoke, a motor yacht used by the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 157, for intelligence collection operations in the Mediterranean. Photo from Jeffrey Richelson, “Task Force 157: The U.S. Navy’s Secret Intelligence Service, 1966-77,” Intelligence and National Security 11 (1996), 118; it is used because I had to buy the article for $34 […]

I am often asked if I have served various places around the world, and how many languages I spoke. However, maybe on this occasion, it was good that I didn’t know one word of French. Had I known, I may not be here today. We arrived at the Gar du Nord station in Paris on […]

This is the third and penultimate episode of Big Smoke. I hope to do a brief appreciation of the organization he served, and how Naval Intelligence acquired and divested itself of a Human Intelligence capability. Which included yachts with topless female crewmembers to deflect resistance to close-aboard passes of Soviet warships for important collection missions. […]

Sorry- I was going to complete Big Smoke’s tale of counter-intelligence on the Cote D’Azur this morning, but for a variety of perfectly good reasons I got involved in an editorial project that was going to take too much time and I blissfully dove into it so I would not have anything hanging over my […]

Reader’s Note: The world ended this morning. Sequestration is in effect. Accordingly, I have scheduled meetings in distant Fairfax County through the day in case the capital spontaneously combusts. We are still twenty days out from the official start of Spring and have no Pope at the moment, but I am going to treat the […]

(The United States Embassy Paris, near the Place de la Concorde.) The US Embassy is an impressive pile of stone located near the bustling Place de la Concord. We were waved through the gate and the Captain slid the black Ford sedan into a parking place near the front entrance. We were waved in by […]