How many dead swine does it take to fill a Chinese river? That and other issues occupied my limited attention span as I padded out to the lap-top way too early. I can’t quite get the hang of the Daylight Savings change. It must be creeping fogey-ism. Thousands of pigs, apparently. A horrid thought. Glad […]

Vickie-the-Maid was getting her week together, and called to tell me to clean up the condo in preparation for her monthly ministry on Tuesday. You know the drill: when the maids are coming, it is time to actually pick up and organize the books plopped on the wing of the armchair, open face down, the […]

(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 […]