The weapons a country fights with, the software that aims them, and the officers who command them were for a century things a state owned and could not put up for sale. That arrangement is coming apart. One by one these assets are being bought by private companies,...
How a Citizen Bought a Kidnapping From Israel’s Spy-for-Hire
On New Year’s Eve in 2023, on the Danish side of the border with Germany, two children stood near their father’s house watching fireworks. The boy was ten, his sister thirteen. A team of masked men in black stormed the house, beat the father to the ground, and took...
Former Spymasters, a Taped Mouth, and the Market in Cross-Border Snatching
Just after midnight on New Year’s Day 2024, a man and his two children stood near the harbor in the Danish town of Gråsten, watching fireworks over the water a short walk from the house where the children had been living. A witness later told a court in Hamburg that...
The Spy Chief Who Was Caught by Accident
In February 2003, the intelligence that August Hanning's service had handed to Washington turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council, in the case for invading Iraq. On the morning of 6 October 2026, masked officers walked Hanning,...
The Usefulness of a Massacre
On Sunday morning, without notice, a private plane carried Benjamin Netanyahu out of Israel and into Abu Dhabi. Channel 12 broke the story while he was still on the ground. A day later both governments confirmed the meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, calling it a...
The Enemy the Alliance Needs
On the morning of August 6, near the coastal town of Furuvik, a Russian couple named Semyon Rusanov and Tatyana Milenina were declared a threat to the security of the Swedish state. They had lived in Spain for five years. They opposed the war in Ukraine. They had not...
Washington Is Underwriting the Proliferation It Went to War To Stop
The Trump administration sent Congress its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. Asked what the deal permits, the president wrote: There will be no enrichment of material. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has said the opposite. The agreement...
Baiting Turkey: Israel’s Strategy in Syria
The base at Abu al-Duhur had been dead for thirteen years. Wrecked in the Syrian war, out of service since 2012, its runways cratered and its hangars stripped, it sat in Idlib province about 60 kilometers from the Turkish border, useful to no air force. On the night...
The Two Terrorists: Britain Jails Tweets While the West Crowns al-Qaeda’s Man in Damascus
Two men, one word. Next Monday, at Kingston Crown Court in London, a 72-year-old grandfather goes on trial for terrorism; the evidence is a tweet of seven words, and the maximum sentence is 14 years. Nine months ago, a man who founded al-Qaeda's Syrian branch and...
The Bomb in Monaco and a Torture Room Near Kyiv
They took her trainers. That is the detail that survives, once the rest is stripped away – the belongings removed from the corpse, the shoes pulled from her feet, the shallow hole in woods sixty kilometers west of Kyiv. Anastasiia Berezovska had been shot in the back...


