As combat aircraft from Russia and the United States shadow each other over Syrian airspace, director Steven Spielberg has created an Oscar-quality film about what happened when the Soviet Union shot down an American spy plane near Sverdlovsk on May 1st 1960.
The event was a major embarrassment to the Eisenhower administration, which got caught by its own lies. The U-2 affair effectively scuttled the Paris “peace summit” between Eisenhower, Khruschev, deGaulle and MacMillan that was...
“Even the leaders were unsure about what they would do next or how to avoid fatal missteps. Each side called on its intelligence services to supply that knowledge.”
The quote is from an article by Markus Wolf and Tennent Bagley, two icons of the Cold War intelligence community with opposing ideologies writing in 1997 in the Los Angeles Times as a team about how in August, 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall surprised the best and the brightest in the West.
They wrote a review of...
Although the government of Russian president Vladimir Putin has authorized writing off 90% of Cuba’s $32 billion debt Kremlin policy toward the Castro regime is characterized by caution. Foreign direct investment by the Russian Federation in Cuba remains insignificant.
But Cuba’s economic future is up for grabs and Brazil’s socialist elite is playing the non-aligned card, taking big risks in a gambit to control part of the action.
Moving forward with a strategy driven by members...
... relations and the thorny issue of recent leaks over data collection programs conducted by the United States that have drawn the ire of citizens and governments everywhere. Some correspondents were preparing tough questions to ask Kerry about the “spying.” After all, O Globo, Brazil’s largest media organization, did use maverick American journalist Glenn Greenwald to stir up nationalist sentiment over what was not direct “spying” or “casing” of individuals, but ...
