hard is it for him to be out of the full time spy business and how hard was it for you to not have him in the full time spy business? gabriel has been a full time spy on and off since he was about 20 years old. he was an art student when the munich olympics massacre happened. he happened to speak fluent german, he was a perfect a lousy soldier, but pretty good with a gun, and he was drafted by the israeli intelligence to be part of the team that went and hunted down the perpetrators of the munich olympics massacre. he s been at this since he was a kid. he is ready to step back. so when he retires, he retires at the beginning of this book, this first book i wanted him to not get drawn back in right away. i wanted him to have a little space, and i wanted i always wanted to write a book that began in the art world and stayed in the art world with
by reading the memo from the outside, it suggests there are problems with u.s. intelligence against all of these countries, which says as we transition from the war on terror to what the cia used to do, big hard targets like the russians and the chinese, maybe the american intelligence service i served in lost a step in terms of tactics and training. those are far harder targets than chasing al qaeda and isis. look, it seems like technology is an issue here, that other countries are getting good at it and they are able to use it to track informants down. i think that s true. think of a couple of aspects of the spy business. number one, tracking people, especially people or w.h.o. trying to communicate outside their countries in a place like russia, iran or china. tracking people through social media, email, text. if you look at the capabilities, take russia for example, of tracking people electronically, remember, this is the same russia that has thousands of people looking at the
second piece? and this is what i want to focus on. that is the digital piece. if you want to talk to somebody on e-mail, if you want to talk to somebody on text, if you ask somebody to travel by a fake name in the age of biometric passports, that is, fingerprints, if you re doing that classic spy business are you sure that you know how to face the chinese or the russians today as opposed to what you would have done 20 years ago. the digital age, chris, has changed the spy business, and one of the questions in the article is is the cia ready for that, are they trained for that? so is it about the game changing and maybe the united states not being up to snuff? or is this about some type of targeted takeout of united states assets? i d say there s two things i d think about. first is them and the second is us.
and this is what i want to focus on. that is the digital piece. if you want to talk to somebody on e-mail, if you want to talk to somebody on text, if you ask somebody to travel by a fake name in the age of biometric passports, that is, fingerprints, if you re doing that classic spy business are you sure that you know how to face the chinese or the russians today as opposed to what you would have done 20 years ago. the digital age, chris, has changed the spy business, and one of the questions in the article is is the cia ready for that, are they trained for that? so is it good the game changing and maybe the united states not being up to snuff? or is this about some type of targeted takeout of united states assets? i d say there s two things i d think about. first is them and the second is us. them is what i just mentioned. if you look at the countries i
informant at all to me is significant. the issue i think, if you read the story, that s really important and that a lot of people are skipping over is something that s fundamental in the spy business. that is access. if you have somebody, and it looks like this person does not have access to leadership circles in the proud boys. if you have somebody that s not that significant, they can still tell you stuff like where are they meeting? when are they getting to the city? what are they talking about? what are the kinds of places they communicate on the internet? it doesn t tell me it s an intelligence failure. it tells me they have access to lower levels of the proud boys that didn t represent leadership decisions. that s it. of course that raises questions about how much credibility you should lend to really what the proud boys, what they were planning, whether it was premeditated versus a mob mentality the day of the insurrection. the fact this was someone lower level and not someone