A writer considers an alternate life as an undercover agent. By Jennifer duBois.

Detainees held by the CIA after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were occasionally stripped naked and photographed in the nude before being sent elsewhere to be interrogated, according to a new report. Although the agency’s intelligence gathering tactics, such as waterboarding, were widely detailed in a controversial report released by a Senate committee in 2014, new accusations involving the use of sexual humiliation on...

The collective weight of all C.I.A. memoirs written since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks could collapse a bookshelf, but Mr. Laux brings a raw perspective to the canon.

Bus ferried students to and from school this week, but officials say explosive materials posed no risk. By Clarence Williams and Moriah Balingit.

In Douglas Laux’s final days as a C.I.A. officer, the futility of his mission prompted him to quote George Orwell to his boss. Mr. Laux had spent months in 2012 working with various Middle Eastern nations that were trying to ship arms to Syria to help disparate rebel groups there. But it had become clear to him that the C.I.A had little ability to control the squabbling and backstabbing among the Saudis, Qataris and other Arabs.

CIA Director John Brennan said Sunday the intelligence agency will not engage in "enhanced interrogation" practices, including waterboarding — even if a future president demands it.

Bradley Birkenfeld is the most significant financial whistleblower of all time, so you might think he'd be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. But today, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is shaking political regimes around the world. Birkenfeld, an American citizen, was a banker working at UBS in Switzerland when he approached the U.S. government with information on massive...

It's fair to say that the interests of governments and the FOSS community are not always aligned. That's not to say that the US government is out to crush every FOSS project or that every FOSS user is on a secret mission to destroy the government. Nonetheless, the relationship is often a strained one. So it shouldn't be surprising that the Open Source community gets a little restless when it learns that the government has its hands in an...

A former undercover C.I.A. agent will be handed over to Italy, where she was convicted of taking part in the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in one of the renditions ordered by the George W. Bush administration, after appellate courts in Portugal, where she lives, turned down her appeal this week. In January, a Portuguese court ruled that the former agent, Sabrina De Sousa, should be handed over to Italy, but the order was stayed...

Two months after Osama bin Laden was killed, the CIA’s top operative in Pakistan was pulled out of the country in an abrupt move vaguely attributed to health concerns and his strained relationship with Islamabad. In reality, the CIA station chief was so violently ill that he was often doubled over in pain, current and former U.S. officials said. Trips out of the country for treatment proved futile. And the cause of his ailment was so mysterious, the officials said, that both...

A tip from a CIA spy to authorities in apartheid-era South Africa led to Nelson Mandela's 1962 arrest, beginning the leader's 27 years behind bars, an article in the Sunday Times reported. The newspaper cited comments reportedly made by Donald Rickard, a former US vice-consul in Durban and CIA operative, to British film director John Irvin.

The CIA inspector general’s office — the spy agency’s internal watchdog — has acknowledged it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved, Yahoo News has learned.

Edward Snowden has responded to reports the CIA inspector general’s office “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate 'torture report' with a stinging rebuttal: “When the CIA destroys something, it's never a mistake.” An intelligence agency was quoted by Yahoo News as saying CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file containing the report, before "inadvertently" destroying a disk with the document on it.

On a cold February night in 1986, Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge became the scene of the cold war’s last ever prisoner exchange – a dramatic hand-over involving a Soviet dissident and Karel Koecher, the only foreign agent ever known to have infiltrated the CIA. Koecher was a Czech citizen who had been living undercover in the US for 21 years. Alternately codenamed Rino, Turian or Pedro, he had moved to America in 1965 to establish himself as a mole within the CIA. Koecher’s KGB case officer, Colonel Alexander Sokolov, would later call him a super-spy.

A man who has appeared on Fox News as a guest "terrorism analyst" was sentenced to 33 months in prison on Friday on charges that he fraudulently claimed to have been a CIA agent for decades, U.S. prosecutors said. Wayne Simmons, 62, of Annapolis, Maryland, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a statement. "Wayne Simmons is a fraud. Simmons has no military or intelligence background, or any skills relevant to the positions he attained through his fraud," said Dana Boente, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Anyone who requests CIA's files on MHCHAOS, Project MERRIMAC or Project RESISTANCE will get a letter like the one below back from the Agency incorrectly summarizing the file. By Michael Best.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki­-moon will propose reopening an inquiry into allegations that Dag Hammarskjold, one of the most revered secretaries-general in the organization’s history, was assassinated by an apartheid-era South African paramilitary organization that was backed by the CIA, British intelligence, and a Belgian mining company, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Tensions flare between the CIA and the Senate in the fight to release the report on torture – leading the agency to spy on its own legislative overseers

One of the more alarming narratives of the 2016 U.S. election campaign is that of the Kremlin's apparent meddling. Last week, the United States formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and the individual accounts of prominent Washington insiders. The hacks, in part leaked by WikiLeaks, have led to loud declarations that Moscow is eager for the victory of Republican nominee Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has unsettled Washington's traditional European allies and even thrown the future of NATO — Russia's bête noire — into doubt.

AS I READ The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, a new book by Salon founder David Talbot, I couldn’t help thinking of an obscure corner of 1970s history: the Safari Club. Dulles — the Princeton man and white shoe corporate lawyer who served as CIA director from 1953 to 1961, still the longest tenure in agency history — died in 1969 before the Safari Club was conceived. And nothing about it appears in The Devil’s Chessboard. But to understand the Safari Club is to understand Allen Dulles and his milieu.