petercgrace.bsky.social

FBI open office in Wellington FBI director Kash Patel opened the office in Wellington on Thursday, meeting with ministers, the police commissioner, and the Directors-General of the NZSIS and GCSB. University of Otago lecturer Dr P...

I talked to Radio NZ this morning on the FBI opening an office in Wellington. www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro...

Our first speaker line up for the Aspen Otago National Security Forum is Chris Taylor of ASPI interviewing the Biden Administration’s emerging tech czar Anne Neuberger on the huge challenges artificial intelligence poses for espionage and analysis. www.otago.ac.nz/foreign-poli...

That’s a pretty multidisciplinary get-up too.

U.S. Government Employee Arrested for Attempting to Provide Classified Information to Foreign Government An IT specialist employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was arrested today for attempting to transmit national defense information to an officer or agent of a foreign government.

The shoe has finally dropped. A USG government employee offered to spy for a foreign government on ideological grounds: his distaste for Trump. I predicted @warontherocks.bsky.social in ~2017 that this would happen. I'll only claim partial prescience because I'm surprised it took so long.

“The panel is tasked with reviewing records to make recommendations to the State Department’s Office of the Historian and Foreign Service Institute for its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series…” thehill.com/homenews/adm...

www.nziia.org.nz/publication/...

Is the national security system robust enough to withstand shock, and fleet-footed enough to respond to black swans? Rolfe asks whether it focuses more on the right processes than it does the right people, and if it ‘lacks imagination’, making NZers less secure.

H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-32 on Stout, World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence 21 April 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-34 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo Editor: Diane Labrosse Commissioning Editor: Sarah-Jane Corke Production Editor: Christopher Ball Pre…

I feel proud and very honored that my book “World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence” (UPK, 2023) is the subject of the latest H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable. I hope this encourages others to work in the field. 1/3

Share but Beware Managing intelligence in the age of Trump

In a guest post for Comment is Freed, Greg Treverton, Chair of the U.S. National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017 under President Obama, considers how allies should deal with the U.S. intelligence community under Trump. (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/s...?

You can’t write about the influence of social scientists on CIA’s intelligence estimates without questioning whether they’d have any flair for it at all. William Harding Jackson, who had written a wartime report on British Intelligence, certainly didn’t think so. 🧵 1/8

Yes, his letters to Kent sympathised with the latter’s huge dissolutionment with State’s treatment of R&A.

McCormack was still championing Sherman Kent when Kent was looking for funding for his Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy book. So clearly R&A was seen as a success. Possibly too, RAND had been persuasive in showing social scientists added value.

The Intel Intellectuals is out in the Fall with Georgetown University Press. Support your starving social scientist now and donate by buying a copy: press.georgetown.edu/Book/The-Int...

In The Ideas Industry, Drezner says the equivocation of SS explanations don't stand a chance against the simple arguments of techopians. My wife says, since I became a “poliwonk” I never give a straight answer to anything. That might be true. The reverse might also be true. 7/8

Yet there was a desperate need to understand the world better. We think of the CW intellectuals: the shopping list pedantry of Hans Morgenthau; Kenneth Waltz’s gruff systemisation. We admire the process they brought to it, at the same time feeling they fell short of the mark. 6/8

Sherman Kent understood very quickly that estimating intentions and capabilities might be a thankless task. “In intelligence, as in other callings, estimating is what you do when you do not know.” 5/8

Raymond Garthoff got a call from his boss asking the size of the Soviet army. It depended, he said, who you counted: border guards, construction troops, did he want divisions and major arms, or manpower? Amory interjected, ‘Don’t give me a dissertation, Ray, just the answer.’ 4/8

Faced with R&A or the Board of Economic Warfare, Arthur Schlesinger Jnr didn’t relish the thought of going to OSS’s thinktank. "Depressing," he said "to be in the middle of a lot of PhD’s once again." But he chose R&A because he felt more at home with polsci than economics. 3/8

Harvard historian William Langer had faced such skepticism before. As head of OSS’s Research and Analysis (R&A), he said Washington’s reception during wartime had been chilly. The professors had been treated with derision and suspicion, and sometimes downright hostility. 2/8

You can’t write about the influence of social scientists on CIA’s intelligence estimates without questioning whether they’d have any flair for it at all. William Harding Jackson, who had written a wartime report on British Intelligence, certainly didn’t think so. 🧵 1/8

Line drawing cartoon. Two men are talking and one says "It's true, Tony Lake says he didn't know anything about what was going on all around him. But what other qualifications does he have to be CIA director?"

Going through some old slides, I ran across this political cartoon about the failed nomination of Anthony Lake to be Director of Central Intelligence in the 1990s. Alas, no signature on this, so I don't know who to credit.

Screenshot of an ArcGIS map of northern Italy from Milan to Venice showing green waypoints and red and green paths

Probably one more session of tidying to go before I've got a complete route network for Italy as published #16thCentury - #18thCentury! I like this view of Northern Italy to show that the #earlymodern routes (red) are not just the Roman roads (green). 🗃️ @emdigit.bsky.social

Thank you Fraser!

It's not an overstatement to say that I really can't wait to read this book. Thank you very much for writing it.

Richard Aldrich says it is "arrestingly well-researched and rich in biographical detail". The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of CIA. Available for pre-order now: press.georgetown.edu/Book/The-Int...

Cambodia’s largest trading partner, by a long way, is China. But China benefits more than Cambodia does. Its most profitable trading partner is the US. Much of its exports to the US is clothing. China however owns the bulk of Cambodia’s clothing factories.

Book publishing is magical. It only feels like a couple of months ago I was series editing this bad boy in the pub … and now voila here it is.

Huge congratulations to @sandbaggerone.bsky.social and Chris Murphy. It’s a fantastic book and a big contribution to the lit!

Thank you Mark for all your kindness!

Hegseth orders ‘disestablishing’ of Office of Net Assessment A March 13 memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth orders all employees of the Office of Net Assessment reassigned to different roles and cancels related contracts.

Hegseth orders 'disestablishing' of Office of Net Assessment

We have a cover! My thanks to Georgetown University Press for their hard work. Photo of the "father of intelligence analysis" Sherman Kent in a very un-pc pose!