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Our team of veteran reporters offers original reporting, scoops and analysis on national security topics, with an emphasis on U.S. intelligence operations, both foreign and domestic.

We also riff on the latest in spy books, TV and film by the likes of James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor (shortened to three days for the hit 1975 Watergate-zeitgeist movie), and Henry Allen, a former U.S. Marine in South Vietnam and longtime feature writer at The Washington Post, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000. 

You may remember Jeff as the Spytalk columnist for years at Newsweek, and before that, at The Washington Post and before that, Congressional Quarterly (where he was also the founding editor of the groundbreaking CQ/Homeland Security). In the 1980s he was deputy foreign news editor at UPI. Over the years he has also authored three books and freelanced investigative pieces for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, from the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe to GQ, Esquire, Playboy and Rolling Stone to The New Republic, Huffington Post, Salon.com and Foreign Policy. In the late 1960s, he served as a case officer with US Army intelligence in Vietnam.

At SpyTalk, he’s aided by a sterling roster of veteran journalists as contributing writers and editors.

They include:

*Jonathan Broder, a former CQ foreign news editor, Newsweek writer and foreign correspondent for the A.P. and Chicago Tribune in the Middle East

*Matthew Brazil, a former US government officer in Beijing and co-author of the authoritative, Chinese Communist Espionage, An Intelligence Primer.

*John Dinges, a former NPR News managing editor, Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of Journalism Emeritus at Columbia University, and author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terror to Three Continents.

*Peter Eisner, a prolific investigative author and former deputy foreign editor at The Washington Post. Today he’s also co-host of the influential podcast, Unconventional Threat.

*Maria Hartwig, professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Director & Co-Founder, Project Aletheia. She is an internationally recognized expert on deception, counter-deception, and interviewing and interrogation strategy.

*Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst on East Asia who now directs the security and intelligence studies program at King University in Bristol, Tennessee.

*Filip Kovacevic, a leading expert on the history of Russian intelligence at the University of San Francisco.

*Olga Lautman, analyst and researcher focused on Kremlin, organized crime, intelligence and Eastern Europe, and senior fellow at The Center for European Policy Analysis. Co-Host of Kremlin File podcast.

*Elaine Monaghan, former Reuters correspondent in London, Moscow, Kyiv, Minsk, Kosovo and Ireland, and Washington columnist for The Times. Co-author of On The Brink, the memoir of CIA officer Tyler Drumheller.

*Patricia Ravalgi, former staffer at the House Intelligence Committee, the FBI and the U.S. Central Command.

*Gus Russo, a nine-time author (including two books on the Kennedy assassination), documentarian, and musician. His latest book is his first fiction, Gaia.

Stars all. Subscribe to get full access to these writers and our website. Never miss an update.

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