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Our team of veteran reporters offers original reporting 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 in the hit 1975 Watergate-zeitgeist movie).

You may remember our founding Editor-in-chief Jeff Stein 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 daily). In the 1980s he was deputy foreign news editor at UPI. Over the years he has also freelanced investigative pieces for a wide variety of magazines, from Playboy, GQ, Esquire and Rolling Stone to The New Republic, The Nation and Italy’s l’Espresso.

And this: 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 editors.

They include:

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

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

*David Charney, a reknowned psychiatrist specializing in minds of insider spies. He met weekly for a year interviewing three moles including Robert Hanssen. Find his white papers on his website, NOIR4USA.com

*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. During the 2020 campaign, he was 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 provided support to the Obama Administration’s effort to transfer Guantanamo detainees. She now directs the security and intelligence studies program at King University in Bristol, Tennessee.

*Jim Laurie, who roamed the world first for NBC News (1972-1978) and ABC News (1978-2000). He is the author of THE LAST HELICOPTER: Two Lives in Indochina (2020), a memoir of Cambodia and Vietnam.

*Ronald Marks, a former CIA official, who was intelligence council to two Senate majority leaders. Now an IT executive, he is also a visiting professor at Geo. Mason U.

*Elaine Monaghan, who reported from London, Moscow, Kyiv, Minsk, Kosovo, Ireland and Foggy Bottom for Reuters, and authored the column, Abroad in America for The Times online. With former CIA officer Tyler Drumheller, she coauthored a memoir, On The Brink.

*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), a documentarian, and musician. His latest book is his first fiction "Gaia."

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