The baseball season is well underway and, I don’t know about you, but I’m still struggling to identify who’s who in the lineups of my favorite teams—my legacy hometown Boston Red Sox and adopted hometown Washington Nationals—both rebuilding with rookies and new faces acquired over the winter.
Which got me thinking about the new additions to our already outstanding roster of SpyTalk contributors, whom you may not have recognized as they came aboard in recent weeks. For those who haven’t been following along, I’m super happy to introduce them.
Our most recent addition is my old friend and long ago Washington, D.C. softball teammate, Michael Isikoff. Mike’s accomplishments over his decades as a top investigative reporter at The Washington Post, Newsweek, NBC News and Yahoo News are too numerous to enumerate here—you can find them on his Wikipedia page—but suffice it to say that his national security chops speak for themselves and are welcome here. His most recent book, coauthored with his former Newsweek and Yahoo News colleague Daniel Klaidman, is Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election.
A few weeks ago, meanwhile, we welcomed to our pages Henry R. Schlesinger, an author and journalist who has been writing about things espionage for more than two decades, particularly in the realm of intelligence technologies, counterterrorism and law enforcement. His most recent book is Honey Trapped: Sex, Betrayal, and Weaponized Love. In 2009, he was a coauthor, with Robert Wallace and H.Keith Melton, of Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda. His work has also appeared in Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Technology Review, and Smithsonian magazine.
And last but hardly least, veteran journalist and author Seth Hettena came to us in December with a proposal to assemble a weekly intel news roundup called SpyWeek. It quickly became our most popular new feature. Based in San Diego, Seth is a former correspondent for The Associated Press whose work has also been featured in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times . Here at SpyTalk he also broke the attention-getting Exclusive: FBI Agents Accuse CIA of 9/11 Coverup. He is also the author of Trump/Russia: A Definitive History and Feasting on the Spoils: The Life and Times of Randy "Duke" Cunningham, History's Most Corrupt Congressman.
These sterling three join our estimable roster of regular contributors, which includes Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post writer and author Henry Allen, longtime Middle East hand (and my former Newsweek colleague) Jonathan Broder, Chinese intelligence expert and author Matthew Brazil, and Peter Eisner, an award winning former foreign correspondent, editor and reporter at The Washington Post, Newsday, and the Associated Press. His books include MacArthur’s Spies and The Freedom Line, the story of young resistance workers who rescued Allied fighter pilots during World War II.
That’s our spring lineup. Sorry, no playing cards. . .yet. Read more about our whole clubhouse here.
Lordy, you may have to rebirth as SpyCountry. Wow.
Great opening day lineup!