Why It Matters: Support for Ukraine could be at risk. While some U.S. officials are becoming more comfortable with Ukraine’s covert attacks on Russia, concerns remain about the possibility of miscalculation by Ukraine while conducting such operations. Sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines was exactly the kind of operation that would concern the United States — […]
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A defense lawyer was making a constitutional argument in the Guantánamo war court that the clock had run out on a case involving terrorist attacks in Indonesia 20 years ago when he was suddenly drowned out by white noise. “It is repugnant …” were the last words the public heard from Lt. Ryan P. Hirschler, a […]
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To mark the 20th anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq, the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, stood in the lobby of the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., and sought to exorcise the ghosts of the prewar intelligence failures that haunt the building to this day. Addressing some 100 C.I.A. officials on March 19, Mr. […]
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Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman implicated in a vast leak of classified documents, was fixated on weapons, mass shootings, shadowy conspiracy theories — and proving he was in the right, and in the know. Even as he relished the respectability and access to intelligence he gained through his military service and top secret clearance, […]
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WASHINGTON — For more than a year, the notion that Vladimir V. Putin is seriously ill has been a subject of lurid speculation, internet video forensics — and potential wartime propaganda, even though U.S. officials say there is no evidence the Russian leader is dying. Now, a document among the trove of leaked classified materials […]
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The Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified documents to a small group of gamers had been posting sensitive information months earlier than previously known and to a much larger chat group, according to online postings reviewed by The New York Times. In February 2022, soon after the invasion of Ukraine, a user profile matching […]
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GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In court this week, a psychologist who waterboarded prisoners for the Central Intelligence Agency rolled up a towel, wrapped it around the neck of a criminal defense lawyer, and slowly pulled the lawyer toward him and up on her toes — a dramatic re-enactment of practices used on a Saudi detainee […]
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WASHINGTON — A month before President George W. Bush first sent American troops into Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was warned that the war might end up costing the United States billions of dollars. Mr. Rumsfeld’s reply to retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the American tasked with overseeing Iraq’s postwar reconstruction, would constitute a […]
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WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that a foreign adversary is “very unlikely” to be responsible for the mysterious ailments known as Havana syndrome that American spies and diplomats have reported experiencing at missions around the world since 2016, officials announced on Wednesday. The assessment builds on interim findings from the Central Intelligence Agency […]
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WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is expected this week to ramp up a political battle over a high-profile warrantless surveillance program that traces back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A 2008 statute that legalized the program, known as Section 702, will expire at the end of December unless Congress votes to […]
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GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Over the years, the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture in its secret overseas prisons after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been revealed in government leaks, testimony and a damning Senate investigation. But an expert’s testimony this week in pretrial hearings at Guantánamo Bay offered […]
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WASHINGTON — A year ago, the United States did something extraordinary — it released previously classified intelligence that exposed Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine. Last week, Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, made a similar move when he warned China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, against providing weapons to Russia. In a previous […]
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A few days before Christmas, a convoy of security vehicles invaded a quiet corner of Weilheim, a quaint Bavarian town of pastel squares and fastidiously kept cobblestone streets. Their target seemed as unassuming as the setting: a local children’s soccer coach. Before then, nothing had stood out about the man, fellow coaches recalled. He was […]
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Julian Barnes contributed reporting. The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, […]
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BELIZE CITY — On his first day of freedom, the former Guantánamo Bay prisoner Majid Khan prayed without anyone watching him for the first time in two decades. He ate a lunch of fresh fish from the Caribbean with his new hosts, fumbled with his first smartphone, sipped a nonalcoholic piña colada with his lawyers and […]
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The echo from the episode, though, serves as a reminder that powerful countries regularly spy on one another, which generally becomes a problem when it goes public or leads to misunderstanding or tragedy. In 1983, a Soviet warplane shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after it veered into Russian airspace at night, killing 269 […]
Read MoreA damning 2014 Senate investigation of the covert program disclosed what the C.I.A. did to Mr. Khan when he went on a hunger strike in his second year of detention: His captors “infused” a purée of pasta, sauce, nuts, raisins and hummus into his rectum. His lawyers called it rape. At his sentencing in 2021, […]
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