The Modern Spy And It's Soviet Roots Part 2: The mom who fought al Qaeda, the spies who caught Ames, more!
Plus: Elizebeth Smith Friedman: The Woman All Spies Fear!
Meet A Spy: Melissa Mahle
Ms. Mahle is a former US intelligence officer and expert on the Middle East and counterterrorism.
As a field operative for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), she worked against many of the key challenges to US national security, including running operations against al-Qaeda terrorists and illicit networks selling weapons of mass destruction.
She received a Presidential Letter of Appreciation for her work on the Middle East Peace Process and numerous exceptional performance awards from the CIA for her recruitment of agents and collection of intelligence. Ms. Mahle is the author of the book Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA from Iran-Contra to 9/11.
(Photo: The CIA team that brought down Aldrich Ames.)
The FBI and CIA suspected Russia had a dangerous spy working in the US in the early 1990s. But who was it? The newest book in Bryan Denson’s “FBI Files” series for younger readers Catching a Russian Spy: Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. and the Case of Aldrich Ames explores the race to uncover the traitor.
Denson will be joined by Leslie Wiser, Jr., the agent who ran the Ames operation out of the Washington Metropolitan Field Office, and Sandy Grimes, a CIA officer who was determined to find the evidence that Ames was spying. Together they will explain how Ames betrayed his country, caused US assets to be killed, and ultimately was brought to justice.
Elizebeth Smith Friedman: The Woman All Spies Fear
In the summer of 1916, a young woman from Indiana set out to solve a mystery. It involved an oddball millionaire, a volume of Shakespeare’s plays, and the secret world of codes and ciphers. Within a year, she had transformed herself into one of America’s top code breakers.
During World War I, Elizebeth Smith Friedman cracked thousands of messages, but that was only the beginning of her brilliant career. In the 1920s and 1930s, she pitted her wits against the mob. When World War II broke out, she hunted Nazi spies. Despite her fame, she was a woman of many secrets, and later she was pushed into the shadows.
To get the true measure of her hidden life, award-winning historian Amy Butler Greenfield sifted the truth from the misdirections and myths to write The Woman All Spies Fear: Code Breaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman and Her Hidden Life. From the “doll woman” spy to bootleggers, join us for a conversation with Greenfield about the new facts she discovered about the enigma of this astonishing woman’s life.
Behind the paywall: The man who created our computer world, who broke a German code and was able to give information that led to the British defeating the Germans in many battles including the crucial Battle Of The Atlantic, Alan Turing should have been an acclaimed hero of World War 2 and the creator of our computer world. Instead, he was arrested, castrated and forced to take poison by the British government. His crime?
He was gay. Behind the paywall, at last his story can be told.
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