Articles

CIPHER BRIEF INTEL REPORT — During a recent visit to Kyiv centered around The Cipher Brief’s Kyiv Economic and Security Forum, a small Cipher Brief delegation met with a variety of representatives from government, business, and civil society, who conveyed a consistent and compelling message of unity and determination to win the war that Russia started in 2014 with the invasion of Crimea, and since February 24, 2022, when it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Hostile foreign states are using weaponized information to attack the United States. Russia and China are disseminating disinformation about domestic U.S. race relations and COVID-19 to undermine and discredit the U.S. government. These information warfare attacks, which threaten U.S. national security, may seem new, but they are not. Using an applied history methodology and a wealth of previously classified archival records, this article uses two case studies to reveal how and why a hostile foreign state, the Soviet Union, targeted America with similar disinformation in the past

Private sector intelligence is on its way to professionalization, but the road is a long one and the destination is uncertain. Studies of intelligence professionalization have not yet systematically analyzed private sector intelligence, a field that focuses on mitigating geopolitical and security risk and supporting decision-making. In this article, Maria Robson Morrow draws on years of empirical research of private sector intelligence with reference to five key pillars of professionalization: a shared identity, knowledge advancement, training and education, a code of ethics, and certification. She concludes with implications for professionalizing private sector intelligence and proposes further research on this understudied field.

Protests against racism erupt in cities across America. A White House, under siege, believes a vast conspiracy is at work, and, to uncover it, instigates a policy to spy on Americans. This is not the United States in 2020, but half a century earlier. Using a wealth of declassified records, this article explores a domestic intelligence collection program (CHAOS) instigated by two  successive US administrations and conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In an interview,  the Intelligence Project's Calder Walton examines the recent assessment from entire U.S. intelligence community on the impacts of climate change on U.S. national security.

Covert action has long been a controversial tool of international relations. However, there is remarkably little public understanding about whether it works and, more fundamentally, about what constitutes success in this shadowy arena of state activity. This article distills competing criteria of success and examines how covert actions become perceived as successes.

This article, an exercise of applied history, has two aims: first, to understand the history of Soviet disinformation, and second, to make sense of Western efforts to counter it during the Cold War. Doing so provides policy-relevant conclusions from history about countering disinformation produced by Russia and other authoritarian regimes today.

Delta Force commandos took two Islamic State fighters as prisoners and a trove of intelligence from the now-destroyed compound where AbuBakral-Baghdadi, the world’s most wanted terrorist, had been hiding, officials said Monday.