If President Obama, senior policymakers and members of Congress feel that they were “caught off guard” by the events in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere in the Middle East, maybe they should focus the blame on themselves. Intelligence does not “trickle down” to the president: he is the intelligence...

CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists: two. Despite a major escalation in the number of unmanned Predator strikes being carried out...

In many ways, the personal injury lawsuit looked routine: In late 2001, a government employee and his family sued the agency he worked for, saying it had placed them in a mold-contaminated home that made them sick and required nearly all their possessions to be destroyed. But this was no ordinary...

TODAY, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed glasses, the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the vast country, nearly...

The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks. Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F. The irreverence...

Besieged by criminal inquiries and Congressional investigators, how could the world’s most controversial private security company drum up new business? By battling pirates on the high seas, of course. In late 2008, Blackwater Worldwide, already under fire because of accusations of abuses by its...

The release of a huge tranche of U.S. diplomatic cables has laid bare the primary risk associated with the U.S. government’s attempt to encourage better information-sharing: Someone is bound to leak. The U.S. intelligence community came under heavy criticism after Sept. 11, 2001, for having...

The most draining aspect of my job is reading, every day, intelligence reports describing the plotting of terrorists who are bent on maiming and murdering people in this country.” Those words, spoken last week, come from the first public speech given by a director of Britain’s Secret Intelligence...

Defense Department officials, in an attempt to prevent distribution of an Afghan war memoir they say contains intelligence secrets, are negotiating to purchase and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing, according to two people familiar with the dispute. The publication of “Operation...