Free Republic

Edward S. Miller, a lifetime FBI man of high rank and stature, recently passed away at the age of 89. A good man and good American, Miller, who was also a veteran of World War II (Okinawa), faithfully served his family, country, and God. He also faithfully served the agency that hired him in 1950, as well as the longtime head of that agency, J. Edgar Hoover. I was fortunate to spend a long Saturday afternoon with Ed Miller back in March, at long last meeting him after previously only corresponding with him. (He was an alumnus of Grove City...

Germany has canceled surveillance accords dating from the late 1960s with the United States and Britain in the wake of revelations about vast US online spying. Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Friday the move was “necessary and proper” amid the debate on data privacy protection sparked by the snooping scandal which also ignited uproar in Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the issue with US President Barack Obama on his June visit and has come under pressure in the run-up to September elections over Germany’s knowledge of it. …

SR-71 Blackbird: The Cold War's ultimate spy plane Colonel Rich Graham spent 15 years as a Blackbird pilot and wing commander. He told BBC Future some of his incredible stories about the world's fastest plane. After a Soviet surface-to-air missile battery showdown with a USAF U-2 spy plane near the closed city of Sverdlovsk in 1960, the US government realised they needed a reconnaissance plane that could fly even higher – and outrun any missile and fighter launched against it. The answer was the SR-71 Blackbird. It was closer to a spaceship than an aircraft, made of titanium to withstand...

American POWS sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area. The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to...

Trans-Atlantic relations plunged at the weekend as Berlin, Brussels and Paris all demanded that Washington account promptly and fully for new disclosures on the scale of the US National Security Agency’s spying on its European allies. As further details emerged of the huge reach of US electronic snooping on Europe, Berlin accused Washington of treating it like the Soviet Union, “like a cold war enemy”. … The reports of NSA snooping on Europe—and on Germany in particular—went well beyond previous revelations of electronic spying said to be focused on identifying suspected terrorists, extremists and organized criminals. Der Spiegel reported that...

The photo of President Obama and Russian boss Vladimir Putin sitting glum-faced at the G8 summit sparked talk of a new Cold War. Let’s hope not, because we would lose this time. Looking at them, I had one thought: In a showdown, my money is on Putin. In fact, whether negotiating over Syria or arm-wrestling, I want a Putin on our side. He knows his country’s national interests and is prepared to pursue them. We, on the other hand, have a president who increasingly lives over the rainbow. World disorder is growing by the day, and Obama seems not to...

Well apparently a president can’t just make new lows for respect of American moral authority in one single term and then let it go at that. Nope. Apparently after getting stiff-armed by our ideological enemies once in the first Obama term- turning his back on American values and getting called out on it- the administration felt the need to demonstrate crumbling American might and values by going back to that well early in the second term too. During the first term, we suffered the embarrassment of the Chinese Communist who publicly lectured Obama about straying away from capitalism and taking...

...Fifty years after the Profumo affair erupted, Christine Keeler, now 71, has confessed she played a role in a high-placed spy ring... ...she says: 'However I dress it up, I was a spy and I am not proud of it. The truth is that I betrayed my country. ...The scandal hit the headlines after seven shots were fired at a house in a quiet Marylebone mews by a jilted boyfriend of Keeler in December 1962. It then emerged the then 19-year-old Keeler had been sleeping with former Secretary of State for War John Profumo, then 48, and a handsome Russian...

“A confidential message from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, reproduced in [Diana] West’s new book, told [White House aide Harry] Hopkins that a ‘continuing’ investigation had discovered that Russian diplomat (and Comintern agent) Vasily Zarubin had made a payment to U.S. Communist Party official Steve Nelson to help place espionage agents ‘in industries engaged in secret war production … so that information could be obtained for transmittal to the Soviet Union.’ This information had come from a ‘bug’ at Nelson’s home in Oakland, California, through which the FBI first learned of the Soviet effort (code-named ‘Enormous’) to obtain the atomic...

On the evening of 23 March, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered a televised address about defence and national security. "Let me share with you a vision of the future," the president began in what was a last-minute addition to the half-hour speech. In Reagan's vision, we would "embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive." It was the first mention of Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), the plan to change America's nuclear posture from offensive to defensive. His goal was to render the Soviet nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Reagan's admirers praised SDI...

A camera hidden inside of a coat jacket, controlled by a hand held mechanism. A wrist–gun that is attached to a glove, can be hidden under a sleeve. A special listening device. A 4.5mm gun hidden inside of a lipstick. A gun hidden inside of a tobacco pipe. A camera hidden inside of a pen. This gun fires a dual cyanide charge that can kill almost instantly. Cufflinks with recessions to hide things An ancient coin that has a recess in it to hide things. A jacket button that can be turned into a compass. A transmitting device inside of...

Margaret Thatcher, one of the most significant leaders of the 20th century, died yesterday at age 87. A model of convictional leadership, Margaret Thatcher became almost universally known as Britain's "Iron Lady." In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher moved into No. 10 Downing Street and changed the course of British history. Beyond this, Lady Thatcher changed the terms of debate on both sides of the Atlantic and left a legacy of leadership that should inspire generations to come. Born October 13, 1925 in the village of Grantham, Margaret Roberts was soon recognized as an unusually bright and forceful child. Her father,...

STUTTGART, Germany — The U.S. Army’s 69-year history of basing main battle tanks on German soil quietly ended last month when 22 Abrams tanks, a main feature of armored combat units throughout the Cold War, embarked for the U.S. The departure of the last M-1 Abrams tanks coincides with the inactivation of two of the Army’s Germany-based heavy brigades. Last year, the 170th Infantry out of Baumholder disbanded. And the 172nd Separate Infantry Brigade at Grafenwöhr is in the process of doing the same. On March 18, the remaining tanks were loaded up at the 21st Theater Sustainment Command’s railhead...

Cancelled: BritainÂ’s High-Mach Heartbreak The TSR-2 bomber was a case of aeronautical genius foiled by political foolishness. For an American teenager, 1963 was a great year to be living in London. Thanks to my dadÂ’s job in international marketing, I was a Beatles fan six months before my pals back home knew there was such a thing as a Beatle. And as a budding airplane buff, I had a front-row seat for the emergence of another symbol of British national pride: the TSR-2 supersonic bomber, a twin-engine, low-level hotshot that I thought was the coolest-looking airplane ever. Shivering in my...

'It was one of the most audacious acts of the Cold War which could have come straight from the pages of a spy novel. Georgi Markov was jabbed with an umbrella which fired a poison pellet into his leg as he crossed Waterloo Bridge. He died three days later – and for almost 35 years mystery has surrounded the whereabouts of his killer. Now the prime suspect has been tracked down to a small Austrian town where he works as an antiques dealer. Francesco Gullino, 66, who was known by his Communist handlers as 'Agent Piccadilly', lives in a rundown...

The British government sought on Tuesday to limit the information it would disclose at a planned inquest into the death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former officer in the K.G.B. who succumbed to radiation poisoning in London more than six years ago. The coroner hearing the case said that it may now be postponed. “Due to the complexity of the investigation which necessarily precedes the hearings,” the coroner, Sir Robert Owen, said, “it may not be possible to adhere” to the planned May 1 start date for the hearings. The inquest would be the first — and probably the only...

Have we waged the wrong war against North Korea? Then, can our new President Park Geun-hye redirect our strategy and finish that feral beast once and for all? These are complicated questions but the ghost of one “complicated simple” man may beg to answer from his grave: Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States who is credited with giving the Soviet Union a final push toward the brink of collapse during his 1981-1989 reign.

That an Ivy League historian takes exception to the idea of American Exceptionalism may not surprise. That the skeptic is not a man of the Left is rather noteworthy. “The term did not even exist until the middle of the Twentieth Century,” University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall claimed in remarks at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Alexis deTocqueville used it as an adjective but it did not get picked up,” McDougall said. The Catholic Church and the Communist International used the term in the early 20th Century, according to McDougall. Both the Church and the Communist party fretted over it...