Author: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — So-called “transparency advocates” who believe that splaying out all the intelligence activities of America and its allies will result in increased oversight, regulation and accountability have failed to learn the recent lesson of warfare: Whining about what you can’t handle just leads to more secrecy. That’s how we ended up with drones. When […]

PARIS — From the same people who brought you the “National Security Agency Spies on Foreigners” shocker, we now have the “Canada Is Secretly Devious” spectacle. Apparently it’s a shock for some people — namely, journalist Glenn Greenwald, the buddy of NSA contractor turned Russian defector Edward Snowden — to discover how the world has […]

PARIS — Over a year ago, I sent my fingerprints for a standard foreign background check to the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., along with a money order. Both promptly disappeared, never to be seen again. A personal survey of those around me suggested that this was standard operating procedure — which is why […]

PARIS — Boy, was that ever painful, watching Russian President Vladimir Putin attempting to pry U.S. President Barack Obama’s fingers off the Tomahawk missile trigger and convince him not to go ahead with an attack that Obama most likely didn’t want to launch in the first place. America won, and so did Russia. I realize […]

PARIS — You’re probably thinking that there are better things to watch than the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly — like maybe something featuring narcissistic birdbrains or pretentious toddlers. But you can actually get all of the above this week by tuning into the webcast of this annual gathering of world leaders. […]

The Syrian conflict is far from resolved, but with Russia finally stepping in and offering to broker a solution — something this column has long recommended — a stand-down now seems increasingly likely. As the world now mulls Russia’s proposal for Syria to place its chemical arsenal under international control, what have we really learned […]

It’s like we’re living in some kind of alternate universe where traditional paradigms have evaporated around the Syrian conflict. Suddenly, the fate of the world lies almost exclusively in the hands of France and its pragmatic Socialist President Francois Hollande — and as a-right-winger based in France, I’m strangely comforted by this. France is the […]

When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the reported chemical weapons attacks in Syria this week, it was like watching a bad Stanley Kubrick movie cross between “Dr. Strangelove” and “Spartacus.” As in, “I, Spartacus, would like to claim full responsibility for the battles and woes in everyone’s backyard.” This self-sacrificial impetus to take […]

President Obama has demonstrated leadership qualities ranging from poor to nonexistent. But is a president who lacks visible leadership qualities really such a bad thing? Or is he lazy like a fox? A lack of leadership — whether deliberate or accidental — can have a surprising upside, as none other than the French have historically […]

There’s a grade-school-level international game being played. It’s like the one you played as a kid when you would have a friend punch you as hard as possible in the stomach to see how long you could keep a fake smile plastered on your face. “Oh, THAT didn’t hurt AT ALL! Hit me harder, you […]

Major media outlets have featured him as representative of a new generation of “patriot hackers.” He sent an old laptop to the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where it’s now on display. He claims to have launched hacking attacks on websites ranging from jihadist forums to WikiLeaks. Last week, a guest on the syndicated […]

How about a cheat sheet that you can carry around during the summer cookout season to help you strike up conversations with friends about some topics worth worrying about? While people have been contemplating the possibility of New York City being run by mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, whose underwear seems to be engaged in an […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin cares a lot about what you think — about NSA contractor-turned-defector and Russian asylum seeker Edward Snowden, and pretty much everything else — to the point of spending $300 million of state funds last year on the external audiovisual service RT, designed primarily to spoonfeed the Kremlin worldview to a global […]

In January, Egyptian newspapers reported that the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, had traveled to Cairo that month to meet with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s aides about setting up a spy service that would answer to Iran and circumvent the Egyptian military. Were the Egyptian people really going to sit back and allow […]

Ever since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden fled the job he held for three months, taking four laptop computers full of U.S. intelligence with him to Hong Kong and Russia, other countries have become “outraged” by the Snowden disclosures about American intelligence practices. What, exactly, is so alarming? Apparently, the fact that spies actually spy. […]

PARIS — “A traitor is always useful,” a Russian security service friend said to me while discussing NSA contractor turned defector Edward Snowden’s arrival in his country. Snowden has fallen into the open arms of Mother Russia, where he was greeted at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport by a Russian security service contingent. The plan reportedly was […]

PARIS — Anyone who knows anything about the real world of intelligence and espionage knows that James Bond is a joke who wouldn’t survive his first day on the job (and not just because he’d fall asleep during static surveillance). But just try explaining to people that Agent 007 bears absolutely no resemblance to the […]

PARIS — Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor on the lam for having dumped some classified documents on the desk of a British reporter, says that he doesn’t consider himself a hero, but his girlfriend’s blog paints a different picture, with delusions of grandeur dating back more than three months. If only the […]

PARIS — To believe the media narrative, the “Arab Spring” has arrived in yet another Islamic nation — Turkey this time — snowballing at record speed from a single protest over the fate of trees under an urban-development plan. This simplistic explanation might have more merit if Turkey wasn’t the staging ground for Western interests […]

PARIS — The war in Syria is Russia’s to lose. Arguably, it could very well end up being Russia’s biggest test as a player on the world stage since the end of the Cold War. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, are meeting here in Paris this week to […]

PARIS — Given that no one is officially denying it, it’s fairly safe to say that Russia’s domestic security service recently slammed America’s foreign spy service face-first into the Moscow pavement — blond wig and all — in the person of diplomatic staffer and unconfirmed CIA case officer Ryan Fogle. When you’re benefiting from official […]

PARIS — Hardly a day goes by without America-bashers accusing the U.S. of “imperialism” or “interventionism.” Meanwhile, China is largely exempt from that sort of criticism from the same crowd. If only they’d listen to the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and a few other stray voices. In late 2011, I had the […]

PARIS — As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with his Russian counterparts this week in Moscow to discuss Syria, much of the world is wondering what America’s endgame is. But what if we are already witnessing it? What if America’s ultimate exit strategy for the Syrian conflict is to have it grind on […]

PARIS — As dignitaries gather in London to pay their respects to one of modern history’s greatest leaders, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who died last week at the age of 87, the riff-raff of Great Britain have emerged, subsidized by either the state or by mummy and daddy, to rejoice in her death. […]

PARIS — The left revels in sex scandals involving preachy conservative moralists, but when members of the left get caught up in seedy financial scandals, so perverted and twisted is their relationship with money that the effect can be equally jaw-dropping and salacious. Former French Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac, who left his Socialist government post […]

PARIS — The left revels in sex scandals involving preachy conservative moralists, but when members of the left get caught up in seedy financial scandals, so perverted and twisted is their relationship with money that the effect can be equally jaw-dropping and salacious. Former French Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac, who left his Socialist government post […]

PARIS — Be careful about how you interpret what you’re seeing, as your eyes might be deceiving you. That’s the advice I offered viewers the other day on Russia’s global TV network’s flagship program, “CrossTalk,” when explaining that capitalism isn’t facing any sort of crisis, but rather is just being subverted by socialists, Wall Street […]