From Christopher Dickey, the author of "Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South" and "Securing the City," this site provides updates and footnotes on history, espionage, terrorism, fanaticism, policing and counterinsurgency linked to Dickey's columns for The Daily Beast and his other writings; also, occasional dialogues, diatribes, and contributions from friends.
The first thing I ever wrote for The Washington Post was a little chapter about statues in a 1975 guidebook to D.C. that is now long out of print, and subsequent editions dropped my contributions. But given the current debate about monuments and protests in Lafayette Park, these pages may be of interest, or even amusement.
Beginning in November 2018 and well into 2019, virtually every weekend protests taking place in the name of the gilets jaunes were staged around the country and, especially in Paris, turned into violent confrontations with the police by groups that identified themselves as anarchists and, yes, "Antifa." The graffiti slogans they left behind make that clear.
On December 1, 2018, presumed members of this group broke into the Arc de Triomphe and destroyed or defaced important artifacts. Others burned banks and cafés and cars. I posted several photographs of the rioting and the police response immediately after the initial violence. Those can be found here. These I selected mainly for the graffiti, which speaks for itself.
CLASS against Class .... GILETS JAUNES=ANTIFA - Graffiti on Arc de Triomphe from Dec. 1, 2018
----UTION, What else? - in English on fallen sign. French and Palestinian flag in background. March 2019
Trashed and looted boutique, March 2019
French pun: No quarter (Cartier) for the bourgeois
Child looking at paving stone projectile at closed entrance to the Arc. Circled A is for Anarchist.
MAKE IT BURN and SWEPT AWAY BY A REVOLUTIONARY WAVE on torched Belle Époque mansion at the Étoile. December 2018
Liberty defaced. Inside the Arc during repairs after Black Bloc vandalism.
VICTORY THROUGH CHAOS
The Black Blocs trashed Fouquet's, and the gilets jaunes amused themselves.
Torched news stand, March 2019
Borrowing a line from the U.S.
Dec. 1, 2018: "THE YELLOW VESTS WILL TRIUMPH" written on Arch of Triumph.
December 2019. "WE'LL BE BACK" with Anarchist symbol. And they certainly were.
From Peter Beard to Cold war spies, the French resistance, and Sir Richard Francis Burton—some of my "long reads" of recent years.
Lockdown Weekend Reading: Forays Into Friendships and History
Over the last few years I have written quite a few rather personal pieces, some of them exploring friendships, some of them bits of history that interested me, some of them both. I am thinking of reading some of them aloud as a sort of informal podcast. If you have a preference, let me know.
They are posted here by publication date in reverse chronological order dating back to 2016, which means the subjects appear random, but one might discern certain threads that run through them.
Trapped in my apartment I pulled Joan's books off the shelf. I wanted to learn again from her meticulous observation of detail, character and setting, and her great sense of irony.
Many of us worldwide are stuck at home, which means it's the perfect opportunity to escape with a great travel book. Our first selection? Aldous Huxley's "Along the Road."
The most powerful reporters—and spies—in America were haunted by the death of Mary Meyer, President Kennedy's murdered lover. They knew her well. What secrets were in her diary?
During the same summer that he wrote "The Amiable Fleas," now published in English for the first time, the American author also appears to have been gathering intel for the Agency.
The only training she ever got as a spy was from her lover. But Elizabeth Bentley managed to manipulate the most feared secret police agency in the world—and intimidate the FBI.
Even as Ethel Rosenberg was strapped into the electric chair for spying for Moscow in 1953, decrypted cables might have spared her. But they were released only decades later.
In 1987, Trump attacked Reagan's deployment in the Gulf to protect 'ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need destined for allies who won't help.' He may still feel that way.
The president, born the year after the war ended, does not remember and probably does not want to know what brought it on or what it was fought to end.
Schoolteachers, archeologists, linguists and mathematicians worked on the Venona project breaking unbreakable Soviet code from WWII. They were heroes. But some had deep regrets.
Igor Gouzenko was a lowly Soviet cipher clerk when he turned the world order upside down in 1945. Nobody could have predicted the espionage hysteria his defection would unleash.
Her beauty was legendary, her fortune enormous, and he was notoriously thick. She made him emperor, but she's been written out of history as a tragic whore. She deserves better.
Given a large fortune by one lover, Harriet Howard ditched him and used it to help her new lover return to France, get elected president, and fund the coup that made him emperor.
The Musée d'Orsay houses a work that still shocks visitors, a painting that united one of the 19th century's most controversial painters with one of its most dissolute gentlemen.
I was looking for a muse, and found in her eyes a gateway to the past, an icon for the present. Victorine Meurent was the painter's star model but remained an enigma for 150 years.
Christopher Dickey's father wrote the novel on which 'Deliverance' was based—and, during filming, Dickey saw Reynolds the womanizer, wit, and actor desperate to be taken seriously.
A newly published short story by the iconic American author, set in WWII Paris, grew out of a "moveable feast" very different from the one he had lived there in the 1920s.
These three journalists died investigating mercenaries tied directly to an oligarch and an intelligence agency indicted by the Mueller probe in the U.S.
The Castros claimed Cuba was never into drug smuggling, then they said it quit. But their own operations were nothing compared to the ones they helped facilitate in Venezuela.
Richard Francis Burton was one of the great adventurers of the Victorian era, and a spy. But several weeks just before the Civil War are curiously missing from his life's account.
One of the world's great adventurers—and a Resistance spy—Jacques Cousteau warned me 25 years ago that humans were reaching the point of no return on environmental destruction.
Before he was a world-famous spy and translator, Richard F. Burton was sent into the boy brothels of Karachi so the British could conquer all of India.
Brave women helped downed Allied flyers escape the Germans. But more than that, they showed Hitler's white nationalists they would not surrender, would not submit.
The first thing I ever wrote for The Washington Post was a little chapter about statues in a 1975 guidebook to D.C. that is now long out of print, and subsequent editions dropped my contributions. But given the current debate about monuments and protests in Lafayette Park, these pages may be of interest, or even amusement.
