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.
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 actions we write about most often are reactions to what came before, but the links may be obscured by fictionalized narratives.
Notes on Cause and Effect: Trump, Russia, Ukraine, Venice, and Hong Kong
We did not write about the yellow vest movement which celebrated its one year anniversary this week with some small but violent demonstrations. Most people ignored it. Paris was packed with shoppers. But as the notice at the Madeleine bus stop shows, a lot of public transport was shut down on Saturday. Elsewhere in the city, we saw the last of the fall colors, which you can take a look at on my Instagram feed.
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One of the core purposes of reporting is to understand cause and effect. The actions we write about almost always are reactions to events that have gone before. But the truth of the matter is not always easy to discern as people try to impose their own one-sided narratives on known facts, or invent their "facts" altogether.
The stories we've published about world news over the last few days were all reported with an eye to understanding why we see what we see happening in various corners of the world:
It's much easier to understand the way Donald Trump thinks and acts, for instance, if one knows about his longstanding connections to alleged Russian mobsters.
The impeachment investigations will have as constant background Trump's most important and long lasting connections to Russia—through alleged mobsters.
Russian state media crowing over impeachment are less interested in the fate of the U.S. president than they are in the demoralization and weakening of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin could not possibly envision a sweeter gift than Ukraine falling away from the West into the welcoming—albeit bloodied—hands of the Kremlin.
The presence of the extreme nationalist right in Ukraine, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, cannot be ignored, even if efforts by members of the U.S. Congress to get the Azov Battalion declared a foreign terrorist organization play into the hands of Kremlin propagandists.
In 2014, almost anyone who wanted to fight the Russians in Ukraine was more than welcome. But today one volunteer battalion is accused of white-supremacist terrorism.
Despite Russia's denials, damning evidence continues to accumulate about the Kremlin's complicity in the downing of a passenger jet flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in 2014.
Dutch investigators release damning audio that connects Russian authorities to the rebels suspected in the 2014 shootdown of a Malaysian jet with 298 people on board in Ukraine.
Much of the Hong Kong coverage the world sees has focused on telegenic flames, clouds of teargas, bricks thrown and shots fired. But the make or break moment may actually come at the ballot box next weekend—if elections are allowed at all.
Blood has been shed on Hong Kong streets and a university is under siege. But even the "black bloc" at the vanguard of the protests is looking toward the Nov. 24 vote.
This story, which ran in our travel section, tells you why climate change and the full moon are not the only culprits in the destruction of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
La Serenissima has long struggled with flooding as it sank deeper and deeper, but the recent crisis has been exacerbated by all too familiar corruption.
