Recent Posts

Intelligence Work Is Exciting. And Traumatizing

Many people grow up wanting to be secret agents. I fell into the field somewhat by chance—though it turned out I was good at it and advanced quickly. Less than a year into the job, I volunteered to deploy to Iraq, where the United States was hunting down terrorists like …

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Trauma Takes a Toll in the U.S. Intelligence Community

There was nothing that unusual about the day when Karen Sudkamp reached her breaking point. She had spent years as an intelligence analyst watching drone videos of terrorists and military operations in almost real time. She had never thought much about the toll it was taking, until that one day …

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Turkey’s Erdogan meets Azerbaijan’s Aliyev as Armenians flee Nagorno-Karabakh

Ankara is backing the oil-rich Turkic nation’s current drive to seize all of Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev in Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani exclave bordering Turkey, as thousands of ethnic Armenians continued to flee Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia proper in the wake of a …

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Nagorny Karabakh’s Uncertain Future

With thousands fleeing Nagorny Karabakh after Azerbaijan’s lightning victory ended 30 years of de facto sovereignty by a breakaway Armenian community, its population faces an uncertain future. As Azerbaijanis celebrate a future homecoming to the long-estranged region, scores of buses and cars carrying Karabakh residents headed to neighbouring Armenia. The …

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