A Mid-Week Dead Drop Break

Posted: July 28th, 2021

By Suzanne Kelly

Suzanne Kelly is CEO and publisher of The Cipher Brief as well as founder of the Cyber Initiatives Group. Before entering the private sector, she served as CNN’s Intelligence Correspondent before spending two years in the private sector. Prior to this, she worked as an executive producer for CNN and as a news anchor at CNN International based in Berlin and Atlanta. In Berlin, Suzanne anchored a morning news program broadcast live in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and in Atlanta, she anchored a number of world news programs. She covered the NATO campaign in 1999 from Kosovo and Macedonia.

In the world of national security, it can’t all be so serious, so here’s a preview of what’s waiting for you in this week’s Dead Drop:

GAME OF THROWS: We want to be David Cohen when we grow up. He seems to have a lot of fun. A couple years ago he had a walk-on part in The Game of Thrones (he explained to us in 2019 how that came about) and now we hear the CIA Deputy Director got to throw out the first pitch at Fenway Park where his hometown Boston Red Sox were playing their arch enemies, the New York Yankees. “Our cousin from Boston” tells us the pitch was a strike and was highly praised by the Red Sox TV analysts who said Cohen would be “hard on right-handed batters and bad guys.” In addition to being interviewed on TV, Cohen (a former Cipher Brief expert) was also on the Red Sox radio network. The Yankees were at bat at the time and after the umps called a close pitch a ball, Cohen told play-by-play announcer Joe Castiglione: “the CIA does intelligence assessments, and I would assess that was a strike.” Making the most of the occasion, Cohen also delivered strong pitches on behalf of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation and the Third Option Foundation, both organizations that support CIA officers and their families.

Find more scintillating national security gossip in The Dead Drop.