Dead Drop: December 10

WAXING POWER OF DIPLOMACY:   It was with a sigh of relief when we read that the U.S. and Russia may have quietly agreed to quit making each other’s lives miserable by slashing the number of employees they allow to work in their respective embassies. We’ve written before about how the two sides have engaged in a (cold) war of kicking each other’s diplomats out of the country. The U.S. diplomatic presence in Russia five years ago, stood at 1,200 personnel and is now around 120. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are reportedly working on finding a way to get things back to normal.  That cannot come too soon for some – perhaps no one more than U.S. Ambassador John Sullivan, who reportedly, “learned how to mix solutions to clean the restrooms and also how to work a floor buffer in case staff support further diminished during the pandemic.”  Mixing solutions sounds tough – but running a buffer is a skill we expect our diplomats to be able to polish off without much training.

HOW ABOUT A GASTRONOMIC TOUR OF NORTH KOREA? Veteran British intelligence officers may be looking for new places to go for their holidays. According to The Mirror,the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, has sent letters to retired spies warning them not to go to China or Russia on holiday for fear of being “aggressively” targeted by hostile intelligence services. The letter reportedly says: “The Chinese service are becoming increasingly proactive and aggressive in approaching former members of HMG (Her Majesty’s Government), including security and intelligence agencies. We advise former staff to avoid travel there for business or other reasons.” If the fact that the Chinese are targeting former intelligence officials comes as a surprise to those officials – they might have been in the wrong line of work in the first place.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

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