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The Stars on the Wall

Kevin Hulbert is a former senior intelligence officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations who retired in June 2014, having served multiple overseas tours as CIA Chief of Station and Deputy Chief [...] More

Don’t Expect Change from Cuba’s New President

It’s very interesting that today will be the first time in almost 60 years that one of the Castro brothers has not been president of Cuba. But while it’s an interesting factoid, the fact that someone [...] More
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More from Kevin Hulbert

Afghanistan: The Kentucky Derby of Spying

An old boss of mine at the CIA used to talk to young officers who were deploying to Afghanistan or Pakistan, and in his preamble to discussing the [...] More

Pakistan and U.S. Don’t See Same Urgency in Terror Fight

The U.S. is calling on Pakistan to eradicate its safe havens for terrorists or else the U.S. will stop providing security assistance and other [...] More

Dereliction of Duty II: The Afghanistan Years

There has been a lot of writing lately on Afghanistan as the new administration struggles with what do to there, just as the previous administration [...] More

What in the World is Happening in Pakistan?

The last couple of weeks have seen almost daily terrorist attacks across Pakistan from a variety of bad actors: February 13: A suicide bombing during [...] More

The Never Ending Story: The Morass of Afghanistan and Pakistan

The new administration must surely be thinking about the challenges of Afghanistan and Pakistan and what to do. The region has bedeviled outsiders [...] More

Trump’s Options for an Unchanging Cuba

I remember remarking to Cuban American friends in Miami some 20 years ago and in the wake of the passage of the Helms-Burton Act (which formalized [...] More

What if the U.S. Can’t Keep a Secret? The Real Impact of Manning’s Leaks

Now that the dust has settled on President Obama’s unexpected decision to, his last week in office, commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning, it’s [...] More

Tactical Victories, Strategic Defeats

Drone strikes have proven effective at eliminating terrorist leaders, yet terrorists continue to threaten American security. In this article written [...] More

The Need for Strategy As Well As Tactics

When contemplating some of the challenges of Vietnam many years ago, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger commented that in a guerrilla war, the [...] More