CYBER STYLETTO

Not a lot of fiction has this level of cyber intell . . . S.L.

From the Smashwords Ebook site:

Super hacker Yvonne Tran, part of a secret government agency called CyberCom, is brought in to investigate a malicious network attack that caused the deaths of eight innocent people. She and her team follow the trail to Hong Kong and Afghanistan, and they must pinpoint the source before the next attack, which has the potential to kill hundreds of US citizens . . .

A malicious network attack on a traffic management system in California causes the deaths of eight innocent people. Yvonne Tran, a former black hat computer hacker and now part of a secret government agency called CyberCom, is called in to investigate. Her handler and former lover, Rohan Stokes, and executives at Network Systems, the company that made the computer server, have no idea how the system could have been commandeered so completely, or how many other critical systems have been infiltrated.

Once, Yvonne had what seemed to be the perfect life—the daughter of a Russian diplomat and a woman from a prominent Vietnamese family, she was raised in privilege, and was sent to all the best schools. But abuse at the hands of her Russian kin drove her from the future her parents had charted for her. She turned inwards, to the world of computers and hacking. She made a spectacular living breaking into the online systems of companies and governments, and turned her exploits into luxury . . .

Read MORE.



Today's Bird HERE


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ON WRITING

OK this is where my head is at right now:

I've been writing for years, but I really got serious about ten years ago; the year I lived alone, all by myself in a marble palace on the outskirts of a dusty, sand baked Nowheres-ville, on the edge of the great Sahara. I have the better part of two novels (based on my adventures, exploring the deepest recesses of the human psyche, all alone on the Road to Infinity, etcetera, etcetera . . .) already written down, and ten thousand times more than that bouncing around inside my skull.

What I want to do is save them as pdf's and post them online - a form of e-publishing - release them a chapter a week. For people to read them they click an icon, a dollar per chapter.

How to set this up? I know Pay pal is involved somehow; I put the question out there and true to form the Heroes of Team STORMBRINGER came back with all kinds of detailed instructions . . . give me a week or two to crack the code on this thing and we'll see how it goes from there.

All I know this thing is long overdue - the stories going around in my head have been screaming for an outlet for years now . . . decades even. I know my stuff is good - everybody I've shown it to cries out, "Sean! You've GOT to get your work out there! In the name of all that is Good and Holy, man, you've GOT TO GET PUBLISHED ! ! !" Now we're talking editors, writers - some pretty respectable figures in the literary world here - THE WOMEN even like what I write so I KNOW it's not just macho bravo sierra . . . and then sometime last week suddenly it dawned on me: This is what STORMBRINGER is FOR!

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!"

BTW another journalist/writer has been querying me for technical advice for his sci-fi novels (involving a Special Forces desperado) and I have been feeding him institutional knowledge of the profession. I hardly told him anything about Special Forces . . . little drips and drabs . . . and what little I told him seemed mind-expanding:


Journalist/Writer Guy: I did read that there is some specialization among the SF companies, so that many specialize in some aspect. In addition to specializing in language, maybe one company is more highly-trained in underwater infiltration methods, another in mountain warfare, another in who knows what, and the one best suited (if available) is used in any given mission. So it's not as if all companies and A detachments need to know everything to the same degree. Just as there are focus roles in an A detachment with some cross-training (weapons, engineer, medical, communications, operations, commanders), so individual A detachments have areas of specialty.

Is this correct, or are they all basically interchangeable except with regards to language? I did read that all the 5 active groups are spending significant time in Afghanistan and Iraq despite their geographic responsibility. Maybe the two reserve groups are there as well.

As far as SF compared to Rangers, it appears that the Rangers, while I assume they could be used for any of the 9 SOF missions or 7 collateral activities, engage in more DA, CT, and SR than anything else. Well, I guess some FID. They're light infantry that goes in usually with bigger numbers than SF would. As far as the culture goes, and I know all individuals are different, but from what I understand, Ranger culture is more hooah gung-ho warrior macho than SF. Kind of "give me the target and I'll eliminate it." In, bam-bam, out.

"THIS . . . IS . . . STORMBRINGER ! ! !"

SF is more relationship focused with its UW and FID missions. They still perform DA, SR, and CT missions. They’re deadly snipers (isn't it SF and Marines that have the top sniper training?) But there's also a lot of training friendlies—insurgents, military, and law enforcement. And they're not mainstream soldiers, but more independent-minded. I think someone will shoot me if I say they're the hippies of the military, but that's what I'm getting. They're wearing beards and riding horseback into battle. You probably want to shoot me yourself (grin). Maybe "unconventional" is a better term.

So what of the above is not right? Also, I guess it depends on the current needs, but is my assessment that Ranger’s = DA while SF = UW, FID, SR accurate?


StormBringer: This is going to take me WEEKS to answer - especially since it's tax time of the year and I'm a freelancer, a privateer; my accountant has a love/hate relationship with me.

“Great Patriotic War on Towelhead-ism” - yes, cynicism; sarcasm, black humor - we're allowed to engage in it; we pay the price.

Special Reconnaissance (SR) - it used to be called "Strategic Reconnaissance" to differentiate from "Tactical Reconnaissance" which occurs within a mile or two of the front - "STRATRECON" became "Special Reconnaissance" when it enveloped the various disciplines of reconnaissance - think living in a sniper hide for a week, keeping a recon log, shitting in plastic bags then humping them out - electronic surveillance, photo reconnaissance, clandestine urban operations - teams patrolling the cities of Western Europe for Red Brigades, Red Army Faction cells; later doing the same thing tracking al Qaeda cells - this genre crosses over into "Special Activities" when you involve running cell organizations, collecting HUMINT from assets, etc.


Journalist-Writer Guy: This stuff is gold. Plastic bags of crap? Never in a million years would I think of that. As well as the “spy” crossover. A book I have on my list is Hunting the Jackal and I thought it interesting that it was CIA and SF. But now I see why. And I really like that business about spy versus scout. Take the time you need. I can’t wait to get the rest.


StormBringer: Of course this is the most important mission - "Time spent in Reconnaissance is never wasted." - George Washington said that.

This is the discipline where I made my most money. I was in the Atlanta airport, in the international transit lounge and some old guy was telling me, "I was a spy, I was in Austria after the war," and his wife was nodding her head up and down. I was just nodding and smiling and not saying a word. It was 1995, I was enroute to Sarajevo, and I was in civvies.

For what it's worth, very few intelligence professionals actually meet the dictionary definition of a "spy"; to be a spy, one must betray. I was a scout, a reconnaissance soldier.


Journalist-Writer Guy: “This is the discipline where I made my most money.” Is that a turn of phrase, or do SF actually get paid by the job?


StormBringer: That was turn of phrase but military pay works three ways: you get your base pay, then you get your special pay & allowances (jump pay, special duty pay, language pay, scuba pay, demo pay, housing allowance, cost-of-living-allowance, etc) then there's mission-related pay (TDY pay, per diem, hazardous duty pay, imminent danger pay, combat zone tax-free exclusion, etc).

You end up trying to connect the dots. Twenty-plus years ago I saw a brass plaque hanging over a team sergeant's desk, in one of the team rooms over in Torii Station, Okinawa. It said it all:


"WE'RE LOOKING FOR A LOW-INTENSITY WAR IN A HIGH PER DIEM AREA."

"The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior . . . I'm a little man, he's a great man."



STORMRINGER SENDS



Today's Bird HERE.



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SPY MAGAZINE GOES DIGITAL

This is cool . . .

WALL STREET JOURNAL February 18, 2011, 2:00 PM ET

Spy Magazine Goes Digital by Katherine Rosman

Before there was snark and irony littered on a million blogs all over the World Wide Web – in fact, before there was a World Wide Web — there was Spy magazine. Published from 1986 to 1998, Spy was a phenomenon among the media and political cognoscenti. Since, only those who keep dusty old magazines in attics have enjoyed its archives.

But on Wednesday, Spy co-founding editor Kurt Andersen tweeted, “Google’s digitized every issue of Spy magazine. Half up now, the rest soon. (The internet has justified itself).”

“I don‘t think I’ve every had as many retweets or happy ‘hallelujahs!’” Andersen said yesterday.


Read it all HERE


"It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" -Dave Eggers.


"It's a piece of garbage" -Donald Trump.



I've been referred to as a spy and a spook but that was never truly the case - I always considered what I was involved in 'strategic reconnaissance'. One time I had a remarkable encounter in an airport lounge with an older gentleman who explained to me he was a spy in post-war Austria. This was amusing because at the time I was enroute to Sarajevo, and I wasn't wearing a uniform - S.L.

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DIED THIS WEEK

NATHAN HALE - 21 September 1776 - New York City

Nathan Hale, a Connecticut schoolteacher and captain in the Continental Army, is executed by the British for spying. A graduate of Yale University, Hale joined a Connecticut regiment in 1775 and served in the successful siege of British-occupied Boston. In the summer of 1776, he crossed behind British lines on Long Island in civilian clothes to spy on the British. While returning with the intelligence information, British soldiers captured Hale near the American lines and charged him with espionage. Taken to New York, he was hanged without trial the next day.


Before being executed, legend holds that Hale said:

"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."





He was the first Hero of America.


Honor him.


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DEAD RUSSIAN SPY

A mysterious accident in which one of Russia's most powerful spies was found dead on a Turkish beach has provoked speculation that the deputy head of the country's foreign military intelligence service had been murdered.

The badly decomposed body of Yuri Ivanov washed up last month on the shore of the Mediterranean, and was discovered by Turkish villagers in the province of Hatay, Turkish newspapers reported today. Reports suggest that he was quietly buried in Moscow over the weekend.

Ivanov was the second in command at Russia's foreign military intelligence unit, the GRU. The general had last been deployed to review military installations in Syria, amid Kremlin attempts to reassert its influence in the Middle East, reports suggested.

The general was last seen visiting the building site for a new Russian military base in the Syrian coastal city of Tartus, which is being expanded as a base for Russia's Black Sea fleet.

After his visit, he left for a meeting with Syrian intelligence agents. He then went missing, the Turkish newspaper Vatan reported today.

Read the entire story here.


The GRU is Russia's largest foreign intelligence agency [1]. In 1997 it deployed six times as many agents in foreign countries as the SVR, which is the KGB intelligence successor. It also commanded 25,000 Spetsnaz troops in 1997.

BOND vs. BOND 2

Ian Fleming was a novelist and a journalist (trivia alert: besides his James Bond novels he also wrote the childrens book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) before those roles, he also had a career in British Naval Intelligence. He was recruited from the Black Watch to serve as the personal assistant to Rear Admiral John Henry Godfrey (then Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy). He rose through the ranks from Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Lieutenant to Commander. His known codename as 17F.

IAN FLEMING - FATHER OF BOND

Ian Fleming is best known as the author of the James Bond novels but who was he and how much of James Bond was based on truth?

During WWII his work included the planning of operations against the Germans (i.e. Operation Ruthless: to obtain German Naval Enigma Information and Operation Goldeneye: a plan to communicate with Gibraltar and a defense strategy in the event Spain joined the Axis powers). He also controlled a specialist commando unit known as 30 Assault Unit (30AU). He participated on the committee selecting targets of the T-Force which secured targets of interest to the British military (including nuclear labs, gas research centers and rocket scientists).

Fleming was also involved in Camp X, a paramilitary and commando training installation. It is proposed that Bond is based on Sir William Stevenson (associated with Camp X) a Canadian soldier, airman, businessperson, inventor and spymaster as well as the senior representative of British intelligence for the western hemisphere during WWII as well as Patrick Dalzel-Job (British Naval Intelligence Officer and Commando) and his own brother Peter Fleming (Grenadier Guards and helped establish the Auxillary Units intended to be a secret army of civilian volunteers behind enemy lines).

Many of the stories, locations, and tidbits in the Bond novels were culled from Ian's real life experiences. So, while fiction, when reading his books, you are experiencing a little piece of life lived and places known.

DHS TRYING TO DEPORT PRO-AMERICAN SPY

Feds See 'Terrorist' in Christian Convert Who Spied for Israel


Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport the son of a Hamas founder who told of his conversion to Christianity and decade of spying for Israel in New York Times best-seller:"Son of Hamas"







Mosab Hassan Yousef is scheduled to appear June 30 before Immigration Judge Rico J. Bartolomei at the DHS Immigration Court in San Diego.

Yousef said the DHS informed him Feb. 23, 2009, he was barred from asylum in the U.S. because there were reasonable grounds for believing he was "a danger to the security of the United States" and "engaged in terrorist activity."

An incredulous Yousef said the U.S. government's belief he is a terrorist is based on a complete misinterpretation of passages of his book in which he describes his work as a counter-terrorism agent for the Israeli internal intelligence service Shin Bet.






Yousef said he's not so much worried about himself as he is "outraged" about "a security system that is so primitive and naive that it endangers the lives of countless Americans."

"If Homeland Security cannot tell the difference between a terrorist and a man who spent his life fighting terrorism, how can they protect their own people?" he asks.


You won't get no argument from me on this - if you expect the United States Government to take care of you, just remember the LAST time they tried to protect innocent Americans from evil:

Mount Carmel compound, Waco Texas, 19 April 1993



Mosab Hassan Yousef is a legitimate freedom fighter in this conflict against abject evil, and he is an asset against the terrorist forces arrayed against us. Read how bad Department of Homeland Security is effing-up his case here.


SEAN LINNANE SENDS

U.S. USING PRIVATE SPY RING

Military brass in Afghanistan and Pakistan are relying on a ring of private spies despite legal concerns among authorities. News broke earlier this year that the CIA had enlisted retired intelligence officers as contract spies. At the time, the program was portrayed as unofficial and said to be brought to a close. Now, The New York Times reports, it's clear that the work of those private agents continues in places like Pakistan. The spies send reports to top commanders. Their presence in Pakistan is particularly shocking as the American military is prevented from operating there and the Army is not supposed to hire contract spies under Pentagon rules.

Read the entire shocking revelation at The New York Times


Has it ever occurred to anyone at the New York Times that our intelligence operations are not constrained by such artificialities as the Law of Land Warfare? In the time-honored history of American espionage, the ONLY rules or references in our laws that define ANY kind of legal requirements, when it comes to intelligence-gathering, is Executive Order 12333, which provides for the effective conduct of United States intelligence activities and the protection of constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.

This same Executive Order 12333 ALLOWS for private contracting, by the way:



Executive Order 12333, United States Intelligence Activities

Part 2 - 2.7 Contracting.

"Agencies within the Intelligence Community are authorized to enter into contracts or arrangements for the provision of goods or services with private companies or institutions in the United States and need not reveal the sponsorship of such contracts or arrangements for authorized intelligence purposes. Contracts or arrangements with academic institutions may be undertaken only with the contract of appropriate officials of the institution."



Historically, the United States has used military men, diplomats, private businessmen, mercenaries and adventurers, foreigners - even members of other countries governments - in espionage and reconnaissance. Somebody tell me: WHEN DID THAT CHANGE?

Personally, I don't have a problem with doing anything and everything it takes to WIN THE GLOBAL WAR AGAINST TERRORISM.

What we gotta ask ourselves is . . . DO WE WANT TO WIN THIS THING OR WHAT ? ? ?

I guess the answer to that question is another question: does the New York Times want to win this thing, or what?

- Sean Linnane


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BIRTH OF A LEGEND

At 5 a.m. Paris time, on this date in 1917, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle — better known to the world as Mata Hari — was awoken at Saint-Lazare Prison to news that it was her last day on earth.




Prior to becoming an espionage legend, Mata Hari presented herself as a Hindu dancer. The truth is she was just a needy adventurer, a pretender with enough intuition and sensitivity to take advantage of the Parisian orientalist fantasies at the beginning of the XX Century.

There, her scanty, exotic costumes were enough; she never was genuine oriental dancer but, avant la lettre, an exotic dancer. Shot by firing squadron on a muddy drill field outside Paris, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle died, but the romantic myth of Mata Hari the femme fatal was born and lives amongst us to this day.


She died as she had lived: self-possessed, mysterious, facing the firing squad eyes open - she refused a blindfold.


She was already pushing 30 when she got into dancing, with a failed marriage behind her and two children. In Paris in the belle epoque, there were assuredly dancers younger, prettier; Margaretha, who here debuted the show name by which history would know here, surpassed them with showmanship.

Her exotic olive-toned looks — there were rumors of Javanese or Jewish blood even in her childhood - combined with her willingness to push boundaries of eroticism made her an instant sensation. Naturally gregarious and unprudish, she segued into the courtesan biz on the side with dashing officers and wealthy industrialists.


Not bad for a thirty-something mother of two. Nowadays they'd call her a MILF.


Sensual postcards and posed photos of Mata Hari were at once her pitch and her product.





14 years after her death, she’d be portrayed by silver screen femme fatale Greta Garbo:




I've always had a hard time figuring out my sympathies here; Mata Hari was a whore who spied on the French . . . for the Germans . . .





. . . yet whether or not she was really a German spy has never been determined — she seems to have been approached, or to have been set up by either French or German intelligence . . .





. . . sort of an anti-hero, I suppose . . . kind of hard to be against her . . .





So the French shot a whore - bravo les grenouilles! If it had been the British who had caught her, they'd have turned her against the Germans.

As a British correspondent reported, Margaretha Zelle owned her role to the very last:

The first intimation she received that her plea had been denied was when she was led at daybreak from her cell in the Saint-Lazare prison to a waiting automobile and then rushed to the barracks where the firing squad awaited her.

Never once had the iron will of the beautiful woman failed her. Father Arbaux, accompanied by two sisters of charity, Captain Bouchardon, and Maitre Clunet, her lawyer, entered her cell, where she was still sleeping - a calm, untroubled sleep, it was remarked by the turnkeys and trusties.

The sisters gently shook her. She arose and was told that her hour had come.

"May I write two letters?" was all she asked.

Consent was given immediately by Captain Bouchardon, and pen, ink, paper, and envelopes were given to her.

She seated herself at the edge of the bed and wrote the letters with feverish haste. She handed them over to the custody of her lawyer.

Then she drew on her stockings, black, silken, filmy things, grotesque in the circumstances. She placed her high-heeled slippers on her feet and tied the silken ribbons over her insteps.

She arose and took the long black velvet cloak, edged around the bottom with fur and with a huge square fur collar hanging down the back, from a hook over the head of her bed. She placed this cloak over the heavy silk kimono which she had been wearing over her nightdress.

Her wealth of black hair was still coiled about her head in braids. She put on a large, flapping black felt hat with a black silk ribbon and bow. Slowly and indifferently, it seemed, she pulled on a pair of black kid gloves. Then she said calmly:

"I am ready."

The party slowly filed out of her cell to the waiting automobile.

The car sped through the heart of the sleeping city. It was scarcely half-past five in the morning and the sun was not yet fully up.

Clear across Paris the car whirled to the Caserne de Vincennes, the barracks of the old fort which the Germans stormed in 1870.

The troops were already drawn up for the execution. The twelve Zouaves, forming the firing squad, stood in line, their rifles at ease. A subofficer stood behind them, sword drawn.

The automobile stopped, and the party descended, Mata Hari last. The party walked straight to the spot, where a little hummock of earth reared itself seven or eight feet high and afforded a background for such bullets as might miss the human target.

As Father Arbaux spoke with the condemned woman, a French officer approached, carrying a white cloth.

"The blindfold," he whispered to the nuns who stood there and handed it to them.

"Must I wear that?" asked Mata Hari, turning to her lawyer, as her eyes glimpsed the blindfold.

Maitre Clunet turned interrogatively to the French officer.

"If Madame prefers not, it makes no difference," replied the officer, hurriedly turning away.

Mata Hari was not bound and she was not blindfolded. She stood gazing steadfastly at her executioners, when the priest, the nuns, and her lawyer stepped away from her.*

The officer in command of the firing squad, who had been watching his men like a hawk that none might examine his rifle and try to find out whether he was destined to fire the blank cartridge which was in the breech of one rifle, seemed relieved that the business would soon be over.

A sharp, crackling command and the file of twelve men assumed rigid positions at attention. Another command, and their rifles were at their shoulders; each man gazed down his barrel at the breast of the women which was the target.

Inevitably, a story got around that she’d opened her funereal coat to the firing squad, revealing no clothing beneath it - she did not. She did not move a muscle.

The non-commissioned officer in charge had moved to a position where from the corners of their eyes they could see him. His sword was extended in the air.

It dropped. The sun - by this time up - flashed on the burnished blade as it described an arc in falling. Simultaneously the sound of the volley rang out. Flame and a tiny puff of greyish smoke issued from the muzzle of each rifle. Automatically the men dropped their arms.

At the report Mata Hari fell. She did not die as actors and moving picture stars would have us believe that people die when they are shot. She did not throw up her hands nor did she plunge straight forward or straight back.

Instead she seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backward, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, with her face turned towards the sky.

A non-commissioned officer, who accompanied a lieutenant, drew his revolver from the big, black holster strapped about his waist. Bending over, he placed the muzzle of his revolver almost - but not quite - against the left temple of the spy. He pulled the trigger, and the bullet tore into the brain of the woman.

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was surely dead . . .

. . . and the Legend of Mata Hari was born.