Counter-intelligence officers around the world have had their hands full lately, dealing with a string of high-profile espionage cases.
Just in the past few weeks:
- 🇹🇼 A lieutenant-colonel in the Taiwanese Army was arrested for allegedly recruiting spies on behalf of China
- 🇺🇸 Two junior officers in the US Navy were arrested on charges of passing sensitive information to Beijing, and
- 🇩🇪 On Wednesday (9 August), a German government official was arrested for sharing national security info with Russia.
And those are just the ones we know of…
Intrigue’s take: Spying has been around for millennia, but nations tend to place a premium on doing it (and catching it) when the stakes are highest. With a war in Europe and jitters in the Indo-Pacific, the stakes are pretty high right now.
And these latest cases are a reminder that, even as nations lean more on cyber-spying from afar, there’s still a role for the ol’ trench-coat and fake ‘stache.
Also worth noting:
- Poland’s secretive intelligence training facility (known as JW 2669) turns 50 this year.
- Brazil recently declined a US request to extradite a Russian intelligence officer who had posed as a Brazilian student in the US.
