Senior State Department officials have drawn up plans to close a dozen consulates overseas by this summer and are considering shutting down many more missions, in what could be a blow to the U.S. government’s efforts to build partnerships and gather intelligence, American officials say. The department also plans to lay off many local citizens…
The C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe said on Wednesday that intelligence sharing with Ukraine had been paused alongside military aid to pressure its government to cooperate with the Trump administration’s plans to end the country’s war with Russia. Speaking on Fox Business, Mr. Ratcliffe applauded the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement on Tuesday praising President Trump…
The chemistry professor’s nightmare seemed to finally be over. Five years had passed since Feng Tao, also known as Franklin, was led by F.B.I. agents out of his home in Lawrence, Kansas. The first professor to be arrested under a Trump-era program aimed at fighting Chinese economic espionage, Dr. Tao was accused of hiding his…
For his first three years as the head of the C.I.A., William J. Burns was relentlessly focused on tripling the agency’s resources devoted to understanding China, and on countering Russia and its mysterious partnerships with Iran and North Korea. But in the last 16 months of his tenure, the diplomat-turned-spy was plunged back into his…
Understanding leaders around the world is one of the C.I.A.’s most important jobs. Teams of analysts comb through intelligence collected by spies and publicly available information to create profiles of leaders that can predict behaviors. A chatbot powered by artificial intelligence now helps do that work. Over the last two years, the Central Intelligence Agency…
After innocent-looking cargo shipments began catching fire at airports and warehouses in Germany, Britain and Poland over the summer, there was little doubt in Washington and Europe that Russia was behind the sabotage. But in August, White House officials became increasingly alarmed by secretly obtained intelligence suggesting Moscow had a far larger plan in mind:…
White House officials said on Friday that the truth behind the mysterious ailments known as Havana Syndrome was still unknown, contradicting a new intelligence assessment about what had befallen spies and diplomats for the last nine years. On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an updated assessment about the ailments, one…
The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a Beijing-based cybersecurity company on Friday, blaming it for helping Chinese hackers infiltrate U.S. communications systems and conduct surveillance across four continents. In an announcement, the department said the company, Integrity Technology Group, had supported a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Flax Typhoon in a campaign to break…