Articles

Calder Walton reviews Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman. He writes that the book not only sheds light on Israel's intelligence services, but also has wider significance: how and why a state uses extra-judicial killing—and the consequences of doing so.

"Jeffrey Karam is to be commended for writing such a richly researched and cogently reasoned article, one that invites invigorating reexamination, by historians and political scientists alike, of a pivotal moment in modern Middle Eastern history."

International Security Program Postdoctoral Fellow Jeffrey G. Karam reviewed America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State by Osamah F. Khalil.

Though President Trump says he is not convinced that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, U.S. Sen. Angus King of Maine said Monday that he and his colleagues on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is probing the matter, have “no doubt whatsoever” of Moscow’s involvement.

Why were American officials caught by surprise with the military coup and later revolution in Iraq on 14 July 1958? Drawing on American intelligence and diplomatic records as well as multilingual sources, this article argues that the US intelligence failure is the product of two factors: the collection of information from too few and too similar human sources of intelligence in Iraq's ruling regime, and the unreceptivity of US officials to assessing new information and their unwillingness to update assessments of local Iraqi developments. It revisits America's intelligence failure in Iraq and suggests important lessons for the study of intelligence.