Independent analysis and thoughtful commentary on technology, geopolitics, science, and culture.
The Cold War was fought in public by diplomats and in private by spies. This long read traces the most consequential espionage episodes from 1945 onward: the Cambridge Five's decades long penetration of MI6, Arne Treholt's betrayal of NATO secrets from inside Oslo's Foreign Ministry, the daring MI6 extraction of KGB colonel Oleg Gordievsky, and the ruin Aldrich Ames brought to the CIA's Soviet network.
On March 30, 1867, the United States bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, and newspapers immediately mocked the deal as "Seward's Folly." A century and a half later, that two-cents-an-acre purchase has generated more than $274 billion in oil revenue, anchored American Arctic defense against Russia and China, and funded one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the United States. The investment everyone called a mistake became the most profitable real estate deal in American history.
In January 1968, a US Air Force B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed onto the ice near Thule Air Base in Greenland. The accident scattered radioactive contamination across miles of Arctic landscape and exposed a decade of secret American nuclear flights over Danish territory, violating Copenhagen's nuclear weapons ban and sparking a diplomatic crisis with lasting consequences.