SpyTalk

"Indeed, Pakistan's intelligence service has waged a proxy war against India using terrorists for decades. The two nuclear powers have avoided a large-scale exchange, but the Pakistani ISI has repeatedly sponsored or aided terrorist groups targeting civilians in India. For example, Indian authorities were quite vocal in blaming Pakistan for the July 11, 2006 train bombings, which killed more than 200."

Victor Comras, a longtime State Department diplomat and trade expert, argues that plunging oil prices and chaos in the international finance system could force Iran back to the bargaining table over its nuclear program.

Economic sanctions have also begun to show results, Comras said, as reports surfaced that the Bush administration was forcing Israel to stand down from plans to attack the Islamic republic.

"Iran's economy is already in shambles," Comras wrote for the widely read Counterterrorism Blog Tuesday.

"The downturn in the price of oil has left Iran's government with serious budget shortfalls and significantly reduced its ability to support and subsidize its extensive ongoing energy sector and other infrastructure projects," he said.

"It has also significantly reduced the profit incentives that previously enticed foreign businesses and banks to compete for Iran's business, even when that meant irritating their American relationships.

"Iran's cost of doing business is soaring, and the stepped up measures adopted by the U.S. Treasury Department, and the US campaign to dissuade financial dealings with Iran, are now actually having a significant impact! More and more Western banks are reducing their Iran exposure and pulling out of the Iran marketplace. Even non Western banks in Dubai are beginning to view triangular transactions with Iran more cautiously. These factors may serve to enhance the chances of engaging Iran in a more constructive dialogue on its nuclear program than previously."

Read the rest here.

It's not every day that a traitor writes a memoir.  

Kim Philby, the notorious Soviet agent in the senior ranks of the British secret service, did. But that was from the safety of his Moscow apartment. 

John Walker ranks himself above Philby, not to mention American turncoats Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen and Jonathan Pollard, in a new memoir, "My Life as a Spy."

And he may be right. A chief warrant officer in the Navy, in 1968 Walker began selling the Russians communications codes that allowed Moscow to track U.S. warships, including nuclear submarines. Eventually, he dragged his wife, brother, son and best friend into the scheme.

Walker was arrested in 1985, the so-called "Year of the Spy," and is serving a life sentence at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, in Springfield, Mo.

Why did he do it?

"I cannot classify myself as a visionary or idealist, but just a simple citizen who became angry by the government lies," he writes.

"I did conclude that the US system of government was broken, so I felt justified in breaking some rules in order to help save it.... Why did I feel responsible or qualified to end the pattern of perpetual war? I cannot answer my own questions. But then, my insane stunt seemed to have worked. By the admission of both the US and the USSR, I provided the most extensive intelligence ever to the Soviets.

"With my material in hand, the Soviet government eventually realized the US planned no attack upon them, so my actions have contributed greatly to the Soviet Union's decision to end the Cold War."   

Or so he says.

I figured my friend Pete Earley would be in a good position to evaluate Walker's claims. A former reporter at The Washington Post, Earley is the author of "Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring,"  the definitive work on the case, which became a New York Times bestseller and much-watched TV miniseries.

Here's what he had to say.
 

"If nothing else, John Walker Jr. is consistent.

"More than 20 years ago when I interviewed him, he argued that Time magazine and other U.S. media regularly revealed top secrets and damaged our nation's security, so why should he be blamed for damage he did by selling the KGB classified information for nearly eighteen years?

"After making the same tired excuse of, "We were not at war with the Soviet Union" and the "Cold War is a game played by politicians and generals," Walker explains that he simply decided to cash in and do what anyone with any sense was doing.

"He takes delight in bragging how "K-Mart had better security than the U.S. Navy," and proudly describes how his policy of K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid - enabled him to steal the keylists and schematics for every major code machine used by the U.S. military and deliver them to our enemies during the height of the Cold War.

"Just as he did in his jail house interviews with me, he blames his alcoholic and emotionally distraught wife, Barbara, for driving him into the KGB arms, and claims that he was simply trying to help out his hapless brother, Arthur, his hollow best friend, Jerry Whitworth, and his own dim-witted son, Michael, by drawing them into what became our nation's most damaging spy ring.

"In a mean-spirited final chapter, he claims his brother Arthur would have gone free if he had not cowed to his wife and had insisted that they sell their house to pay for a better defense team, concluding that Arthur has only himself to blame.

"The only new revelations in this autobiography are a sympathetic portrait that he attempts to draw of himself by claiming his life would have been markedly different - though nevertheless just as exciting - if he had married better.

"He also drops names, such as the great Soviet Cold Warrior, Gen. Boris Solomatin, and former KGB great and Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov.

"Walker makes it sound as if they sought him out personally for advice when, in fact, during our interviews, he chuckled when I asked him if he knew any of his KGB handlers, explaining that he had no idea who they were and stating that one didn't ask for resumes when committing treason. At the time, he had no idea who Andropov was and, in his own words, he explained that he did not see himself as an intelligence source, but simply as a thief. 

"'Look, I don't know why people make such a big deal of me committing espionage,'" he told me. "'If I had worked in a bank, I would have stolen money. If I had access to drugs, I would have sold them.'"

Earley says Walker thinks he did us a favor.

"In what has to be the most revealing rationalization of all, Walker explains that his treachery actually did the U.S. a huge favor. By sharing vital military secrets with the KGB, Walker argues that the Kremlin realized just how badly it was losing the arms race and how pitiful Soviet forces would be if challenged by the U.S. It was one of the key reasons, he insists, the Cold War ended."

"My Life as a Spy" was published to little notice on Oct. 28.

"As part of a joint U.S.-Peruvian anti-drug program that began in the mid-1990s, CIA officers helped Peruvian air force pilots identify aircraft suspected of carrying illegal drugs through the country's airspace. The program had succeeded in bringing down numerous suspected planes when, in April 2001, a Peruvian pilot mistakenly shot into a small plane carrying U.S. missionaries. Two of the Americans on board, Veronica 'Roni' Bowers and her infant daughter, Charity, were struck by bullets and killed. The pilot, although wounded, managed to land the plane. Bowers's husband and their 6-year-old son were not injured."

"In a time of war with these difficult legal issues, he is going to have many, many tough issues to face. But they couldn't have picked a person better suited or more qualified to address them."