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WIN NEWS ARTICLES

Keep up-to-date with the latest news from or about the intelligence community. Send submissions and comments to: winseditor@afio.com.

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Events

AFIO Las Vegas Chapter Membership Meeting & Briefing by Charles Kolodgy on “Project GUNMAN - a 1970s Espionage Incident.”
6 Aug 2025 1:30 PM
Windmill Library, 1st Floor Conference Room

7060 West Windmill Lane | Las Vegas, NV 89113


San Francisco Chapter Meeting Featuring Barry Eisler on The Art of the Craft: Power in Contemporary America
26 Aug 2025 11:30 AM
Basque Cultural Center

599 Railroad Ave | South San Francisco, CA 94080


AFIO-CIRA 50th Anniversary Celebration
26 Sep 2025 6:00 PM
Army-Navy Country Club, 5 Star Ballroom

1700 Army Navy Drive | Arlington, VA 22202


Advertiser, Corporate Sponsors, and Other Events

Book Signing Event: Victory in Shanghai: A Korean American Family's Journey to the CIA and the Army Special Forces
26 Jul 2025 - 12:00pm
Barnes & Noble, 6260 Seven Corners Center, Falls Church, VA 22044


Book Signing Event: Agents of Change with author Christina Hillsberg
29 Jul 2025 - 2:00pm-4:00pm
In-Person International Spy Museum Store Event, Washington, DC


Covert Cocktails: An Evening in Support of the International Spy Museum
31 Jul 2025 - 7:00pm-9:00pm
In-Person International Spy Museum Program, Washington, DC


Vintage Espionage Wine Tasting
21 Aug 2025 - 5:30pm-7:30pm
1310 Kitchen & Bar in Georgetown, Washington DC


CULPERCON 2025
26 Sep 2025 - 27 Sep 2025
The Westin Arlington, 801 North Glebe Rd, Arlington, VA 22203


OAR No-Host Breakfast
28 Sep 2025 - 9:00am - 10:30am
Savannah, GA


OAR No-Host Breakfast
30 Sep 2025 - 8:30am - 10:00am
Charleston, SC


OAR No-Host Dinner
30 Sep 2025 - 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Myrtle Beach, SC


OAR No-Host Lunch
1 Oct 2025 - 11:30am - 1:00pm
Southport, NC


Other Things to Do

"Spies of Embassy Row" and "Spies of Georgetown" Walking Tours- Washington, DC - Sundays (Dates/Times Vary)

Former intelligence officers guide visitors on two morning and afternoon espionage-themed walking tours: "Spies of Embassy Row" and "Spies of Georgetown." More Information and Booking or contact rosanna@spyher.co.  

Attention Students! Discounts are available on all Spyher, Espionage-themed Tours and Events. Students save $10 using code INTELSTUDENT2025. Join Spyher on a variety of different, exclusive, guided tours conducted by former CIA officers.

In Memoriam

View all obituaries

Dick Wiltamuth - Former Naval Radio Operator and Phoenix Society Member
ichard E. Wiltamuth passed away in Silver Spring, MD, on July 7, 2025 at age 86. He was a character. In his final years, he was fond of saying, "I've lived a very interesting life." Read more

Walt Dikerson - Career NSA Officer
At 10:50 PM on Friday, June 6, 2025, Walter Scott Dickerson, affectionately known as “Walt” to his close friends and “Boot” to his beloved wife Yolande, peacefully passed away in his sleep after a prolonged battle with illness. Read more

Louis Giacchino - Former Naval Intelligence Officer
CPT. Louis Frank Giacchino, U.S. Navy (Ret.), age 91, of Silver Spring, Maryland, passed away peacefully on July 4, 2025. Lou developed a wide range of interests from an early age. Read more

Bernard Day - Former NSA Officer
Bernard Eugene Day, age 94, of Adelphi, MD passed away peacefully on Friday, July 4, 2025. He was the beloved husband of the late Patricia Ann (Hartman) Day; loving father of Brenda Patrick and her husband, David; devoted "PopPop" to his grandchildren. Read more

Norbert Szynamowski - Decorated NSA Executive
Norbert Harold Szymanowski, affectionately known as “Reds,” “Ski,” and “Norby” to family, friends and colleagues, passed away peacefully on July 7, 2025, in Crofton, Maryland, surrounded by his loving family. He was 96. Read more

Quick Links


Announcements

Registration is Open for the AFIO-CIRA 50th Anniversary Celebration

Please join us in celebrating 50 years.  Event cost is $99 per person. Registration and credit card payment required no later than Friday, 19 September 2025.

MORE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION 

READ MORE

There's Still Time to Nominate for the CIRA Salvetti Award

The CIRA Board of Directors is accepting nominees for the Annual Lloyd Salvetti Award. All nominations must be received no later than 31 July 2025. Many thanks in advance to all submitters! READ MORE

Spyher Seeks Sommelier

Spyher LLC is in search of a former intelligence officer who is also an accredited sommelier or wine educator to host spy-themed wine tastings in October.  The ideal candidate will have field experience and be comfortable sharing stories from their time in the IC with a group. Contact Rosanna Minchew at 571-236-9052 or rosanna@spyher.co with questions and if interested. READ MORE

WIN Short-Form Book Review for July is Available!

Security Technologist Bruce Schneier reviews Fred Kinch's book The Business of Secrets: Adventures In Selling Encryption Around The World in this week's WIN, on your Member Account page and on the WIN Short Form Book Reviews page. READ MORE

AFIO NOW Video Series: Mike Mears, CIA Chief of HR, on "Intelligence Community Reform"

Released to the publicmembers on 22 July 2025

Interview of Tuesday, 24 June 2025 with Mike Mears, former CIA Chief of HR, on "Intelligence Community Reform." His most recent book is Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation. The questions discussed are: "Why can't we ever seem to get IC reform right?" "What is the meaning of 'the culture of a work environment'?" "Why are bad bosses so important?

Mike Mears retired as CIA’s Chief of HR (Human Capital) and founded and headed the CIA Leadership Academy. He trains and consults on advanced leadership and management approaches for government and private sector organizations. 

Run time: 34 minutes

Interview conducted by: James Hughes, AFIO President and former CIA Operations Officer, and Former NSA Associate Deputy Director of Operations.

To view other publicly available AFIO Now videos, please visit our YouTube page . To listen to the series as audio only, please visit our Podcast page. "AFIO Now" Interviews and Podcasts are sponsored by Northwest Financial Advisors.

View all WIN Short-Form Book Reviews

The Business of Secrets: Adventures In Selling Encryption Around The World

BY FRED KINCH | AMAZON | RELEASE DATE 24 MAY 2024

Review by: Security Technologist Bruce Schneier

From the vantage point of today, it's surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn't know whether the cryptography they sold was any good. The customers didn't know whether the crypto they bought was any good. Everyone pretended to know, thought they knew, or knew better than to even try to know.

The Business of Secrets is the self-published memoirs of Fred Kinch. He was founder and vice resident of - mostly sales - at a US cryptographic hardware company called Datotek, from company's founding in 1969 until 1982. It's mostly a disjointed collection of stories about the difficulties of selling to governments worldwide, along with descriptions of the highs and (mostly) lows of foreign airlines, foreign hotels, and foreign travel in general. But it's also about encryption.

Datotek sold cryptographic equipment in the era after rotor machines and before modern academic cryptography. The company initially marketed computer-file encryption, but pivoted o link encryption - low-speed data, voice, fax - because that's what the market wanted.

These were the years where the NSA hired anyone promising in the field, and routinely classified - and thereby blocked - publication of academic mathematics papers of those they didn't hire. They controlled the fielding of strong cryptography by aggressively using the International Traffic in Arms regulation. Kinch talks about the difficulties in getting an expert license for Datotek’s products; he didn’t know that the only reason he ever got that license was because the NSA was able to break his company’s stuff. He had no idea that his larges competitor, the Swiss company Crypto AG, was owned and controlled by the CIA and its West German equivalent. “Wouldn't that have made our life easier if we had known that back in the 1970s?" Yes, it would. But no one knew.

Glimmers of the clandestine world peek out of the book. Countries like France ask detailed tech questions, borrow or buy a couple of units for "evaluation," and then disappear again. Did they break the encryption? Did they just want to see what their adversaries were using? No one at Datotek knew.

 Kinch "carried the key generator logic diagrams and schematics" with him - even today it's good practice not to rely on their secrecy for security -- but the details seem laughably insecure: four linear shift registers of 29, 23, 13, and 7 bits, variable stepping, and a small nonlinear final transformation. The NSA probably used this as a challenge to its new hires. But Datotek didn't know that, at the time.

Kinch writes: “The strength of the cryptography had to be accepted on trust and only on trust." Yes, but it's so, so weird to read about it in practice. Kinch demonstrated the security of his telephone encryptors by hooking a pair of them up and having people listen to the encrypted voice. It's rather like demonstrating the safety of a food additive by showing that someone doesn't immediately fall over dead after eating it. (In one absolutely bizarre anecdote, an Argentine sergeant with a "hearing defect" could understand the scrambled analog voice. Datotek fixed its security, but only offered the upgrade to the Argentines, because no one else complained. As I said, no one knew anything.)

In his postscript, he writes that even if the NSA could break Datotek's products, they were "vastly superior to what [his customers] had used previously." Given that the previous devices were electromechanical rotor machines, and that his primary competition was a CIA-run operation, he's probably right. But even today, we know nothing about any other country's cryptanalytic capabilities during those decades.

A lot of this book has a "you had to be there" vibe. And it's mostly tone-deaf. There is no real acknowledgment of the human-rights-abusing countries on Datoteks customer list, and how their products might have assisted those governments. But it's a fascinating artifact of an era before commercial cryptography went mainstream, before academic cryptography became approved for US classified data, before those of us outside the triple fences of the NSA understood the mathematics of cryptography.


Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by The Economist. He is the author of over one dozen books—including his latest, A Hacker’s Mind—as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter “Crypto-Gram” and his blog “Schneier on Security” are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularly quoted in the press. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and AccessNow; and an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. He is the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc.