Welcome to TOP SECRET UMBRA

Greetings! This my brand-new newsletter at Substack, devoted to issues of espionage, terrorism, propaganda, and security with a counterintelligence flavor. If you know my work as a national security commentator, journalist, and social media maven for quite a few years, you know what TOP SECRET UMBRA is about.

Here we ask the unaskable and say the unsayable without concern for appearance or offense. If you believe the world is exactly as it seems to be, if you buy official stories, if you prefer disinformation to bona fide information, you will be triggered by TOP SECRET UMBRA on a regular basis.

We’re going to dig deep at TOP SECRET UMBRA into sensitive matters that the mainstream media avoids, glosses over, or covers up. We will do this in a spirit of open inquiry, grounded in sometimes unpleasant reality plus deep understanding of how the secret world of espionage actually works.

For too long, mainstream media avoidance of complex and controversial intelligence-flavored issues has relegated these important matters to the fringes, sometimes nut-fringes. Then the MSM has no need to cover them because, of course, only crazy basement-dwellers talk about such things. The antidote to tinfoil and media avoidance is right here.

This newsletter builds on my long experience in national security and intelligence, a couple decades in the Defense Department and the Intelligence Community as a GS civilian, military member, and sometime contractor. I won’t say I’ve seen it all – who has? – but I’ve seen a lot and I’ve experienced it from different hush-hush viewpoints. That’s the perspective you’ll get at TOP SECRET UMBRA.

I won’t be divulging any state secrets here, I take my lifetime secrecy oath seriously, but you will get the benefit of my expertise and knowing what’s legit in the spy world versus what’s bogus. Here we’ll separate not just wheat from chaff but reality from RUMINT.

This newsletter’s main feature will be the Friday edition, the Intelligence Summary (INTSUM) for the week: my analysis of some big items you need to know about. That will be supplemented a couple times during the week, usually Monday and Wednesday but allow for breaking events, with shorter Situation Reports (SITREPs) that will focus on developing items of interest. Occasionally I will post something for the whole world to enjoy but most TOP SECRET UMBRA content will be for subscribers only.  

Please join us if you’re inclined. I can’t promise you’ll always agree with me or even like what I have to say, but I do promise you that TOP SECRET UMBRA will never be boring.