WIRED MAGAZINE, 2017

Chasing the Phantom: Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker

ON THE MORNING of December 30, the day after Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 US election, Tillmann Werner was sitting down to breakfast in Bonn, Germany. He spread some jam on a slice of rye bread, poured himself a cup of coffee, and settled in to check Twitter at his dining room table. Read more…

POLITICO MAGAZINE, 2016

‘We’re The Only Plane in the Sky’

Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. But for a tiny handful of people, those memories touch American presidential history. Shortly after the attacks began, the most powerful man in the world, who had been informed of the World Trade Center explosions in a Florida classroom, was escorted to a runway and sent to the safest place his handlers could think of: the open sky. Read more…

WIRED MAGAZINE, 2018

The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in the Vietnam War

ONE DAY IN the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam. After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short days of R&R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense combat since he last said goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for valor for his actions in one battle, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being shot in the thigh. He and Ann had spoken only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam. Read more…

POLITICO MAGAZINE, 2014

The Green Monster

Gil Kerlikowske was hoping to make it through at least his first week on the job without being awakened in the middle of the night. President Barack Obama’s new head of Customs and Border Protection, Kerlikowske could have used a week of quiet as he began to figure out the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, with its 46,000 gun-carrying Customs officers and Border Patrol agents and massive $12.4 billion annual budget. He didn’t get it. On his sixth night after taking office in March, a Border Patrol agent’s single gunshot 1,500 miles away from Washington interrupted Kerlikowske’s sleep. Read more…

WIRED MAGAZINE, 2020

The Furious Hunt for the MAGA Bomber

Weird things happen in and around New York City nearly every day, so the appearance of a suspicious package at George Soros’ residence in Westchester County didn’t initially raise many eyebrows at the FBI’s hulking New York field office. Late on the evening of Monday, October 22, 2018, the office received an alert known as a “nine-liner”—a brief update on an unfolding situation that, in the classic muddle of government communications, is actually 11 lines long. As a routine precautionary response, a team of bomb techs headed to Katonah, New York, to examine the yellow padded envelope. Given the rarity of mail bombs—the US Postal Service encounters about 16 a year, amid plenty of hoaxes—the technicians had good reason to expect it was a false alarm. Read more…

THE ATLANTIC, 2019

On 9/11, Luck Meant Everything

Joseph Lott, a sales representative for Compaq computers, survived one of the deadliest days in modern American history because he had a penchant for “art ties,” neckties featuring famous masterpieces. “It began many years earlier, in the ’90s,” he said in an oral history with StoryCorps. “I love Impressionist paintings, and I use them as a way to make points with my kids. I’d put on an art tie, and then I would ask my kids—I have three daughters—I would say, ‘Artist identification?’ And they would have to tell me whether it was a van Gogh or a Monet, and we would have a little conversation about the artist.” Read more…

WIRED MAGAZINE, 2020

The Man Who Speaks Softly—and Commands a Big Cyber Army

Meet General Paul Nakasone. He reined in chaos at the NSA and taught the US military how to launch pervasive cyberattacks. And he did it all without you noticing. In the years before he became America’s most powerful spy, Paul Nakasone acquired an unusually personal understanding of the country’s worst intelligence failures. Read more…

POLITICO MAGAZINE, 2021

‘I’d Never Been Involved in Anything as Secret as This’

On the morning of May 1, 2011, most Americans had never heard of Abbottabad. By that night, the dusty midsize city near the mountains of northwest Pakistan was the center of the biggest story in the world. A team of U.S. Navy SEALs had just descended by helicopter on a high-walled mansion there in the dark of night, located the globe’s most hunted man and killed him. Read more…

THE ATLANTIC, 2021

After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong

On the friday after 9/11, President George W. Bush visited the New York City site that the world would come to know as Ground Zero. After rescue workers shouted that they couldn’t hear him as he spoke to them through a bullhorn, he turned toward them and ad-libbed. “I can hear you,” he shouted. “The whole world hears you, and when we find these people who knocked these buildings down, they’ll hear all of us soon.” Everybody roared. At a prayer service later that day, he outlined the clear objective of the task ahead: “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” Read more…

ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, 2018

Looking for Elvis

In the first weeks of the Iraq war, the Pentagon assembled a pack of playing cards denoting Iraq’s most wanted, the fifty-five figures in the Iraqi government and military deemed its most important targets. This is the story of the hunt for the Ace of Spades—the ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, known around the world simply as Saddam—told by those who caught him. Read more…

WIRED MAGAZINE, 2020

Inside the Feds’ Battle Against Huawei

On the morning of December 1, 2018, the vast central plaza in Mexico City was thronged by tens of thousands of people. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing populist, had just been sworn in as Mexico’s 58th president. In his inaugural address, he thumbed his nose at decades of neoliberal rule and promised a sweeping political and economic transformation of Mexico. Read more…

WIRED MAGAZINE, 2019

Sole Survivor: Mike Pompeo Was Riding High—Until the Ukraine Mess Exploded

Nearly three years into the administration, Pompeo effectively is the last man standing, having outlasted and vanquished all rivals for Trump’s ear on foreign policy, the president’s tireless, give-no-quarter chief crusader, a political pugilist in a role normally reserved for thoughtful diplomacy, a happy warrior Trump dispatched to tongue-lash European allies over China and Huawei, to scold Iran over its nuclear ambitions, to glad-hand with North Korea, to boost Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, to reassure Saudi Arabia that its relationship with the Trump administration would remain copacetic, despite the government’s alleged killing of US resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and to clean up with Denmark in the wake of Trump’s aborted effort to purchase Greenland. Read more…

WIRED MAGAZINE, 2020

An Oral History of the Day Everything Changed

In the end, as history will record, the story that would have been the biggest news on Wednesday, March 11—the story that in normal times might have been the biggest headline of the month—will hardly register in America’s memory: That morning, at 11:06 am, a judge sentenced Hollywood super-producer turned super-predator Harvey Weinstein to 23 years in prison on sexual assault charges. Yet within 12 hours, the staggering fact that Weinstein—the force behind an entire generation of movie classics from Shakespeare in Love to Pulp Fiction—might very well spend the rest of his life in prison turned out not only not to be the biggest story of the day, it wasn’t even the biggest Hollywood story of the day. Read more…

POLITICO MAGAZINE, 2020

Experts Knew a Pandemic Was Coming. Here’s What They’re Worried About Next.

You might feel blindsided by the coronavirus, but warnings about a looming pandemic have been there for decades. Government briefings, science journals and even popular fiction projected the spread of a novel virus and the economic impacts it would bring, complete often with details about the specific challenges the U.S. is now facing. Read more…

THE WASHINGTON POST, 2020

The Storm We Can’t See

Listening to recent news conferences by the White House, certain governors and other state officials — like those in Texas, Iowa, Georgia and Tennessee — makes it seem as if the coronavirus crisis is already passing, America is on the verge of reopening and our economy will be begin bouncing back any day now. “All the key metrics are going in the right direction,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told the Texas Tribune at the end of April. Even those governors who acted most aggressively and whose states have borne the worst of the pandemic so far, such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo, have begun to sound notes of hope and optimism that we’ve cleared the worst of the first wave. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s office said on April 30, “We hope to be in a position to begin the recovery in early May.” Read more…

BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK, 2016

The Spy Who Added Me On LinkedIn

Evgeny Buryakov woke up to a snowstorm. On the morning of Jan. 26, 2015, his modest brick home in the Bronx was getting the first inches of what would be almost a foot of powder, and Buryakov, the No. 2 executive at the New York branch of a Russian bank, decided to skip work and head around the corner to a grocery store to buy supplies for his family of four. As the 39-year-old Russian bundled into his winter gear and closed the front door of his house behind him, he didn’t realize he would never set foot in it again. Read more…

POLITICO MAGAZINE, 2016

What the FBI Files Reveal About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server

The scandal of Hillary Clinton’s “home brew” email server, as it is played out over more than a year and a half, has served as a Rorschach test for her supporters and opponents. In her critics’ eyes it’s just another example of the Clinton family taking ethical shortcuts and playing by their own set of fast-and-loose rules; her supporters say it’s another example of the hysterical near-insanity that motivates her attackers in which, after millions of dollars in investigations, congressional hearings, FBI interviews and more, the scandal has amounted to little more than a whopping nothing-burger. Read more…

ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, 2017

The Inconvenient Comrade

For many ambassadors who work on their country’s behalf in Washington, D. C., the swirl of high society is the key to America’s capital city—it’s where friendships form, bonds strengthen, and deals get made. The UAE ambassador holds lavish dinners for friends and government officials, and the wife of the Kuwaiti ambassador is the doyenne of a well-connected crowd of female power brokers. The British ambassador’s massive residence, situated on Massachusetts Avenue next door to the vice-president’s mansion, is the setting of some of the city’s swankiest parties. Read more…