By the time you see this, I hope to be somewhere off Kittery, Maine, enjoying the cool Atlantic waters. But I’ve left behind a special treat—our recent podcast interview with Luis Rueda, a senior former CIA operations officer, which many of you may have missed because, for entirely innocent reasons, I wasn’t able to promote it here in the SpyTalk newsletter.

Luis has been prescient about developments in the Middle East and elsewhere ever since I’ve known him, which is going on some 15 years now. His stint as chief of CIA operations for Iraq alone before the misbegotten invasion was enough of a learning lesson for him, and one that a number of us who’ve closely tracked events in that Godforsaken region have been privileged to learn as well.