Ali Hassan Salameh was a Palestinian militant who was the chief of operations for Black September and founder of Force 17. He was assassinated in January 1979 as part of an assassination campaign by Mossad.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion began on 19 March 2003 and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations, in which a United States-led combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded the Republic of Iraq. Twenty-two days after the first day of the invasion, the capital city of Baghdad was captured by coalition forces on 9 April after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad. This early stage of the war formally ended on 1 May when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations" in his Mission Accomplished speech, after which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as the first of several successive transitional governments leading up to the first Iraqi parliamentary election in January 2005. U.S. military forces later remained in Iraq until the withdrawal in 2011.
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth is an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Kill List. Forsyth's works frequently appear on best-sellers lists and more than a dozen of his titles have been adapted to film. By 2006, he had sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages.
Red Rabbit is a spy thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 5, 2002. The plot occurs a few months after the events of Patriot Games (1987), and incorporates the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Main character Jack Ryan, now an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, takes part in the extraction of a Soviet defector who knows of a KGB plot to kill the pontiff. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Project Babylon was a space gun project commissioned by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. It involved building a series of "superguns". The design was based on research from the 1960s Project HARP led by the Canadian artillery expert Gerald Bull. There were most likely four different devices in the program.
The Cobweb is a 1996 novel written by Neal Stephenson with J. Frederick George, a pseudonym for Stephenson's uncle, historian George Jewsbury. It was originally published under the collective pseudonym "Stephen Bury", as was their earlier novel Interface (1994).
The Deceiver is a novel by English writer Frederick Forsyth, about a retiring agent of the British SIS named Sam McCready. He is the head of Deception, Disinformation and Psychological Operations, and his maverick but brilliant successes have led to his nickname "The Deceiver." The stories had previously been filmed as Frederick Forsyth Presents, a miniseries for British television, in 1989 and 1990, with McCready played by Alan Howard. The book followed in 1991. It appeared in The New York Times's list of the best-selling books for eight weeks, and its peak was #6.
Icon is a thriller novel by British author Frederick Forsyth. Its plot centres on the politics of the Russian Federation in 1999, with an extremist party close to seizing power. Published by Bantam Press in September 1997, (ISBN 978-0-553-57460-9), Icon became a New York Times Bestseller and was adapted into a television film.
The Iraqi Armed Forces are the military forces of the Republic of Iraq. They consist of the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi Air Force, and the Iraqi Navy. Along with these three primary service branches, there exists the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service and the Popular Mobilization Forces. The President of Iraq acts as the supreme commander as outlined by the constitution.
The Afghan is a 2006 thriller novel by British writer Frederick Forsyth.
Khidir Hamza is an Iraqi atomic scientist who worked for Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme in the 1980s and early 1990s. Following the Gulf War, he left Iraq in 1994 and went into exile in the United States. He provided testimony to Western intelligence agencies suggesting that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programmes were active and ongoing. However, claims of active WMD programs including nuclear weapons have since been invalidated, and his self-described role as the former head of Iraq's nuclear weapons programme has been discredited.
Mike Martin is the protagonist in two novels, The Fist of God (1994) and The Afghan (2006) by Frederick Forsyth.
National governments deal in both intelligence and military special operations functions that either should be completely secret, or simply cannot be linked to the sponsor. It is a continuing and unsolved question for governments whether clandestine intelligence collection and covert action should be under the same agency. The arguments for doing so include having centralized functions for monitoring covert action and clandestine HUMINT and making sure they do not conflict, as well as avoiding duplication in common services such as cover identity support, counterespionage, and secret communications. The arguments against doing so suggest that the management of the two activities takes a quite different mindset and skills, in part because clandestine collection almost always is on a slower timeline than covert action.
The cruise missiles strike on Iraq in June 1993 were ordered by U.S. President Bill Clinton as both a retaliation and a warning triggered by the attempted assassination by alleged Iraqi intelligence agents of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush while on a visit to Kuwait from 14–16 April 1993.
Doomsday Gun is a 1994 television film produced by HBO, dramatizing the life of Canadian supergun designer Dr. Gerald Bull and his involvement in Project Babylon, Saddam Hussein's plan to build a supergun with a range of over 500 miles (800 km).
Operation Desert Storm, the combat phase of the Gulf War, began with an extensive aerial bombing campaign by the air forces of the coalition against targets in Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait from 17 January 1991 to 23 February 1991. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition flew over 100,000 sorties, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs, widely destroying military and civilian infrastructure. The air campaign was commanded by United States Air Force (USAF) Lieutenant General Chuck Horner, who briefly served as Commander-in-Chief—Forward of U.S. Central Command while General Norman Schwarzkopf was still in the United States. The British air commanders were Air Chief Marshal Andrew Wilson and Air Vice-Marshal Bill Wratten. The air campaign had largely finished by 23 February 1991 with the beginning of the coalition ground offensive into Kuwait.
The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, popularly known as Mossad, is the national intelligence agency of the State of Israel. It is one of the main entities in the Israeli Intelligence Community, along with Aman and Shin Bet.
Jonathan Moyle, the 28-year-old editor of the magazine 'Defence Helicopter World' and former RAF helicopter pilot, was found dead in room 1406 of Santiago's Hotel Carrera on 31. March 1990. His purpose in Santiago was to attend a Chilean sponsored defence conference.
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence on foreign nationals in support of its Five Eyes partners. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary.
The Fox is a novel by British writer Frederick Forsyth, published in 2018 by Bantam Press. The story concerns an SIS Cyber operation run by Spymaster Adrian Weston.
