4 ms·

The Notorious London Spy School Churning Out Many of the World’s Top Journalists

22 points by therockspush 5y ago

Qw3r7 5y ago
In similar fashion there are the Chicago Boys from Chile too. A lot of this article, whilst interesting, comes across as a 'well yeah'. And with a school with so many apparent connections, I would believe people would want to study there even if there was opposing ideology.
cafard 5y ago
"Increasingly, it appears, intelligence agencies the world over are beginning to appreciate agents with a strong academic background." John Le Carre's upper-echelon spies seemed to be mostly Oxonian. I am not particularly a historian of the CIA, but its leadership seemed to have fairly expensive schooling, to, didn't they?
- noughtme 5y ago
  Not just expensive, exclusive. In the early years they hired mostly out of Yale, before expanding to include Princeton. Similar to MI5/MI6 hiring from Oxbridge. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/16/books/yale-a-great-nursery-of-spooks.html https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/16/books/yale-a-great-nurser...
davidgerard 5y ago
MintPressNews was deprecated from Wikipedia - it should not be used for any claim or purpose - because of its extensively documented history of publishing completely fabricated stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_268#RfC:_MintPress_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not... Even if something in MintPressNews happens to be true that day, in general it's on the level of the Daily Mail. If you can't find a quality source for a claim in MintPressNews, you should strongly question it.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Okay, but this is obviously not wikipedia. Either the facts here are true or they aren't, and it should be pretty easy to verify either way. I get needing to weed out generally bad sources in an encyclopedic setting where the sheer volume of citations can make verifying everything a very painful chore, but invoking wiki policy anywhere else than on Wikipedia is not very useful Imo. (and that's without getting into the very very... Intense lobbying when it comes to a lot of WP:RS decisions anyways. Though it doesn't seem like the proposal you linked has been subject to that)
chriselles 5y ago
Well, to be fair.....the professional career field that has the most overlap with intelligence collection/analysis is journalism.
aliasEli 5y ago
I really don't see the problem here. Journalists and spies have a lot in common, so why shouldn't they learn from each other?
zibzab 5y ago
> Department of War Studies at King’s College, London Let's be honest, they got nothing on Trinity College, Cambridge.

22 points by therockspush 5y ago

In similar fashion there are the Chicago Boys from Chile too. A lot of this article, whilst interesting, comes across as a 'well yeah'. And with a school with so many apparent connections, I would believe people would want to study there even if there was opposing ideology.

cafard 5y ago

"Increasingly, it appears, intelligence agencies the world over are beginning to appreciate agents with a strong academic background." John Le Carre's upper-echelon spies seemed to be mostly Oxonian. I am not particularly a historian of the CIA, but its leadership seemed to have fairly expensive schooling, to, didn't they?

noughtme 5y ago
Not just expensive, exclusive. In the early years they hired mostly out of Yale, before expanding to include Princeton. Similar to MI5/MI6 hiring from Oxbridge. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/16/books/yale-a-great-nursery-of-spooks.html https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/16/books/yale-a-great-nurser...

davidgerard 5y ago

MintPressNews was deprecated from Wikipedia - it should not be used for any claim or purpose - because of its extensively documented history of publishing completely fabricated stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_268#RfC:_MintPress_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not... Even if something in MintPressNews happens to be true that day, in general it's on the level of the Daily Mail. If you can't find a quality source for a claim in MintPressNews, you should strongly question it.

mardifoufs 5y ago
Okay, but this is obviously not wikipedia. Either the facts here are true or they aren't, and it should be pretty easy to verify either way. I get needing to weed out generally bad sources in an encyclopedic setting where the sheer volume of citations can make verifying everything a very painful chore, but invoking wiki policy anywhere else than on Wikipedia is not very useful Imo. (and that's without getting into the very very... Intense lobbying when it comes to a lot of WP:RS decisions anyways. Though it doesn't seem like the proposal you linked has been subject to that)

chriselles 5y ago

Well, to be fair.....the professional career field that has the most overlap with intelligence collection/analysis is journalism.

aliasEli 5y ago

I really don't see the problem here. Journalists and spies have a lot in common, so why shouldn't they learn from each other?

zibzab 5y ago

> Department of War Studies at King’s College, London Let's be honest, they got nothing on Trinity College, Cambridge.