The Gift of Espionage

As the holiday gift-giving season cranks into gear, Raleigh's Metro Magazine is suggesting a gift idea to make even Jack Bauer's eyes light up: espionage.

Metro editor and publisher Bernie Reeves founded the successful Raleigh Spy Conference in 2005. He believes tickets to the 2008 conference, to be held March 26-28 at the North Carolina Museum of History in downtown Raleigh, would make a timely – not to mention unique – holiday gift.

"The premise that history is in the midst of a major re-write based on the flow of new declassified material has made the Raleigh Spy Conference the best-known event of its type in the world," said Reeves. "Each year we have attracted the top experts to Raleigh to discuss Cold War espionage; the connection of intelligence to the war on terror; the scholarship of the Cold War era — from McCarthy to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the effect of Soviet propaganda on American academia. In 2006, the very timely topic 'Castro and the future of Cuba' was picked up and broadcast on C-SPAN-TV."

The theme for the '08 conference is "CIA's Unsolved Mysteries: The Nosenko Defection, Double Agents and Angleton's Wilderness of Mirrors." Keynote speaker Pete Bagley, the former chief of CIA's Soviet bloc counterintelligence division, will defend his controversial new book on KGB defector Yuri Nosenko. Its mysterious connections to Lee Harvey Oswald and John F. Kennedy “kicked off 40 years of unresolved internal strife at the CIA," Reeves says

Other speakers will include Dave Robarge, Chief Historian for CIA and an expert on the infamous counterintelligence chief James Angleton; Brian Kelley, the “wrong man” in the Robert Hanssen spy case and former counterintelligence officer for CIA; Jerry Schecter, former Time magazine correspondent in Moscow during the Cold War and an author of books on Cold War espionage; and David Ignatius, former foreign editor-turned-columnist for the Washington Post, and an author of espionage fiction.