The Notorious London Spy School Churning Out Many of the World’s Top Journalists | Hacker News Reader

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

mintpressnews.com

22 pointstherockspush8 comments

"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?

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-nurser...

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/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.

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)

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.

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?

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

> Department of War Studies at King’s College, London

Let's be honest, they got nothing on Trinity College, Cambridge.

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