I’m running down the road tryin’ to loosen my load...

Yes, Virginia, we do take time off—and this is one of them. Due to the press of events since late February, I’d pretty much given up my annual late summer truck north to my ancestral home of sorts in Rhode Island. I’d lived in the Ocean State for only two years as a kid in the late 1950s, but I’d come back constantly over the decades to see my late sister and her family, who lived on there for another 40 years—until yet another late-March sleet and an empty nest propelled them to Gulf Shores, Ala. Then were the other things: I got my first teen kiss on the rocks at Second Beach in Middletown, abutting Newport, in 1960, and in 1991, I’d scattered my mother’s ashes in the waters there. I like to take a dip in the exact same spot. (Yes, it’s strange.) This year, though, with two wars threatening to go wide and the administration’s authoritarian crackdowns in high gear, I felt pinned to my chair. Around Washington, moreover, there was a growing chorus of angry and alarmed former CIA, NSA, DIA and State Department officials, offloaded in repeated DOGE/MAGA political purges, to talk to. I snuck off the New Hampshire for a rye days around the 4th of July, but that was it. But burnout finally came about 10 days ago. At the last moment, I decided couldn’t very well handle September if I didn’t bolt north at the end of this month and find solace, with a firm plan to hit the beach with my books for a week and try very hard to disconnect from the incessant, demanding internet. So by the time you read this, I should be well gone, with my feet folded in the Second Beach sand, the Sawx on the radio, a cup of Del’s frozen lemonade in my hand, a linguica sandwich in my lap, and a few great new books to haul from my beach bag. (Leading candidates: Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, and two forthcoming titles, Mark Riebling’s The Soldier Spy, about the late Patrick Lang, an Army colonel I knew quite well, and David McCloskey’s latest thriller, London Station.) (By the way, SpyTalk’s Year Seven begins August 31. How ‘bout that?!) And that’s principally because of you, dear readers—you and the incredibly accomplished writers who continue to do great work for SpyTalk. So everybody involved should take a bow. Thank you, thank you, thank you, all. Catch you on the rebound. I’m headed down the road—listening to The Warmth of the Sun. Don’t miss the latest SpyTalk podcast, with former CIA Chief Learning Officer Steve Hirsch on how Russia, China, and Iran exploit the cracks in US intelligence. Rock your time off -- and your time on. Enjoy, relax . You do an amazing job keeping us better informed, better able to understand, better able to see behind the many layers of intentional deceptiveness. But it takes its toll and sometimes you have to take care of you. Enjoy, relax and thanks for the reading list ,