Brazen Weekender #135

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Brazen Weekender! I’m Bradley, and today I’ll be bringing you the best of what the team has been reading, watching and listening to. This week, I’ve got a brilliant dissection of the private intelligence industry, a rare dispatch from inside Tehran under bombardment, and a cinematic caper about a Harvard fellow turned Caribbean marijuana kingpin. Plus, a French thriller about class warfare, an investigation into the criminal networks smuggling endangered glass eels, and a new podcast from the makers of Serial about a family’s least favorite cousin who tried to hire a hitman.

So, what’s caught our eye this week?

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What we’ve been reading

Among the Private Spies (London Review of Books)

Vadim Nikitin uses Christopher Steele as the entry point to take apart the private intelligence industry — the revolving door between state spy agencies and corporate consultancies, producing intelligence that is often impossible to verify but highly lucrative. He traces how former MI6 officers have built a parallel espionage economy, selling analysis to oligarchs, hedge funds, and governments who can’t always tell the difference between insight and fabrication.

Nikitin’s argument is structural, not personal: the problem isn’t that Steele got the Trump dossier wrong. It’s that the entire business model incentivizes confident claims over honest uncertainty. When your clients are paying for certainty, admitting you don’t know is a career-ending move.