Greg Myre

The Biden administration is expected to release a report soon that addresses the key question in the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi: What role, if any, did Saudi Arabia's crown prince have in the death?

If the report by the U.S. intelligence community implicates Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in any way, it would damage the already complicated relations between the traditional allies.

President Biden's nominee to lead the CIA, William Burns, spent more than three decades as a diplomat. Yet Burns sounded very much like a national security chief at his confirmation hearing Wednesday as he described how the U.S. should be wary of China and its leader Xi Jinping.

"There are a growing number of areas in which Xi's China is a formidable, authoritarian adversary," Burns told the Senate Intelligence Committee in his opening remarks.

As COVID cases began to rise a year ago, a Chinese company contacted several U.S. states and offered to set up testing labs. As a byproduct, the Chinese firm, Beijing Genomics Institute, would likely gain access to the DNA of those tested.

Last year, cyber expert P.W. Singer was asked to write the introduction to a big government report by a group called the Cybersecurity Solarium Commission. Instead of the usual bland summary, Singer produced a fictional account of what Washington, D.C., might look like in the aftermath of a devastating cyberattack.

The riot at the Capitol appeared to be almost all chaos and anarchy. But as private researchers and ordinary individuals scrutinized online video and photos, they identified some of those who took part and assisted law enforcement.

John Scott-Railton from Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto focused on individuals who seemed to have a real purpose amid the mob — like two men who were spotted with plastic handcuffs that could be used to detain people or take them hostage.

In a day filled with shocking images, one of the most startling was a mob of President Trump's supporters surging into the U.S. Capitol with relative ease.

In the most detailed comments so far, the U.S. government said Tuesday that a massive hack into government and private computer networks was "likely Russian in origin" and will take a long time to repair.

"This is a serious compromise that will require a sustained and dedicated effort to remediate," said the lengthy statement issued on behalf of several national security agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity agency.

Editor's Note: As this year winds down, we're looking back at some people we spoke to earlier in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was in its early stages. Now that there's a vaccine, we wanted to check in with someone whose family has a long history with vaccines.

When I spoke to Dr. Peter Salk back in May, he told me the tale of receiving an early polio vaccine - the one invented by his father, Dr. Jonas Salk.

A massive computer breach allowed hackers to spend months exploring numerous U.S. government networks and private companies' systems around the world. Industry experts say a country mounted the complex hack — and government officials say Russia is responsible.

The hackers attached their malware to a software update from SolarWinds, a company based in Austin, Texas. Many federal agencies and thousands of companies worldwide use SolarWinds' Orion software to monitor their computer networks.

Microwave radiation is the "most plausible" cause of migraines, dizziness, memory loss and other ailments that dozens of U.S. diplomats have complained of while serving in Cuba and China, a new report says.

The first time Scott O'Grady made a splash in the news the Air Force pilot had been shot down on a mission over Bosnia in 1995. He survived in the woods by eating leaves, grass and bugs for six days before he was rescued. He returned to the U.S. a hero, was welcomed by President Bill Clinton and appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

He's in the news again, this time for different reasons.

For someone poised to become the ultimate insider as the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines spent her formative years more as a hipster and an outsider.

An only child raised on the West Side of New York, she spent her teenage years helping care for her ailing mother, who died when Haines was 15. As soon as she finished high school, Haines set out on a series of adventures. She began with a stint at an elite judo academy in Japan, earning a brown belt.

In the past 10 days, President Trump has fired the defense secretary as part of a leadership shake-up at the Pentagon. His administration has announced troop cutbacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the president huddled with his national security team and discussed possible military action against Iran.

As president-elect, Joe Biden should start receiving the same daily intelligence briefing as the one prepared for President Trump.

But so far, this hasn't happened, and it's not clear when the daily briefings will begin, according to intelligence officials.

Trump has not accepted the election results, and his administration has not yet authorized Biden and his team to start receiving government resources that range from the mundane — like office space and desks — to the highly sensitive, like top-secret intelligence briefings.

President Trump distilled his foreign policy into the phrase "America First." In practice, the result has often been friction with allies, withdrawal from international agreements and the scaling back of the leading international role the U.S. has played for generations.

President-elect Joe Biden wants to restore a more traditional U.S. posture: warmer relations with longstanding partners, a recommitment to organizations such as NATO, and a U.S. that's once again front and center on the global stage.

A Russian group acquired U.S. voter data in at least a couple of states. The Iranians reportedly did the same. President Trump's campaign website was briefly defaced.

During 26 years at the CIA, Marc Polymeropoulos spent a lot of time in rough places, like war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But he never suffered any harm until December 2017, when he was sound asleep at a Marriott Hotel in Moscow near the U.S. Embassy.

"I was awoken in the middle of the night," recalled Polymeropoulos, 51. "I just had incredible vertigo, dizziness. I wanted to throw up. The room was spinning. I couldn't even stand up without falling down. I had tinnitus ringing in my ears."

National security leaders normally lay low to the point of invisibility during presidential election campaigns. Not this year.

Most members of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff are quarantining at home after Adm. Charles Ray, the vice commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, tested positive for COVID-19, the military said Tuesday.

Ray is not a member of the Joint Chiefs, the nation's top military officers, but he was at Pentagon meetings last week with others who are.

It's not clear how Ray was infected, though he did attend a White House ceremony on Sept. 27, just one day after President Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee. Multiple people at that event contracted COVID.

John Brennan stepped down as CIA director the moment Donald Trump was being sworn in as president – noon on Jan. 20, 2017.

The next day, Trump visited CIA headquarters and spoke about the size of his inauguration crowd while standing in front of the agency's Memorial Wall, featuring a star for each CIA employee killed in the line of duty.

National security officials say the Kremlin is at it again: Just like in 2016, Russia is using social media to try to undermine the U.S. presidential election, only with even more sophisticated tools.

The al-Qaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, may now seem like a distant memory for some. But not for Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who interrogated many al-Qaida suspects.

"For me, it has the feeling that it just happened yesterday," Soufan told NPR in an interview.

He has good reasons for feeling that way. This week, Soufan released a new version of his 2011 book, The Black Banners (Declassified): How Torture Derailed The War On Terror After 9/11, which now includes details of interrogations previously censored by the U.S. government.