"He was like a salmon swimming upstream," one former FSB general told us, citing how Litvinenko, against his advice, investigated links between crime clans and what Russians had come to know as the siloviki - a group of strongmen within the Kremlin whose core members came from St Petersburg with a background in the intelligence services.
But super-forecasters need not have a background in the intelligence services to apply that kind of logic successfully.
Perhaps the best example of the new breed of Russian flexian is Igor Sechin, the tough Deputy Prime Minister who reportedly has a background, like Putin, in the intelligence services.
I'm referring here not just to his place in the background, as the intelligence shaping the fiction, but to long interludes in the novel in which he actually steps forward to explicitly address the reader and interact with his own characters.
Simon Hart, the MP for Camarthen West, said Crouch used to make frequent trips to Iraq and said it was understood locally that he had a background in the military or intelligence.
In remarks prepared for delivery at his confirmation hearings to become director of national intelligence in the Obama administration, Dennis C. Blair, a retired admiral with a long background in intelligence, endorsed the new approach and promised to enforce it rigorously.
Coming from a background in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, she is particularly interested in the topic of cognitive enhancement, or how immersive and wearable systems can actively assist people with memory, attention, learning, decision making, communication, and wellbeing.
Most of the committees' lawyers knew nothing of Radzimski's top-secret background in Navy intelligence.
The company became an international success, sometimes promoting Kaspersky's background in Russian intelligence.
Given that Colin Angle, founder of iRobot, has a MS in Computer Science and a deep background in artificial intelligence and robotics, it's clear that this is a battle of the megaminds.
His background in intelligence gives him the aura of being well-informed, well-connected and mysterious.
