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Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn), a moderate consensus-builder, is in line to take the helm of the House Intelligence Committee if Democrats prevail, as expected, in the midterm elections. (CNN).

William Faulkner’s famous aphorism that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past,” could’ve been the motto for Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee for the past three years.

That’s about to change if the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, takes the reins as expected following Tuesday’s “blue wave” thumping of the Republicans.

While the current committee chairman, Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark), an 2020 election denier, has focused on “restoring trust” in the intelligence agencies after alleged abuses under Joe Biden (and even Barack Obama), Himes is expected to strengthen oversight of current operations and leadership under the second Trump administration.

One of the targets likely to come under Himes’s microscope will be the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, which was chaotic under Tulsi Gabbard, who followed President Trump’s cues in ousting career “deep state” intelligence professionals and then thrusting herself into the FBI’s seizure of Georgia election ballots. Her opposition to Trump’s war on Iran evidently proved politically fatal.

Gabbard’s ouster last May was followed by even more tumult under the temporary reign of hyper-partisan housing official Bill Pulte and then the drawn-out confirmation battle over Jay Clayton, a former SEC chairman with none of the intelligence experience required by statute, and who also could not bring himself to say aloud that Biden won the 2020 election. Recent reporting has it that Clayton has brought calm to the ODNI, but that’s not likely to deter Himes and fellow Democrats from a closer look into the damage Gabbard and Pulte wrought: Their job is oversight.

But Gabbard’s advocacy of “transparency” on Havana Syndrome (what the government calls Anomalous Health Incidents), the mysterious illnesses that have felled dozens of CIA officers, diplomats and others, and which many suspect were inflicted by Russian microwave weapons, will get a new, bipartisan push under Himes’s leadership. Advocates say the suspected sponsorship of Vladimir Putin—whom Trump has been romancing to settle the Ukraine war—in the alleged attacks has prevented committee Republicans from pursuing public hearings on the issue.

The same goes for the CIA’s performance under John Ratcliffe, who has lately maintained a low profile after an early partisan purge of recent trainees and intelligence professionals alike, particularly those judged DEI-infected, like Julia Curlee, a highly regarded senior CIA analyst who was forced to resign after her transgender status was publicized by far-right internet agitator Laura Loomer. She had been Vice President Mike Pence’s chief intelligence briefer.

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Likewise, FBI Director Kash Patel’s forced retirements of officials and agents assigned to investigations of Trump or the Jan. 6 rioters, particularly those agents who were tracking hidden foreign influencers and Iranian plots, will get a new look. Both longtime officials and new hires have also complained that they’ve been illegally quizzed on who they voted for. Oversight of the FBI as a whole is responsibility on the House side of the Judiciary Committee, whose baton will all but certainly pass to Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who managed the second impeachment investigation of Donald Trump in his first term.

The Intelligence Committee chair has subpoena power and can compel documents, depositions and public testimony. The panel’s Democrats will also gain far more firepower when the majority flips—a doubling of their budget and more staff.

No doubt Ratcliffe’s reported assessment that Iran posed “an immediate threat” to the U.S. last winter, and to what degree he warned Trump that Iran would likely close the Strait of Hormuz if it were attacked, will get another look under Himes, as well as the ouster of National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, who publicly resigned over his purported disagreement with the CIA and White House findings on Iran. Joe Weirsky, a retired Marine master sergeant with extensive counterterrorism and Army special operations experience, has been running the NCTC for the past eight months as acting director.

Himes has also said he is preparing to investigate what he has called the Trump administration’s “nakedly corrupt dealings with the [spy world’s] private sector.” That includes scrutiny of defense contractors and tech firms that work with intelligence agencies.

Such oversight has been the responsibility of both the House and Senate intelligence committees since their founding in the 1970s following the exposure of a series of alarming spy agency operations, including assassinations, coup plots, domestic break-ins, psychedelic drug testing on unwitting Americans and the illegal targeting of their mail and phone calls.

All in all, though, nobody expects radical moves by Himes, who has a history of bipartisan cooperation and caution. Unlike many in his party;s left wing, for example, the nine-term Connecticut Democrat was a “yes” vote on a bill reauthorizing the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702, which permits U.S. intelligence to collect the emails, phone calls, and texts between non‑U.S. persons abroad and Americans without a warrant.

What Himes really pines for is a return to normalcy in U.S. relations with its longtime allies.

“Here at the Warsaw Security Forum,” he said in October, “our allies are horrified by the President’s decision to cut an oil deal with Vladimir Putin—a deal that won’t even bring down gas prices for Americans.

“I’m here representing Congress with a clear message: the American people continue to stand with our European allies, including Ukraine, despite Donald Trump’s penchant for befriending violent dictators.”

Himes, who has been a guest on the SpyTalk podcast, did not immediately respond to an election-day request for comment on his plans should he take the gravel, as expected, in January.

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Iran has used the bombing pause to restock its missile arsenals (Reuters)

Gulf Forecast: U.S. intelligence expects Iranian and Houthi missiles and drones to target American personnel and facilities “around the region—and possibly beyond” in response to a new round of U.S. and Israeli air attacks. “An unclassified October 23 memo from Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton to Secretary of State Marco Rubio says U.S. intelligence has found that ‘Iran has substantially increased efforts to target US personnel’ and plotting efforts ‘have reached advanced stages in both the Middle East and certain other countries,’” CNN previously reported. American personnel are being removed from the region as U.S. warships arrive on scene. Two Avenger air defence systems have been placed on a floating barge off Mar-a-Lago, according to photos published by the Palm Beach Daily News.

Limited Visionary: U.S. intelligence was “alarmed” to discover that a suspected Chinese agent they were tracking had formed a “close personal relationship” with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang. “The woman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is a Chinese citizen who has served as a top executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer and cloud partner that provides AI computing power to Chinese companies including Alibaba,” the New York Times reported Thursday.

U.S. Warned Kremlin of Moscow Attack: “Russia’s FSB security service said on Saturday it was carrying out ‘appropriate’ measures after the U.S. embassy in Moscow warned of a planned ‘terrorist’ attack in the capital,” Agence France Presse reported. In early 2024 the Kremlin dismissed U.S. warnings of a looming terrorist attack, which ISIS-K operatives carried out on March 22, killing 149 people and wounding over 600. No new attack had been reported as of Sunday evening.

Kush Money: A new book connects $2 billion in slush funds from Gulf state leaders to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in an effort to influence U.S. policy. Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed Bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, by independent investigative reporter Matthew Cole, also alleges that Kushner got Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired after UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan paid Kushner $50 million. Kushner emphatically denied the details in a book excerpt published last week in Vanity Fair—which alleged that he had access to $2 billion in secret Middle Eastern bank accounts and that Dutch intelligence obtained a phone hacked by the Russians showing the money transfers—calling the allegations “outrageous” and “completely insane.”

“The question that arises from the book is whether Cole has done enough to warrant a major congressional investigation into his allegations. The answer is an emphatic yes,” wrote book reviewer Fintan O’Toole in The New York Times, which has not verified Cole’s reporting. At the end of his lengthy interview of Cole, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart said he believed the overall story but the anonymously sourced details smacked of the Steele Dossier.

Once Again: Disguised Russian social media influencers are targeting Ukraine supporters among congressional incumbents and candidates in the midterm elections, say former FBI executive Lauren C. Anderson and colleagues at The Steady State, an organization of some 450 former national security agents and officials.

Disposables: Russia and Iran are increasingly relying on “disposable agents” as part of their hybrid warfare: petty criminals recruited online for attacks and sabotage,” write Peter R. Neumann and Sophie Roehse in “Terrorism-as-a-Service” at Routledge.

Kill Bill: Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, still a Putin sidekick, urged President Trump this week to assassinate Vlodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian leader “had done more damage to Trump’s interests than U.S. interventions in Venezuela, Cuba and Iran combined,” Medvedev argued. And—here are the key words—he said Zelensky was being “downright disrespectful” to Trump’s administration. (Daily Mail)

Don’t miss the latest SpyTalk podcast on “Deep Cover Sergeants The Pentagon’s Plan for a New Spying Corps,” with Washington Post investigative reporter Zach Dorfman.

Blind Eye: The Pentagon’s internal watchdog has told a bipartisan group in Congress it’s not going to look into what was behind the Donald Trump-Elon Musk slowdown of Ukraine’s Starlink service, a critical link in Kyiv’s ability to ward off Russian missile and drone attacks, the A.P.’s Konstantin Toropin scooped Wednesday. Call the Air Force, said the IG.

Calming Affect: New-ish National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton is calming things down at Liberty Crossing after the tumult of the Tulsi Gabbard reign and brief Bill Pulte rampage, according to ace natsec reporters Julian E. Barnes, Dustin Volz and Robert Draper at The New York Times. “He has halted construction projects he deemed wasteful, reassigned or fired some officials, and abandoned a key initiative of his Trump-appointed predecessors in his first major changes since stepping into the spy chief job nearly three months ago,” they report.

Kashing In: FBI Director Kash Patel has invested “ a six-figure sum in U.S. computer technology interests at a time when his department is cracking down on suspected China-connected computer and cyber crime,” reports The Washington Sun. “In recent weeks, the FBI has seized ‘platforms operated and used by China state-sponsored hackers’ and arrested a California man on suspicion of smuggling to China over $300 million worth of ‘high-end computer servers containing U.S.-manufactured graphics processing units’ commonly used in artificial intelligence applications.” The FBI says Patel’s recent stock purchases are “fully compliant” with agency regulations.

Kash Threat: A Michigan man was charged with threatening to kill the FBI director. Anthony Daniel Palazzolo, 42, of Chesterfield Township, was “accused of writing Facebook messages threatening to kill Patel and an associate earlier in October…. The complaint said Palazzolo wanted to talk about his belief the government was violating his property rights.” (CNN)

DHS Files Heist: A hacktivist group calling itself the Department of Peace says it stole the personnel files of 41,000 DHS employees. “This dataset is massive in terms of both size and impact. It provides an unprecedented look into the Department of Homeland Security’s organizational structure, highlighting which people do what work across multiple DHS agencies, including ICE,” said the Swiss journalist and cyber security researcher who calls herself maia arson crimew. “It is a complete game changer for anyone investigating DHS, simplifying the identification of agents and their lines of command…” (DDOSecrets)

Pyongyang Power: South Korea’s intelligence service says its northern rival has deployed some 8,400 cyber warriors “armed with specialized training and a lot of pressure to generate mountains of hard currency,” according to the Financial Times. “Pyongyang’s closer ties with Moscow have reportedly boosted its hackers’ proficiency in recent years,” it said. NBC News reported Sunday that “researchers suspect North Korean hackers were behind the massive Binance theft. Previous attacks show how the group exploited employees and software providers to steal giant sums.”

Dutch Trait: Dutch intelligence refused to believe repeated U.S. warnings that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine, according to a fascinating investigation by the magazine deVolkskrant, because its “unique source” in the Kremlin dismissed the possibility and Washington’s credibility had been shattered over its faulty intelligence on Iraqi WMD.

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Comey Again: Former FBI Director James Comey said the latest Justice Department Espionage Act charge against him, filed as an “information,” not a grand jury-issued indictment— “would almost be funny if it wasn’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice.” His dismissal motion added that the Trump administration’s “unusual and improper approach to charging” him for an offense two different prosecutors declined to pursue is a “fatal problem” for the case. The DOJ accuses him of authorizing a leak of classified information to the press while he was FBI director.

An assassination threat? Really?

Chinese 101: Stanford student Elsa Johnson talks to SPYCRAFT101 about how she was approached online by someone she thought was a fellow student but turned out to be an agent of China’s MSS intelligence agency, “which had a firm foothold on campus at Stanford” and unleashed frightening pressure tactics on her. Johnson, fluent in Mandarin, “wrote about those experiences in The Stanford Review, and even testified before Congress about foreign espionage activities on university campuses.” Separately, meanwhile, two Chinese spies were sentenced to prison last week for spying on U.S. military bases in the Pacific Northwest.

Unlocked: Former CIA contractor Ian James Brinksman, 42, was granted pre-trial release into his mother’s custody on Tuesday, five days after he was arrested by the FBI on charges that he provided classified information to a journalist girlfriend that she used for articles critical of U.S. policies in the Middle East. “The public affidavit relies upon a detailed but circumstantial timeline constructed from his purported document access requests and phone call records,” wrote Jack Poulson at his All-Source Intelligence column on Substack, “and prosecutors have yet to provide direct evidence of Brinksman improperly transmitting classified information, either orally or through documents.”

Down Under Spy Scandal: An investigation into a decades-old scandal over “whether Australian spies bugged Timor-Leste to gain the upper hand in sensitive oil and gas negotiations—lampooned as an “Austin Powers-esque saga”—has gained new momentum. (The Australian)

In the Beginning: “Newly released FBI files describe how [in the late 1940s] investigators traced explosives procurement, shortwave communications, and an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) document channel during Israel’s formative years.” (IRMep via Military.com)

Science Wipeout: “Even the agencies working on topics that Mr. Trump and his aides have called priorities — including national defense, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear energy — have been depleted.” (New York Times)

SpyTalk at the Telly: Wonderland: Secrets of the Spymasters and Spies, explores “”the lives, works and secrets of some of the most famous and brilliant spy authors in literature, film and television.” (BBC Select)

I spend most of every weekend catching up with and curating the most important news on the intelligence front so you won’t have to—I know, boo hoo. But I hope you find it useful, and if you haven’t done it already, you can show your support by taking out a no-obligation, 7-day free trial. Thanks!

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The celebrated author died in December 2020 at age 89, but his influence still fascinates—and sometimes annoys—American critics.

Six years after his death, John le Carré continues to attract attention and comment. In 2023, Intelligence and National Security, widely regarded as the leading scholarly journal on the role of intelligence agencies in history and contemporary international affairs, printed a special edition assessing the relationship between spy fiction and espionage through his writing. The same year, le Carré biographer Adam Sisman released an expanded version of his revelatory The Secret Life of John le Carré. In 2025, Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries displayed notes, photographs, and other artifacts from his life’s work in a display entitled “Tradecraft.” Also last year, a mini-series based on his novel, The Night Manager (1993), entered its second season. And in 2027, Cambridge University Press will publish The Cambridge Companion to John le Carré.

Within the American intelligence community, le Carré (whose real name was David Cornwell) is acknowledged for coining terms of art like “moles” and “Moscow Rules,” and he remains a basic point of reference. According to former CIA Soviet and Eastern European Division chief Milton Bearden, his predecessor Burton Gerber was “the closest thing the CIA had to George Smiley,” while the KGB’s Rem Krassilnikov was “a real-life Karla.” In the estimation of the Near East Division’s Henry Miller-Jones, the agency’s analyst-turned-operator Robert Ames belonged to “le Carré’s world: anonymous, perceptive, knowledgeable, highly motivated, critical, discreet.”

Others are less impressed, even wary. As a former analyst at Langley shared with me, some regretted his cringeworthy caricatures of agency executives and case officers as arrogant and empowered by wealth but inexperienced, headstrong to the point of recklessness, and as clunky as Keystone Kops. But given the education, training, and experience of le Carré as a mid-century intelligence officer of the United Kingdom, where the United States tended to be looked upon with paternalistic, condescending eyes, his attitudes toward U.S. intelligence should have surprised no one. Indeed, such attitudes have appeared in British literature since Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955).

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CIA contractor Ian Brinksman has been charged with leaking classified information to a reporter, later identified as Substacker Aída Chávez (Ynet art)

Red Alerts: A memo from Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton Friday warned of “dangers to State Department employees in the Middle East and other regions,” officials told the New York Times. It said that U.S. intelligence agencies had “received intelligence” that Iranian plotting “against U.S. citizens [has] reached advanced stages. A State Department cautionary travel advisory “did not mention the increase in intelligence on Iranian assassination plots, but it had been released before the Trump administration publicized Mr. Clayton’s memo and the recent internal warnings.” With another chapter of U.S. attacks on Iran looming, The Washington Post’s longtime national security columnist David Ignatius channeled what seemed to be a D.C. foreign policy consensus that “The Iran war is unpopular because it lacks a coherent endgame. Rolling the dice once again on regime change, as [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu urges, isn’t a wise bet.”

Starlink Vocal Bind: Space X’s off-again, on-again Starlink support to help Ukraine ward off savage Russian missile and drone attacks was his doing, Elon Musk confessed Saturday, in a statement that may well have come from White House pressure. “Musk’s admission on social media came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine’s access to Starlink and Starshield satellite links has been restored to the speeds it had before restrictions that disrupted front-line operations for more than a week.” On NBC, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calf) said that Pete Hegseth and “anyone who has knowledge of what happened” should testify before the Senate on Ukraine’s Starlink disruptions. “Somebody is lying here. Maybe they’re all lying in different ways, but we need to find out.”

Sergeant James Bond: The Defense Department wants a few good men to dress up as civilian business execs to spy abroad, scooped The Washington Post’s Zach Dorfman and Warren P. Strobel. “This new next-generation spying program — in which U.S. operatives would go undercover as businesspeople or other private-sector personnel, without any overt U.S. government affiliation — is intended to be a covert prong of the Pentagon’s larger economic warfare campaign,” sources told them. [According to Politico, the Pentagon “has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency,” dubbed the Technology Support Office, “to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs.”] DoD’s proposed “new spy program of ‘nonofficial cover officers,’ or NOCs, is being overseen by Tom Rakusan, a 39-year CIA veteran and now senior adviser to Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, according to those familiar with it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive initiative,” Dorfman and Strobel reported—and the Pentagon denied. Cynics saw the leak as a preemptive CIA move to kill the baby in its cradle.

Love is Blind: CIA contractor Ian A. Brinksman, arrested this week on charges of leaking top secret information critical of U.S. Middle East policy to a journalist-girlfriend, maybe should have taken lessons from the All the President’s Men and arranged surreptitious meetings in dark parking garages rather than conduct cell phone calls and gmail exchanges with a reporter. From the government’s affidavit, it was evidently easy for the FBI—and anyone who closely read the charges—to link the timing of Brinksman’s cell phone calls and Google emails to stories citing “CIA documents” by Aída Chávez, a former correspondent for the Nation and The Intercept who publishes a Substack called Capital & Empire. Chávez was not named in the case and has not been accused of any wrongdoing. She did not respond to requests for comment.

Ratcliffe’s Tightrope: CIA DirectorJohn Ratcliffe has been walking a fine line between keeping Donald Trump mollified and Ukraine alive, according to a profile by Shane Harris in The Atlantic.

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Trump may intervene if the Alaska Senate race doesn’t go his way (CNN)

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Kash Patel—then-chief of staff at the Pentagon and now director of the FBI—issued one of the more bizarre directives in the history of U.S. intelligence.

Patel wanted the Defense Intelligence Agency to investigate a wild conspiracy theory then gaining traction in QAnon chat rooms: that Italian military satellites had been used by Deep State actors at the CIA to hack U.S. voting machines to flip votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

“It was batshit crazy,” Patel’s then-boss, Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, later told me about the Italian satellite hacking claims. But Miller nevertheless joined Patel in ordering the Pentagon’s intelligence office to investigate the matter for a simple reason: White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had requested the probe, hoping it would somehow yield fresh ammunition for the president’s relentless campaign to block Congress’ certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, thus allowing Trump to stay in office.

The request to investigate what was dubbed “Italygate” went nowhere, of course. As Daniel Klaidman and I wrote in our book, Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, just a few days after getting the order, Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, reported back that the whole matter was hogwash—or, as he put it in clinical bureaucratic language, there is “no legitimacy to this.”

Still, the episode is illustrative of a consistent theme in the efforts by Trump and his allies to cast doubts about election results that don’t go their way: Throw enough claims of foreign “manipulation” and “tampering” against the wall, no matter how outlandish or ridiculous, and eventually some of them might stick—at least enough to give Trump grounds to declare a national emergency and direct the U.S. military or law enforcement agents to show up at the polls on Election Day, potentially even seizing voting machines and ballots.

Whether Trump would actually go through with such a drastic (and blatantly unconstitutional) step is, at this point, anybody’s guess. But as election day grows closer, concerns among state election officials are mounting and for good reasons: Just last Friday, in a jolting reminder of just how far Trump might be prepared to go, he directed his Justice Department to file a lawsuit to block the certification of the winner of the Senate race in Alaska—unless the Republican incumbent wins.

More broadly, a close review of public records, court filings and social media posts suggests the Trump administration has been methodically laying the groundwork for federal intervention in the 2026 elections for more than a year.

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Allegations of deep corruption and cover-ups against Netanyahu revolve around his role in the sale of German Dolphin-2 submarines to Egypt and Israel.

UPDATED

A confidential dossier containing the sworn affidavits of 51 top Israeli intelligence and military figures accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with “harming the security of Israel” so severely it “borders on treason.” These and other statements in the dossier charge Netanyahu with deep corruption in connection with his handling of German submarine sales to Israel and Egypt.

The accusations by major players in the Israeli security establishment come as Netanyahu’s political fate—and even his personal freedom—hang on the outcome of next week’s highly contested election. The submarine affair has garnered immense attention in Israel but almost none in the Western media.

Netanyahu already faces trials on three earlier indictments, charging him with accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust in separate cases. A conviction on any of those charges also could send him to prison. But Netanhyahu, who has denied any wrongdoing, has managed over the past seven years to drag out those trials by citing his duties as prime minister to avoid appearing in court. To date, none of his trials has reached a verdict.

An official inquiry that resumes next month will focus on a new set of criminal allegations related to Netanyahu’s handling of Israel’s purchase of four submarines and other naval warships from the German firm Thyssenkrupp between 2009 and 2017. But the most damning accusations in the dossier claim that Netanyahu defrauded his own government—and possibly committed treason—by secretly approving Germany’s sale of advanced submarines to Egypt without informing his defense minister or other navy commanders — and then lying about it.

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On July 11 Lindsay Graham visited SkyFall, a Ukrainian drone manufacturer.

A second round of tests by the D.C. Medical Examiner has found no poisons or other sinister elements in the body of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, a spokesman there told SpyTalk Wednesday.

The finding, not yet made public, comes after months of swirling MAGA-world conspiracy theorie…

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The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, in Kabul in the autumn of 1978. He would soon be murdered by the KGB. (Dubs family photo)

Charles K. Boles had every reason to feel exhilarated as he strode into the State Department in Foggy Bottom at the end of May 1979. A seasoned foreign service officer, “Chuck,” as everyone knew him, had been lauded by his bosses as one of the best writers in the department’s Office of Security (or SY as it was then known). And he had one hell of a story to tell.

Boles was returning from his post in Kabul, Afghanistan. There, on Valentine’s Day three months earlier, his friend, the U.S. Ambassador Adolph “Spike” Dubs, had been kidnapped and murdered.

State ordered Chuck, a former U.S. Marine sergeant and Vietnam veteran, to head the investigation. His casework had already drawn praise from the brass as “truly outstanding.” Now, after more than three months of relentless inquiry, he was greeted warmly by colleagues in State’s second-floor security branch.

Waiting for him was the trove of evidence he and his regional supervisor, Ron Kelly, had cabled and sent via diplomatic pouch from Embassy Kabul on a daily basis throughout the investigation. This precaution was needed given the two leading suspects in Spike’s murder: the Moscow-backed communist Afghan regime of the day, and the dominant foreign intelligence agency in Kabul—the Kremlin’s KGB.

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Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a onetime head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is now a registered agent of the pro-Russia Republika Srpska in Washington. He’s just the latest political operative from Trump’s inner circle to do so. (2016 White House photo)

Ukraine Espionage Triumph: The Wall Street Journal this week published an extraordinarily detailed account of the defection of a young Russian army lieutenant who became disillusioned with the war in Ukraine, volunteered to spy in place for Kyiv and supplied it for months in 2024 with the locations and battle plans of Russian units he was assigned to, and which were subsequently obliterated by Ukrainian forces. “The Defector“ will surely be required reading at U.S. military spy schools for years. But meanwhile, questions will fly over whether Ukraine’s decision to publicize the case is a psychological warfare op in itself, designed to freak out Russian security services.

Lifeline: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says U.S. intelligence-sharing ⁠has resumed. It had been interrupted but later “de-blocked,” he said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “We are very thankful for this. Now it works.” Trump administration officials and Space X boss Elon Musk spent the week dodging responsibility for the decision to slow down the Starshield satellite system Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operations. The decision came from “inside the White House, according to two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter,” Reuters reported. Meanwhile, Robert B. Murrett, the former director of the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, said in an interview Wednesday that he doubted that the U.S. intelligence community would pull its support from Ukraine. “The current leadership of the United States intelligence community and our allies is very anti-Russian,” he told The New York Times. “That’s not to say the White House couldn’t overrule them. But the principal leadership of the U.S. intelligence community does not have a warm place in their hearts for Putin and his leadership in the Kremlin.”

To Russia with Love: Add former U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a onetime head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and briefly President Trump’s first-term national security adviser, to the ranks of former and current close Trump advisers on the payroll of Vladimir Putin’s proxy in the Balkans, Republika Srpska. Flynn has registered as a $100,000-a-month agent for the semi‑autonomous Bosnian Serb entity led by pro‑Russian leader Milorad Dodik, according to documents filed under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, to provide “strategic advice and analysis” and “work to improve political relations between Republika Srpska and the U.S.,” according to the independent Balkan Insight.

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