SpyTalk

John F. Kennedy is today rightly remembered for his firm and steady resolve that averted nuclear catastrophe during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But nine months later, Kennedy was torn with indecision as he faced another, very different foreign policy crisis.

In the summer of 1963, Kennedy was at a loss about what to do about the increasingly repressive behavior of South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem. A cabal of State Department officials was pushing for a U.S.-backed military coup and got the president, who was on a weekend getaway with his family in Hyannis Port, to hastily sign off on a cable essentially green lighting one.

But Kennedy was filled with doubts. Barely five days later, he dispatched a follow-up cable whose wording should ring through the ages.

Shooter Roamed: White House Correspondents’ Association dinner gunman Cole Allen marvelled at how easy it was for him to walk about the Hilton Hotel fully armed. “Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat,” he wrote in a note obtained by the New York Post. Cole had booked a room in the hotel and smuggled in a shotgun, handgun and knives, reports said. On Saturday, he wrote, “The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.” He continued, “Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again,” adding: “Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit,” invoking a nickname for the M2 Browning .50-caliber machine gun. “Actually insane.” The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported Sunday that the Trump administration “provided a lower level of security for the White House correspondents’ dinner than it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, even though the president and many Cabinet members were in attendance.” That was a decision by DHS secretary Markwayne Mullins, in accord with past practice for the annual event, but will no doubt undergo a critical review. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democrats and some members of the news media for the violence, which she attributed to a “left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him.” Critical social media denizens quickly responded with quotes and videos of Trump encouraging or celebrating political violence.

Where is Tulsi? It’s a question long asked by many a close observer of the Trump administration’s national security apparatus, such as it is, with real estate operators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’ s son-in-law, leading diplomatic talks with Russia and Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doing double duty as national security adviser, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe at the Situation Room table for the mid-February planning season for the war on Iran, not the nominal head of U.S. intelligence.

Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman is certainly not cut from the mold of many a head of the Mossad, Israel’s legendary spying, assassinations and dirty tricks service.

The agency’s 14th head since the country’s establishment in 1948 isn’t expected to assume his post for another two months. But his appointment by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already stirring unease—with implications for Israel’s relations with its closest ally, America.

For starters, Gofman is widely regarded as the most controversial, politicized, and inexperienced candidate ever chosen to head the Mossad, a man whose grasp of strategic special operations and international relations appears limited. These are not peripheral skills, of course.

In his early thirties, Aaron Lukas was on a glide path to wonky influence in Washington D.C. His two-year stint as chief speechwriter for Robert Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, had followed seven years at the Cato Institute, the libertarian gold-standard of conservative Washington think tanks. While still with Zoellick, he continued publishing with Cato.

In April 2004, though, Lukas’ career path was about to take a dramatic swerve. The same month that his last Cato article was published (about trade protectionism), he was on the payroll as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. A year later he was working in CIA operations—the spying and covert action side of the business. And now, 21 years later, Lukas is the principal deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a mouthful of a title responsible for executing the mandate of the agency’s director, Tulsi Gabbard. His job is coordinating and communicating intelligence from and budgets for the entire, 17-member U.S. Intelligence Community. It’s a position that’s been held by such intelligence heavyweights as Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general, NSA chief, and CIA boss under President George W. Bush.

How exactly Lukas, 54, went from a fresh-faced libertarian trade analyst from Arkansas to a “seasoned intelligence professional and former CIA chief of station” according to his official ODNI biography, who handed out “briefcases of cash” as an agency operative (as he put it in a January recruiting pitch), is not entirely clear. But there are hints to be found in his early interests, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

In choosing legal representation for his $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic, FBI Director Kash Patel turned to a firm with long personal, financial and political connections to him but a mostly losing record with high profile Republican clients, including President Trump and his 2020 election-denying allies.

Kash Bar: Le tout Washington was rocked Friday by a deeply reported piece in The Atlantic describing FBI Director Kash Patel as a habitual drunk who’s often unfit for duty in the morning due to his late night carousing. “Several officials” told The Atlantic’s veteran investigative reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick that “Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights..” One morning, officials told Fitzpatrick, the FBI sent a SWAT-type team to bust down Patel’s apartment door because he wasn’t responding to calls and texts. The damning story follows on previous reports critical of Patel’s use of an FBI jet to visit his Nashville girlfriend and highly publicized misstatements on ongoing investigations. On April 10, a “paranoid” Patel, the story says, already believing his job was hanging by a thread, couldn’t log into his FBI account and “panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a ‘freak-out.’”

The persuasive report on Patel’s alleged alcohol problem comes, of course, amid escalating security challenges from Iran, Russia and China, a major responsibility of the FBI, which has lost several Iran experts due to Patel’s role in Trump’s retaliation campaign over his 2020 election loss.

Few Americans have had more experience dealing with Iranians than Mark Alan Fowler. A CIA case officer for more than 20 years, Fowler was for part of that time deputy chief of the agency’s Iran task force, working out of a satellite station in Germany, charged with getting Iranian scientists, businessmen, security agents and officials to turn coat and spy for the Americans.

HIs success was intermittent, but the lessons Fowler took away from the experience were clear and unmistakable: When talking to the Iranians, be direct, be specific and above all, be patient.

“For Iranians, signing a contract is seen merely as a starting point to continue negotiating,” Fowler, who’s gone on to work as a private consultant on Iran matters, wrote in an Op-ed piece this week for The Washington Post, quoting a Middle East businessman who understands the terrain.

Fowler’s insights suggest a note of caution amid a flurry of diplomatic activity in recent days that has sustained a bombing pause, led to a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon and, Friday morning, a re-opening of sorts of the Strait of Hormuz. (Iran said it was open; Trump said his blockade would continue until terms of a peace deal were met.) On Saturday, Iran said it had reimposed “strict control” over the Strait until the blockade was lifted. Where things stand now is far from clear.

MANY WASHINGTON SEX SCANDALS AGO, I asked a retired former head of FBI Counterintelligence what the bureau did when it discovered the KGB or other malefactors making inroads with a member of Congress. A couple of FBI agents, he said, would make a discreet visit to the Hill and let the member know that their new friend was actually a spy. Then it was up to him or her what to do about it.

Update: the Iranians refused to accept the “final” U.S. offer, Vice President Vance announced around 9:30 pm Eastern time, after 21 hours of talks in Islamabad. The sticking point, he implied, was Iran’s refusal to renounce its nuclear program.

Gabbard Gap: Seems like a week can’t go by without someone asking, “Where’s Tulsi?” On Friday the subject was raised by Mark Caputo at Axios. “President Trump sounded ready to dismiss top intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard until he got an earful last week from one of his oldest friends and advisers, Roger Stone,” Caputo wrote. “Trump was displeased with Gabbard when she didn’t wholeheartedly endorse the Iran war during her recent testimony to Congress about threats to the U.S., according to five advisers and confidants who spoke with the president.” Thing is, “Her fellow Cabinet officials backed her, as did Stone when the president called him last week,” according to this account. So he kept her around. “’Roger sealed the deal. He saved Tulsi,’ a source familiar with Trump’s thinking told Axios.” (Inside-the-Beltway aficionados will appreciate the subtext here: Trump called Stone. The legendary Republican dirty trickster hasn’t lost a step.)

Missile Debate: Iran has “thousands” of missiles left and can retrieve launchers buried under rubble, U.S. and Israeli officials told the Wall Street Journal this week. That’s in sharp contrast to what an increasingly erratic Pete Hegseth claimed a few days ago. The “Secretary of War” told reporters that Iran’s missile program was “functionally destroyed,” with launchers and missiles “depleted and decimated and almost completely ineffective.” And yet, they persist. Sources told the Journal that Iran’s missile inventory had been “roughly halved” since the war began Feb. 28 “yet it retains thousands of Medium–and short-Range ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or retrieved from underground sites.”

A former chief of the U.S. Central Command in the first Trump administration says the president’s threat to bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages is “shocking” and advised U.S. military officers to refuse to carry out “illegal” orders for air strikes that would primarily destroy civilian infrastruc…