SpyTalk

In 1881, members of a Russian revolutionary socialist organization calling itself The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) assassinated Tsar Alexander II. The monarchy, aiming to divert public attention from the populist group, employed its secret police, the Okhrana, and Russia’s antisemitic press, to stir up hatred against the Jews. Incited by the slogan, “Beat the Jews and save Russia,” and later, “God is with us,” pogroms broke out across Russia.

That history comes to mind with the behavior of some Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In a cruel irony, their hatred toward Palestinians of all kinds is reminiscent of those days. The thugs, murderers, arsonists, and looters are Jews, who also believe that God is with them.

The organization that was supposed to act with full force against such Jewish terrorism is Israel’s domestic counterterrorism service, the Shin Bet, together with the army and the police. But today, as in Russia 145 years ago, the authorities have not only turned a blind eye to the violence, some have secretly encouraged it.

Who’s Got a Secret? Evidently eager to claim credit for the rescue of that downed Air Force F-15 weapons officer from Iran, the CIA unveiled a covert action op and let it be known it “initiated a deception campaign to try to confuse Iranian forces and convince them the airman had already been rescued and was moving out of the country in a ground convoy,” an administration official told the New York Times and many others. The official also said, “Navy SEAL Team 6 commandos extracted the officer in a massive operation that involved hundreds of special operations troops and other military personnel.” An Air Force Warthog also took crippling fire during the search for the downed F-15 crew, with its pilot bailing out over Kuwait. All this followed Trump’s claim Tuesday in his national address that Iran has “no anti-aircraft equipment” and that their radar capabilities were “100% annihilated.”

Needs Improvement: U.S. intelligence has been superb at picking targets in Iran but not so good—awful, actually—in predicting the Islamic Republic’s response to the attacks, former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos and journalist-turned corporate risk analyzer Jeremy Hurewitz wrote Saturday at Just Security, pointing out what’s become obvious with every passing day. “First, the Islamic Regime has not fallen, which means the long-term threats it poses to its population and the world remain. More specifically, hardline elements appear to remain in control according to well-sourced Iranian diaspora reporting, and they are still fighting with daily ballistic missile and drone attacks against U.S. interests in [the] region, Israel, and the Gulf states. The Iranian leadership almost certainly feels that it is in a relatively solid position strategically as the energy crisis they have created through attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz is causing global economic disruptions.” On Sunday, Trump used “an expletive-laden social media post to taunt Iranian leaders,” as the New York Times put it, saying that the U.S. would destroy their civilian infrastructure if it didn’t release their stranglehold on Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” Trump roared on Truth Social early Easter morning. “JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Tulsi Tumult: For a spy agency boss, Tulsi Gabbard sure gets an unusual amount of attention—mostly of the unwelcome sort. Now, with Trump reportedly polling aides about a replacement for the DNI and ultra-MAGA agitator Laura Loomer on her case, her days would seem to be numbered.

Most espionage aficionados are quite familiar with spy jargon like dead drops, brush passes, secret writing, and so forth. Experts and former practitioners, though, are familiar with a lesser-known element of the spy business, summed up in the acronym “MICE.” It stands for the various reasons that officials—say, Iranian nuclear scientists—turn coat: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. After reading an extraordinary piece about spy ops in The New Yorker magazine this week, I propose adding another letter—D, for death threats.

The idea came to mind about two-thirds the way through reporter David D. Kirkpatrick’s compelling deep dive into the tumultuous life, career, and travails of one Kevin Chalker, a former CIA operations officer who once played a key role in persuading Iranian nuclear scientists to defect—or be killed.

And he was very good at it, Chalker told Kirkpatrick, an assertion the writer corroborated with other sources.

AS THE IRAN WAR DRAGS ON and the stated objectives for it remain shifting and unmet, tensions are mounting within Israel’s intelligence establishment—both between the Mossad and the Israeli Defense Forces, and between Israel and some parts of the U.S. intelligence community and White House.

This is reflected in published reports that sources within the IDF’s Military Intelligence service and its Operations Directorate, along with officials in the White House, were behind a New York Times story last week claiming that Mossad chief David Barnea had assessed, prior to the war, that his service “would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition—igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government.”

“That Hasn’t Happened,” the incriminating Times headline blared.

One of the biggest mysteries surrounding President Trump’s plans for a $400 million ballroom where the White House East Wing once stood appears close to being resolved: The envisioned new structure will include a “massive” new underground military bunker to protect officials from drone attacks, replacing the underground bomb shelter that had been sitting there largely unnoticed for more than 80 years.

The fate of the existing shelter, originally constructed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, has been a backdrop to the controversy that has raged for months over Trump’s demolition of the East Wing.

But new details about the president’s plans—revealed Sunday night by Trump himself—point to a remodeled and enlarged underground facility designed in part for the new era of drone warfare.

Dagan’s Warning: The legendary late Mossad boss Meir Dagan warned publicly back in 2011 that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intent to launch a military campaign against Iranian nuclear sites was “a stupid idea” and risked “a regional war in which Iran and also Hezbollah will launch missiles.” Dagan, chiefly responsible for launching Mossad’s campaign of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists decades ago, added later that, “If Israel were to attack, [Iranian Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei would thank Allah: It would unite the Iranian people behind the project and enable Khamenei to say that he must get himself an atom bomb to defend Iran against Israeli aggression.” Tom Griffin, author of State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory: From Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism, reminded us of these previously reported remarks Sunday by way of revisiting last week’s New York Times report saying that the current Mossad chief, David Barnea, had forecast that “his service would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government.” The surfacing of Barnea’s—let’s say, premature—prediction, wrote Griffin, appeared to be just another chapter in “the Washington blame game over the Iran War, [whose] recriminations have extended to Tel Aviv.” Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that Washington can only say “with certainty that it has destroyed about a third of Iran’s vast missile arsenal” after four weeks of bombing. Some 50,000 U.S. troops are now in the region for an impending sortie into Iran.

“I think we should not only give negotiations a chance, we should put our main effort right now on negotiations with Iran, knowing we’re going to have to compromise on some areas,” retired former senior CIA paramilitary officer and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Mick Mulroy said on the SpyTalk podcast. “If that’s the case, then we can end this conflict and of course have the Strait of Hormuz open.”

Intel Paradox: There’s been no shortage of intelligence on Iran, writes Yonatan Touval, a foreign-policy analyst and writer based in Tel Aviv. “The spy craft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive,” he noted Sunday in the New York Times. “Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered ‘target-production machine’ capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That,” he concluded, “is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.”

And yet: Trump and Netanyahu ignored all the warnings from the likes of Meir Dagan and countless experts since that a military campaign was unlikely to “obliterate” Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon (as Trump famously and falsely claimed last June), much less result in regime change. “[N]ever has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing.” Touval wrote. “They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.”

Michael Patrick Mulroy—”Mick” to all who know him—has been a Marine, a highly decorated CIA paramilitary officer, and a deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in the first two years of the first Trump administration.

President Trump, he said on this week’s SpyTalk podcast, is between the ol’ rock and a hard place with his four week lon…

When unidentified drones recently flew over Ft. McNair, a residential military base in Washington, D.C. where Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had moved for security concerns this year, it made real the possibility of an Iranian retaliation on American soil.

The threats, soon after the joint U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran in early March, weren’t exclusive to this base. At bases in Florida and New Jersey, the military elevated its force protection protocol to “Charlie,” the highest alert before an actual attack, according to The Washington Post.

The FBI also warned police departments in California that Iran could retaliate for American attacks by launching drones at the West Coast, according to an alert reviewed by ABC News.

As the military ramps up security protocols to address threats, so do cities and municipalities. But the nation’s largest city, New York City, has a much, much greater capacity to head off threats, and the leadership with experience to match.

A wise editor once quipped to me that one definition of news is stuff that people have forgotten.

So it might come as news to President Trump and Pete Hegseth, the so-called Secretary of War, that the Pentagon carried out war games simulating an attack on Iran years ago and it didn’t go so well. In fact, it was a disaster.

Maybe Trump and Hegseth haven’t forgotten them. Maybe they’ve never known, or been briefed, on it.

Whatever, with the 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force kitting up to join the 31st Marine Expedition Unit for what looks like an invasion of Iran’s coastal islands, or maybe more, there’s not a minute to spare for them to dig up the report.

Lucky for them, there’s not much digging to do.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is urging Defense Department civilians to help out ICE and the Customs and Border Patrol agency on a voluntary basis.

“I encourage all who are interested to volunteer for this detail opportunity,” Hegseth said in a little-noticed Feb. 19 memorandum. ”Supporting interior immigration enforcement actions, apprehending illegal aliens and securing our borders are vital to the national security of the United States.”

In another appeal for volunteers last Thursday, Timothy D. Dill, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower & Reserve Affairs, wrote that he was “renewing the call for additional dedicated civil servant volunteers to meet continued mission-critical roles in support of DHS.”