SpyTalk

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.”

BREAKING: Iran responded defiantly to President Trump’s threat that he would “obliterate” Iran’s electricity plants if it did not open the Strait of Hormuz by Monday night, saying the strait would be “completely closed” if its energy infrastructure were attacked, as it launched new missile attacks on Israeli cities. (New York Times)

Mossad Flop: Israeli spy boss David Barnea thought sure his agency could spur a popular revolt and overthrow the Iranian regime and sold the idea to PM Bibi Netanyahu, who in turn sold it to Trump. Both urged Iranians to take to the streets, while intelligence told both they’d be slaughtered. (New York Times)

Intelligence Gap: President Trump claimed “nobody expected” Iran would strike the Gulf States or choke off the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the U.S. and Israeli air campaign, despite multiple intelligence warnings, expert analyses and war games over the decades. “We were shocked. They fought back!” Trump told reporters at the White House last Monday. The president was also miffed that NATO allies he’d been trashing for years didn’t come to his aid on Iran. Said French Gen. Nicholas Richoux: “He can go fuck himself.”

If U.S. officials are looking for face-saving off-ramps to end the war with Iran, they might start by making discreet inquiries into the whereabouts of a notorious Al Qaeda terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head.

Saif al-Adel, once an intimate of Osama bin Laden, has become the “de facto” leader of Al Qaeda and has tasked operatives to “reactivate” terror cells in Europe and across the Middle East, according to a 2025 United Nations monitoring report.

Moreover, a FBI “most wanted poster” lists him as “Iran-based,” a conclusion based on years of sometimes murky reporting that he has been living under a lax form of “house arrest” with protection courtesy of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

All this has led to speculation in counter-terror circles that—with a little creative diplomacy—al-Adel’s transfer to U.S. custody could prove to be a tantalizing card in a negotiated deal to resolve the current conflict.

It’s not all in your head, U.S. spy masters effectively told victims of so-called Havana Syndrome Thursday morning, when they agreed in congressional testimony that previous intelligence community assessments dismissing foreign involvement in the suspected “directed energy” attacks they’ve been reporting for years should be retracted.

“Put simply, it’s my clear opinion that individuals in the intelligence community were involved in a cover-up,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AR) said at the opening of a Thursday hearing, whose focus on foreign threats, particularly Iran, overshadowed the remarkable spy agency turnaround on Havana Syndrome.

Crawford asked the heads of National Intelligence, the CIA, FBI, NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to respond “yes or no” on whether the 2025 report by the National Intelligence Council, which called the involvement of “a state actor” in the debilitating incidents “very unlikely,” should be “retracted.”

Donald Trump’s ever-shifting explanations for the Iran war took another beating Wednesday when the directors of the CIA and National Intelligence conceded under sharp questioning from Democrats that the president’s key rationale for attacking the Islamic Republic had no basis in fact. Nor did his claim that “nobody knew” that Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz survive closer examination.

The intense hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence followed a stunning development from the day before, when Joe Kent, the head of the administration’s National Counterterrorism Center, posted his letter of resignation to President Trump on X, saying, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.’’ He added that, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.’’

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard inadvertently kicked gas onto the fire by abandoning a passage in her prepared statement, distributed in advance of her appearance before the committee, that said Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” by U.S. airstrikes last June and that the regime had made “no efforts” since then “to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.”

In a stunning claim on Monday, President Trump said his administration was “shocked” that Iran has responded to his attacks by launching missiles and drones at neighboring Gulf Arab monarchies that are closely allied with the United States.

“They hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait,” Trump told reporters, his tone one of astonishment. “Nobody expected that. We were shocked. They fought back!”

Trump’s remarks only added to the dense fog that now obscures his administration’s official planning for the Iran military operation both before and after it started late last month.

Rarely are intelligence agencies presented with a tantalizing possibility that could change history. This was the prospect that two British MI6 operatives encountered when a scruffy, elderly man walked into the newly created British embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the spring of 1992—barely three months after the official collapse of the Soviet Union.

He was a “grubby, lean old man, unshaven and poorly dressed,” writes Gordon Corera in his captivating new book, The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB. “The old man seemed introverted and guarded in the way he answered questions.” It took a while before he gave his real name and job: Vasily Mitrokhin, a records-keeper who worked had worked in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, the elite department which spied on the rest of the world, for the past 40 years. Not only that, he was still working there, he added, which explained his nervousness about coming into the embassy using a pseudonym and talking with them.

The Big Things: The CIA warned President Trump before he struck that “removing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in U.S. military operations could lead to other hard-liners taking power,” Reuters reported on Friday, citing “a senior administration official.” Back on Wednesday, Reuters had reported that the regime was “not at risk of collapse” despite “two weeks of relentless U.S. and Israeli bombardment,” citing “three sources familiar with the matter.” The same day, the Wall Street Journal headlined, “Trump Knew the Risk of Iran Blocking the Strait of Hormuz. He Still Went to War,” adding, “The president told his White House team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait, the world’s most vital shipping lane.” The strait remains closed.

Iran Threat Here? ABC News.reported Wednesday that the FBI had warned police departments in California “in recent days that Iran could retaliate for American attacks by launching drones at the West Coast.” The unverified warning said that “as of early February 2026, Iran allegedly aspired to conduct a surprise attack using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) from an unidentified vessel off the coast of the United States homeland, specifically against unspecified targets in California, in the event the U.S. conducted strikes against Iran.” ABC added, “We have no additional information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of this alleged attack.” Asked about it, Trump said, “It’s being investigated. But you have a lot of things happening, and all we can do is take them as they come, and the war itself is being prosecuted as well as anybody has ever seen.”

Mystery Assassin: SecDef Pete Hegseth claimed last week that the leader of the Iranian covert unit that had planned to assassinate President Trump had been “hunted down and killed.” Not so fast, officials say. The man, whom Hegseth did not name but referred to, they say, was ​​Rahman Makdam, an IRGC member “who was targeted last week in an airstrike,” according to the New York Times, but “[n]either the White House nor the Pentagon has clarified or provided additional details.” Not only that, but “American officials are divided on whether Mr. Makdam is dead.”

FEW NATIONAL SECURITY DEBATES HAVE RILED UP AMERICANS more than the permission Congress has given the government to eavesdrop on their private emails and phone calls. The legislation that gave these intrusive powers to the likes of the NSA and the FBI is up for renewal later this spring, and signs are that it will face a bumpy road to passage by Congress.

The issue has taken on additional freight because President Trump has ordered the departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Treasury and the IRS to explicitly target left wing groups for investigation, labelling them “domestic terrorists.”

“I want each of our adversaries to wake up every morning, calculate the risk, and decide that today is not the day to pick a fight with the most powerful Navy in the world, the U.S. Navy,” Rear Admiral Mike Brookes, the head of U.S. Naval Intelligence, said at a conference two years ago.

On March 4, an Iranian frigate sailing in international waters, far from the Persian Gulf strife, didn’t “pick a fight” with the U.S. Navy but it got sunk anyway. The 300-foot-long IRIS Dena, the largest remaining warship in the Iranian fleet—but reportedly lightly or completely unarmed having just attended a multinational exercise with the Indian fleet—was sailing peacefully 20 miles south of Sri Lanka, about 2,200 miles from the Persian Gulf, when a single torpedo from the nuclear-powered USS Charlotte fast attack sub quickly took her down. Only 32 members from the crew of 130 survived. Some critics argued the Navy should have first offered the captain and crew an opportunity to defect.

In any event, Brookes probably had little to do with the attack. His office, tasked with keeping track of adversary vessels, may well have located the IRIS Dena for the White House and Pentagon, but U.S. spy satellites undoubtedly would have been looking for her, too. The order to shoot would have originated with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The vessel, he crowed afterward, “thought it was safe in international waters,” but instead “died a quiet death.” His celebration appears premature, now that Iran has effectively choked off the Strait of Hormuz, a prospect analysts had warned about for years. The mighty U.S. Navy has not taken steps to escort oil tankers through the narrow waters, despite President Trump’s promises.

Whatever the ethics and point of the IRIS Dena’s sinking, meanwhile, some observers said it sent a message to China, which gets 92 per cent of its oil by sea, according to a May 2025 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Ultimately, the Indian Ocean is emerging as a critical arena in great-power competition, where U.S. naval power threatens China’s energy lifelines even as China expands its regional footprint and hedges with continental alternatives,” the Asia Times noted last week.

Until the runup to the Iran war, when determining the disposition of the Islamic Republic’s ships was the ONI’s immediate task, China was at the top of Brookes’s concerns.