SpyTalk

From Moscow With Love: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Russia’s help is nothing new.”It’s not a secret. It has been in the past, and it’s still there, and will continue in the future,” Araghchi told NBC News’s Kristen Welker on Meet The Press. It’s “a very good partnership.” On Friday, The Washington Post, citing “three officials familiar with the intelligence,” exclusively reported that “Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East,” including “the locations of U.S. military assets, including warships and aircraft.” Trump and other administration officials brushed off the import of the report. “If you take a look at what’s happened to Iran in the last week, if they’re getting information, it’s not helping them much,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. When Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked him about it, Trump called it a “stupid question.”

Room at the Top: Iran’s democracy-minded opposition was “unlikely” to take power “following either a short or extended U.S. military campaign” against the Islamic Republic, according to a classified National Intelligence Council (NIC) report produced a week before President Trump ordered an airstrike that eliminated Iran’s leadership. “Iran’s clerical and military establishment would respond to the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by following protocols designed to preserve continuity of power,” sources told The Washington Post’s John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel. The NIC, an arm of the Office of National Intelligence, distills the views of the 18-member U.S. intelligence community. Ali’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, named Sunday to be his father’s successor, was “unacceptable,” Trump declared last week. “They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment,” he said. “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me.”

David Shedd, who held top level positions across U.S. intelligence during a roughly 40 year government career, says there’s a “50-50” chance of Xi Jinping moving on Taiwan in 2027.

“I think that Xi has made it part of his permanent legacy to bring Taiwan into the fold,” Shedd said on the SpyTalk podcast. “It may take on different dimensions in terms of i…

For months, the Iranians had warned that if the United States and Israel launched major attacks that sought to bring down the Islamic Republic, they would unleash their arsenal of 3,000 missiles and countless drones, striking U.S. military bases across the Middle East and plunging the entire oil-rich region into a war that would devastate the global economy..

But the threat of Iranian missiles not only failed to deter the joint U.S.-Israeli attack, but once the war began last Saturday, their counter strikes also have failed so far to knock out any U.S. bases. (In the war’s early hours, two unmanned Iranian drones did manage to strike a command center in the Port Shuaiba U.S. military base in Kuwait, killing six U.S. soldiers and wounding nine others, the only American casualties so far in the fighting. A drone also hit the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain but caused little damage.)

Indeed, so far the vast majority of Iran’s missiles and drones, including those that were heading toward major oil and gas installations in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, have been destroyed in mid-air, intercepted by American, Israeli and allied Arab air defenses. Other missiles or drones that have evaded the interceptors in the Gulf monarchies have struck civilian targets, including airports, seaports, hotels and data centers, turning would-be neutral neighbors like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman against them.

But others argue that Iran’s strategy of missile and drone attacks, including those by proxies in Iraq and Lebanon, on more than a dozen countries stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean shows that President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanahu have started a war that is spinning out of control.

From inside a bomb shelter in downtown Tel Aviv this weekend, I was hearing the warning sirens and the explosions of the Iron Dome’s missile and drone interceptors overhead, all the while listening to Israeli TV pundits describing what sounded like an entirely different universe.

This is not one of the Israeli media’s finest hours. As during most of my country’s battles since the surprise Hamas slaughter of civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, the far majority of our news media and commentators, especially on TV, have struck a jingoistic pose as uniformly as a Roman legion. Hardly any voices have been heard questioning the righteousness of this latest decision to go to war.

Was this truly a war of no choice, of unavoidable necessity? Was Israel facing an imminent existential threat? My answer is no.

Stalking Khamenei: The CIA tracked Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei for months, vacuuming up his locations and movement patterns, “people familiar with the operation,” i.e. Israeli and U.S. officials, told a team of New York Times reporters. “Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place on Saturday morning at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran. Most critically,” Khamenei would be there, they reported. Missile-armed Israeli warplanes took off. Boom. One might wonder why the leadership would chance gathering like that after Israeli agents have proven so skilled at tracking and killing Iranian officials. Then again, they had to be fearful of turning on their phones wherever they were.

Killer Words: The Obama administration paved the legal path for President Trump to attack Iran and assassinate its leaders, SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff noted Sunday. A “secret Justice Department memo” Obama officials sent to Congress, he reported, “argu[ed] that their lethal drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen were fully justified because they did not actually constitute ‘assassinations’ theoretically banned by a decades-old executive order.”

The Right Stuff: “MalwareJake,” a self described “former NSA hacker,” claimed on X that U.S. and Israeli cyberwarriors are “targeting [Iran’s] civilian infrastructure, not government networks with intelligence collection value. That’s because once you deliver an effect (CYBERCOM speak for ‘cyber attack’) in a network, you lose the ability to collect intelligence from that target.” (Jake Williams)

A little more than 13 years ago, I got my hands on a confidential Obama administration legal memo that, in retrospect, may have given President Trump all the cover he needed to launch his military attack on Iran this weekend.

At the time, the issue on the table for Obama and his lawyers seemed far removed from the decision Trump just made: to start a war that, in its opening moments, decapitated the leader of a foreign country.

Instead, the question for the Obama crew was a more limited one: What was their basis for launching drone strikes to kill suspected Al Qaeda operatives— even if, as in one notorious case, the operative, Anwar Al-Awlaki, happened to be an American citizen who was born in New Mexico?

The Obama officials’ response was forceful and unapologetic: In a secret Justice Department legal memo— summarized and sent to Congress as a confidential (non-public) “white paper”— they held nothing back, arguing that their lethal drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen were fully justified because they did not actually constitute “assassinations” theoretically banned by a decades-old executive order.

“A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination,” the Obama white paper read. “In the Department’s view, a lethal operation conducted against a U.S. citizen whose conduct poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States would be a legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban.”

Strong language, to be sure. But it was how the administration defined its terms that caused the outrage when I published the previously secret white paper on the NBC News website.

UPDATED As U.S. and Israeli forces launched their joint offensive against Iran early Saturday, President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the country’s Islamic regime. “Take over your government,” he exhorted them. “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny . . . This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

That moment may be now, especially since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is dead, killed in air strikes that devastated the presidential complex in Tehran, Trump declared on his Truth Social account. Iran has not confirmed the deaths of Khamenei and the other senior officials, and a spokesperson for the prime minister’s office issued a statement warning the public to be aware of “psychological warfare” waged by the United States and Israel.

An Israeli military spokesperson said the dead also included Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohammed Pakpour; Iranian Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh; Ali Shamkhani, senior advisor to Khamenei; and Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces.

Sources tell SpyTalk that the Trump administration’s intent resembles what happened in Venezuela in January—to lop off Iran’s unpopular clerical leadership and invite the next level of officials to cooperate with Washington, however repressive it may remain. Regime change, in other words, would not include opposition figures who’ve led the huge protests that have roiled the country for months. Any IRGC officials who lay down their arms would be offered “immunity,” Trump said when announcing the start of “Operation Epic Fury,” hinting that U.S. intelligence already has made such overtures to that effect. “So lay down your arms, you will be treated fairly with total immunity, or you will face certain death,” he said.

IT MAY HAVE BEEN AMONG THE SCARIER MOMENTS in the run up to the war in Iraq—and one that has taken on eerie new relevance in light of today’s looming military confrontation with Iran.

In September, 2002, the British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair—seeking to help President George W. Bush bolster his case for an invasion—released a white paper making the alarming claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a ballistic missile attack with chemical or biological weapons against the United Kingdom within 45 minutes.

Predictably, the British tabloids went crazy. “He’s got him…Let’s get him,” screamed the headline in The Sun. “45 Minutes from Attack,” declared The Evening Standard over a picture of long-range ballistic missiles.

It was all a fraud, of course: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction—no nuclear bombs, no mobile biological labs, as Bush and his officials claimed—much less ballistic missiles that it could unleash on British or American citizens. In the U.K.’s political folklore, Blair’s white paper came to be known as “the dodgy dossier,” and one of the top intelligence officials who worked on it, David Kelly, conceded to the BBC the document had been “sexed up.” Kelly later took a long walk in the woods and committed suicide, slashing his left wrist with a knife.

This is an analytic forecast based on publicly reported information through mid-February. It’s probabilistic, not predictive—meant to map plausible paths, not declare certainties, Bing Copilot cautions. And it does not take into account Monday’s report by The Washington Post saying Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine had warned the White House that “a lack of munitions and support from allies could mean greater danger for U.S. troops.”

Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif declared an “open war” with the Afghan Taliban on Friday and said his air force had carried out airstrikes in Kabul and two other Afghan provinces in retaliation for Afghanistan’s “cross-border attack on Pakistan.”

For its part, the Afghan ministry reportedly claimed responsibili…