Wishing you and yours a serene holiday season from all of us here at SpyTalk. Catch you on the rebound!

—Jeff Stein

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GENERATIONS OF US have now grown up reading or watching stories about the courage and heroism of the “Greatest Generation,” those young men and women who risked their lives in the existential battle against fascism in World War II. Yet, even 80 years after the guns fell silent, new chapters of that vast conflict continue to emerge, reminding us that the war was fought not just on the beaches of Normandy or the islands of the Pacific, but in the shadows.

Bruce Henderson’s captivating new book, Midnight Flyboys, takes us back to those days of danger and glory, illuminating a specific, harrowing campaign that has long remained a footnote in the broader history of the air war. It centers on the operations of the code-named “carpetbaggers”—U.S. Army Air Force pilots who flew modified B-24 bombers on low-altitude, nighttime missions to drop supplies and allied agents behind enemy lines. Central to this story are not just the aviators, but the intrepid spies—many of them women, by the way—who volunteered to hitch rides on these treetop missions, parachuting into the peril of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Wake Up and Smell the Borscht: The head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence organization, Sergey Naryshkin, claimed Friday that he had a “lengthy” conversation with new MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli back in October. Oh, to be a fly on that line. On Monday, Metreweli took the opportunity in her first speech as director to describe Russia as a “menace.”

“The front line is everywhere,” she said, with Moscow “testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war,” a reference to Vladimir Putin’s escalation of espionage, sabotage, cyber and drone ops against NATO allies, not to mention his bombing of Ukrainian civilians. “We are operating in space between peace and war,” Metreweli said—and much more in a virtual wake-up call to Trump..

The Trump administration has for the first time acknowledged there were “substantial security” issues relating to the destruction of the East Wing of the White House—an apparent reference to the work’s impact on a highly secure underground bunker built to protect the president and top officials from enemy attack.

Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s top lawyer in the first Obama administration, isn’t happy with the Trump administration’s open-seas shooting gallery.

“Not all Targeted Killings are the Same,” ran the headline over his recent Op-ed piece in the New York Times. “Hegseth’s Boat Strikes Are Illegal.”

Johnson, one of the principal architects of the Obama administration’s lethal force policies during his 2009-2012 term as the Defense Department’s general counsel, argued that his administration’s “signature” drone strikes on terrorist suspects across the Middle East and Southwest Asia, were legal. If Congress approves it, he says, and if there is no other way to get the bad guys, and if you can say you’re acting in service to protecting American lives, then it’s perfectly okay.

A bright young college student friend told me recently that suddenly everyone he knows is closely following news in the national security space. From Trump’s tariffs to his open-oceans bombing sprees to the boiling Russia-Ukraine and Middle East wars —not to mention the creep of artificial intelligence into homeland security ops and near daily word of C…

Kash Secrets/Ukraine: Secret meetings between Kash Patel, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino and Ukraine peace negotiator Rustem Umerov “have caused alarm among Western officials who remain in the dark about their intent and purpose,” The Washington Post reported Friday. “Some said they believe Umerov and other Ukrainian officials sought out Patel and Bongino in the hopes of obtaining amnesty from any corruption allegations the Ukrainians could face. Others worry the newly established channel could be used to exert pressure on [Volodymyr] Zelensky’s government to accept a peace deal, proposed by the Trump administration, containing steep concessions for Kyiv.”

Danish Dismay: Denmark’s intelligence service released a report this week that portrayed the United States under President Donald Trump as nearly as dangerous to its interests as Russia.

Until this year, U.S. intelligence agencies never briefed White House officials about any potential terrorism threats from Antifa — despite striking testimony from a FBI official Thursday describing the s…

President Trump ratcheted up his pressure campaign against Venezuela on Wednesday, announcing that the United States had seized a “very large” oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast. “Largest one ever seized, actually, and other things are happening,” Trump declared. It was a dramatic escalation in the months-long confrontation between the two.

As the president searches for a saleable pretext for attacking Venezuela and overthrowing its leader, Nicolas Maduro, the United States is approaching a largely forgotten anniversary that helps explain what is happening: the Dec. 20, 1989 invasion of Panama.

THE ONLY SPY AGENCY THAT EVER TRIED TO RECRUIT ME was South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the NIS. It started sometime in 2009, when a young man from Seoul’s embassy in Washington asked to talk with me about articles and Op-eds I’d been writing in the New York Times, Washington Post and various journals advocating stronger responses by the U.S. and the United Nations to North Korea’s appalling human rights record.

“What motivates you to write these articles?” he asked. I explained my prior service as a human rights advocate at the State Department and private organizations and said that, although I was formally retired, I felt too little attention was being paid to the situation in North Korea.

That evidently interested those he reported back to at the embassy, because soon thereafter, a more senior officer, presumably from the NIS, became involved.