SpyTalk

Iran Decapitation? Among the Iran options presented to President Trump is the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his son Mojtaba, a “Trump adviser” told Axios’s Barak Ravid and Marc Caputo. ”A second source confirmed a plan to kill Khamenei and his son was floated to Trump several weeks ago,” they added. “What the president chooses no one knows. I don’t think he knows,” the adviser said. We’ve not seen corroboration of the widespread report elsewhere.

Crazy Is: Worries about Trump’s plans for Iran are mounting, meanwhile, following his announced intent to send “a great hospital boat” to Greenland, which it neither needs nor wants, once more spurring chatter that the president has dementia. Trump’s ex-White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews last month condemned his obsession with annexing Greenland, calling it “the most mentally ill, deranged thing” Trump has sought since regaining office. His hospital ship announcement on Truth Social caused “befuddlement on both sides of the Atlantic,” The Washington Post reported.

A month after the bloody debacle of the 1972 Munich Olympics, the CIA was still struggling to comprehend what had unfolded. Palestinian gunmen had slipped into the Olympic Village at dawn, taken 11 Israeli athletes’ hostage, and, after a botched and amateurish rescue attempt by German police, murdered them. In Langley, analysts responded as bureaucracies do: they compiled a background report on the Palestinian organizations suspected of involvement. It was orderly, methodical—and curiously hollow.

“What the CIA either failed or chose not to mention,” writes Jason Burke in his superb and meticulously researched book The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, “was that, despite its name, the Black September Organization was not actually very organized.” It was less a coherent entity than a label—a convenient fiction designed to put distance between the gunmen and the leadership of Fatah, the PLO faction under Yasser Arafat. Black September was plausible deniability dressed up as organization, a shadow cast to obscure responsibility.

Burke, a seasoned journalist for The Guardian, argues that the CIA’s presence in the Middle East at the time was thin and undistinguished. Much of what it believed it knew about the Palestinian movement came secondhand—from allied intelligence services.

From J. Edgar Hoover to Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, there has been no shortage of “enemies lists” which pop up from time to time, usually preceding dark crackdowns on civil liberties and political dissent.

But Democratic Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, whose grilling of Attorney General Pam Bondi last week about a secret Justice Department list of “domestic terrorists” created a stir, says that what is happening now is even more alarming than Republican Senator McCarthy’s 1950s communist witch hunts or the post-World War One Red Scare, during which future FBI Director Hoover rose to prominence compiling lists of domestic “radicals” to be rounded up and deported..

“I do think there are parallels, although I find this one more disturbing,” said Scanlon during an interview on the SpyTalk podcast.

More disturbing than McCarthyism (which wrecked the careers of scores of people ranging from journalists to screen writers to State Department diplomats)? she was asked.

Murder They Said: The foreign ministries of the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands announced Saturday in London that an analysis of tissue samples from the body of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny “conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine,” a neurotoxin secreted by dart frogs in South America that “is not found naturally in Russia.” In other words, Vladimir Putin’s agents had manufactured and employed it to murder Navalny. “Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison,” said their joint statement.

Havana Syndrome: Add this wrinkle to the continuing mystery over Anomalous Health Incidents, or AHI, the crippling sensation of “pulsed energy” attacks that have debilitated scores of U.S. diplomats, spies and other government employees: A government scientist in Norway, described as a skeptic of such attacks, “built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy and, in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024 tested it on himself,” The Washington Post’s Warren P. Strobel and Ellen Nakashima exclusively reported Saturday.

WHEN TULSI GABBARD LEARNED she had been briefly placed on a U.S. Transportation Security Administration watch list after her July 2024 trip to the Vatican, she quickly took to cable news and social media to portray herself as a victim of political retaliation for her criticism of the Joe Biden administration. Gabbard told CNN’s Dana Bash that the retaliation occurred because she had just been “on TV warning the American people” about “the dangers of a Kamala Harris presidency.” The former Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii held no political office at the time and was campaigning for Trump.

Contrary to Gabbard’s claims, evidence continues to mount that her Vatican trip triggered TSA’s heightened surveillance because it was funded and arranged by a foundation whose chairman is a Belgian businessman with multiple Russian ties and sympathies. CNN had reported in 2024 that Gabbard’s “overseas travel patterns and foreign connections triggered a government algorithm earlier this year” that resulted in additional security scrutiny measures when she travelled.

The businessman who arranged her Vatican trip has been identified as Pierre Louvrier, whom the Paris-based Intelligence Online newsletter has described as “a multi-faceted consultant … [a]ctive within Russian business circles.”

In 2014 and 2015, Louvrier reportedly attempted a venture partnership with internationally sanctioned Russian media oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, though the deal fell through after exposure in Bulgarian press, and Louvrier denies any continued interactions with Malofeev. Regardless, Louvrier has also publicly celebrated the Russian invasion of Ukraine on social media, called for expansion of the Kremlin’s 2014 Crimean annexation, and called the infamous Russian terrorist and former FSB colonel known as Igor Strelkov (real name Igor Girkin) a “contemporary hero.”

The issue arises as Gabbard fends off accusations that she illegally withheld from Congress a May 2025 whistleblower’s complaint about “an unusual phone call between two members of foreign intelligence,” intercepted by the NSA, “who discussed a person close to Donald Trump,” as the Guardian put it. On Thursday afternoon, the Wall Street Journal identified the person as Jared Kushner, a senior Trump aide and envoy to both the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine peace talks. Her direct participation in a Trump effort to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 election has also drawn sharp scrutiny.

When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard showed up last month for the FBI’s seizure of election ballots cast in Fulton County, Ga., she justified her unusual presence with some extraordinary claims.

The bureau’s investigation into ballots cast during the 2020 presidential election in Georgia was “a national security issue,” she wrote in a …

Since the Kremlin’s 2016 attack on our democracy, the American public has become familiar with terms unique to Russian intelligence culture—kompromat, disinformatsiya, active measures, and, of course, useful idiot, In his new book, Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War, former CIA officer Sean Wiswesser places these techniques in context. In doing so, he offers an in-depth historical view of the Russian secret police and shows how Russian President Vladimir Putin uses the security services (RIS) as instruments of political warfare against the West.

Wiswesser was not only a career officer in the CIA’s Clandestine Service with expertise in Russian operations, he’s long been a dedicated linguist, with a B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from the University of North Carolina. He also holds a degree in Strategic Military Studies from the Air War College. In short, he’s got the right experience and tools for the job.

Kyiv Intelligence Scoop: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday that the U.S. and Russia had secretly discussed $12 billion worth of economic deals—some encroaching on Ukraine’s sovereignity—and suggested President Trump would want them in place before the midterm congressional elections. He said “intelligence sources showed him documents that laid out a framework for U.S.-Russian economic cooperation…,” the Washington Post reported. “We are not aware of all their bilateral economic or business agreements, but we are receiving some information on the matter,” Zelenskyy told journalists Friday. Trump’s lead negotiators in the U.S.-Russia talks are real estate operators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who have been given multiple diplomatic roles in the administration. Trump’s hopes that economic inducements will persuade Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire, many observers say, are illusory. He won’t stop until Ukraine is his.

Tehran Takedown: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted last week about what amounted to a U.S. covert op that crashed Iran’s currency and provoked nationwide economic protests. “What we can do at Treasury, and what we have done, is create a dollar shortage in the country,” Bessent said at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. The op had a “grand culmination in December,” he added, “when one of the largest banks in Iran went under, there was a run in the bank, the central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into freefall, inflation exploded and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

AS MOST OF MY READERS KNOW, in a past life I worked in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SOLIC), and in the Special Operations Division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In both roles, I was part of a team responsible for oversight and/or taskings for clandestine support to military operations, covert action and special activities that required a Presidential Finding, i.e. White House authorization.

I’ve dealt with these matters for 35 years.

It is from that perspective that I offer the following observation and assessment of the startling news of an assassination attempt on Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, a deputy chief of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service.

Suspicion quickly, and naturally, fell on Ukraine’s special services, which have shown an extraordinary ability to carry out sophisticated assasination and sabotage activities deep inside Russia. But It’s also prudent to acknowledge a possibility that cannot be dismissed in the opaque ecosystem of Russia’s internal power politics: that this attack was state-directed, or at least state-tolerated.

Kremlin Intrigue

In modern Russia, internal violence has repeatedly been used as a tool of discipline, deterrence, and narrative control. The destruction of the aircraft carrying Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, once a close ally of Vladimir Putin before sparking a brief rebellion against the Kremlin’s conduct of the war, stands as a stark reminder of how quickly insiders can become expendable.

Against that backdrop, an attack on a senior intelligence figure cannot be ruled out as part of an internal settling of accounts, a warning to rivals, or a managed purge disguised as foreign aggression. In a system where senior officials and oligarchs seem to “fall” from windows with unsettling regularity, attribution is never just about who pulled the trigger, but about who benefits from the message sent.

Success in war is typically measured by advances on front lines. But you can also measure it by the places no one is supposed to bleed: elevators, stairwells, parking garages and entryways, far from the lines, where the security camera blinks and the doorman looks away. That is where the Russia-Ukraine intelligence war has been living for years—not in trenches or boasts, in the dark arts of clandestine tradecraft.

A day after the Senate confirmed Christopher Fox as the intelligence community’s inspector general in October, the most sensitive matter on his agenda was locked in a safe, according to a sensational revelation that surfaced this week. It’s said to be a whistleblower complaint alleging serious wrongdoing by his boss, DNI Tulsi Gabbard.

Filed in May by an…