SpyTalk

Even as Russian and Ukrainian diplomats meeting in Abu Dhabi Wednesday called their U.S.-brokered discussions on ending the war “productive,” the reality is that Vladimir Putin’s massive air attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine won’t stop until he’s faced with a higher price for continuing his brutal campaign.

Starting Monday night, according to news reports, the Kremlin launched 71 missiles and 450 drones on civilian and energy targets across Ukraine, making it the largest assault since late December. Freezing Ukrainian cities were struck even as the two sides sat down to talk, with little evident progress on Russia’s major demand that Kyiv surrender significant real estate to Moscow.

This is no longer surprising, but it should still be clarifying. For three years, Moscow has used the language of diplomacy as cover for continued violence. Every “process” has been matched by another strike. Every pause in Western resolve has been interpreted not as restraint, but as opportunity.

This is the strategic context in which the debate over providing Ukraine with a long-range strike capability to hit strategic targets deep in Russia must finally be settled.

As Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put it, “Without pressure on Russia, there will be no end to this war.”

For more than three years, Ukraine has fought a war it did not start against an enemy that promised victory in three days. That promise collapsed under the weight of Russian incompetence, corruption, and the simple courage of Ukrainians who refused to surrender their country.

This is not a frozen conflict. It is a war whose outcome is being shaped, day by day, by who has reach and who does not.

Right now, Vladimir Putin is weaker than he has been since the invasion began. His economy is under wartime strain. His cash reserves are being drawn down. His oil revenues, including from the so-called ghost fleet, are under increasing pressure. His industry is producing quantity, not quality. His army is increasingly made up of poorly trained recruits and coerced manpower. His generals rotate, fail, and rotate again. His logistics system is brittle. His air defenses are stretched. His rear areas are no longer sanctuaries.

Long before the age of internet influencers, a different breed of provocateur took to the airwaves to spread disinformation. In the 1930s and 1940s, a cadre of expatriate Americans—some ideologues, some opportunists—used the radio to broadcast pro-Nazi, pro-fascist, and antisemitic propaganda back to the United States.

To FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, these broadcasters weren’t just deluded enemy sympathizers. They were “renegades,” and he was determined to round them up for prosecution. And more: Hoover’s campaign against them was the final step in a calculated, three-phase expansion of FBI power, all orchestrated with the blessing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Spy Sheikh Sleeze: A secret cryptocurrency deal that netted Trump family entities and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff nearly $500 million, almost 40 per cent up front four days before the 2024 election, was engineered by an Abu Dhabi royal known as the “spy sheikh,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Led by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, “brother to the United Arab Emirates’ president, the government’s national security adviser, as well as the leader of the oil-rich country’s largest wealth fund,” the royals had been pushing for access to tightly guarded U.S. A.I. chips, which the Biden administration had rebuffed, fearing they would be shared with China. Last May, six months after the secret deal, in which the royals purchased a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump’s fledgling cryptocurrency venture, the president greenlit the chips sale. “The deal marked something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company,” the Journal said.

Noem Call It Treason: The acting head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a Kristi Noem protégé from her days as governor of South Dakota, set off multiple system alarms last summer when he “uploaded sensitive contracting documents into a public version of ChatGPT,” Politico reported on Tuesday, citing “four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident.” It added: “The apparent misstep from Madhu Gottumukkala was especially noteworthy because [he] had requested special permission from CISA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer to use the popular AI tool soon after arriving at the agency this May, three of the officials said.” None of the documents was classified above the “For Official Use Only” level, Politico reported, but they included CISA contracting documents considered sensitive and not for public release. Last December, Politico also reported that Gottumukkala had requested access to a controlled access program—an act that would require taking a polygraph—in June. Gottumukkala failed the polygraph in the final weeks of July.

WITH THE GUNS MOSTLY QUIET IN GAZA and Washington pivoting to “the day after,” the United States has quietly assumed ownership of one of the most confounding national security problems since Vietnam. This is not a war story. It is a system failure story. It explains why Gaza has defeated every American administration since Harry Truman first confronted the question of Israel, Palestine, and U.S. responsibility for the territory in the ruins of World War II.

With a real ceasefire elusive but the political endgame accelerating, Gaza has entered the most perilous phase of the Israeli-Hamas war. The hostages are gone. A fragile ceasefire framework is in place. And the United States is now shaping what comes next through an international stabilization force led by a veteran American special operations commander. History suggests this is precisely the moment when wars unravel. Decisions made now about security, governance, borders, and coercive authority will determine whether Gaza settles into a brittle, managed calm or slides back into renewed chaos, with consequences that will reach far beyond the strip itself.

This assessment explains why Gaza is not a solvable military problem, how hostage-taking, leadership decapitation, media warfare, and lawfare have fused into a single coercive system, and why international stabilization efforts repeatedly fail when they collide with political realities Gaza does not share with the modern Westphalian state system.

While U.S. intelligence and national security officials have been laser-focused in recent weeks on Venezuela and Iran, they just got a powerful reminder that it might be time to pay some attention elsewhere.

Shortly after midnight local time Thursday, motorcycle-riding gunmen from an Islamic State branch in Africa launched a coordinated attack on the airport and adjacent military base in Niamey, Niger’s capital, shooting at soldiers and blowing holes in the fuselage of an airplane.

It was an especially bold attack, targeting a military compound in an African capital. And while casualties in this case so far appear to be minimal—initial reports suggest that four Nigerian soldiers were wounded and 11 militants killed—it was yet one more demonstration that the jihadi terror group, now largely decentralized, still has the resources and determination to deliver frightening strikes around the globe.

Over the past few years, the ranks of Islamic State branches have surged with multiple attacks throughout West Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan where, according to a recent United Nations report, the organization has recruited some 600 fresh fighters from Central Asia, many of them teenagers.

WHEN A SQUAD OF FBI AGENTS marched into a Fulton County Georgia election office on Wednesday and started seizing ballots from the 2020 election, they were accompanied by a cabinet official who almost nobody would have expected: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The FBI search for ballots th…

It seems like a plot drawn up for cable TV’s next international thriller, along the lines of Homeland or Tehran.

Two of China’s most powerful generals vanish from public view. The government quietly confirms that they are under investigation. Rumors ripple through the capital. A whiff of treachery is in the air. Fear of new purges spread.

This latest upheaval in Beijing is shocking, but it follows a longtime political script in Beijing, where communist bosses since 1950 have displayed a secretive ruling style that seems little changed since emperors once ruled China from behind the high walls of the Forbidden City. Last week’s military leadership purge, following the recent dismissals of other top generals, however, could have grave, contemporary consequences far beyond Beijing, particularly for the United States .

The abrupt removal especially of Gen. Zhang Youxia, a military official second only to President Xi JinPing, tops out “on an earthquake scale,” longtime China watcher John Pomfret says. It’s a “generational purge” unequaled across communist history, even exceeding Stalin’s purge of scores of generals in the 1930s.

But ground truth facts are hard to come by.

So let’s start with the one that is not in dispute.

China’s own Ministry of National Defense has publicly confirmed that Zhang, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission—the highest military authority in the country—and General Liu Zhenli, the officer responsible for operational planning of the armed forces, are under investigation for what Beijing calls “serious violations of discipline and law.”

Zhang, moreover, was a member of the ruling politburo and Xi’s most trusted military associate.

The Wall Street Journal exclusively reported that Zhang was also “accused of leaking information about the country’s nuclear-weapons program to the U.S…”during a “briefing—attended on Saturday morning by some of the military’s highest-ranking officers.”

It was a deliberate lie—disinformation—swallowed by the Journal, longtime experts consulted by SpyTalk said. The implication that Zhang was a CIA mole is not only far fetched but a falsehood manufactured by Xi’s minions to warn the defrocked general’s allies away from defending him.

As Bill Bishop, editor of the highly regarded Sinocism Substack site, put it: “Just because they may be telling other officials he leaked nuclear secrets does not mean he actually did. It might make for a useful charge internally, as it shows him to be an even greater villain than if he were simply corrupt.”

Likewise, Nicholas Eftimiades, the former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency specialist who wrote the standard modern work on Chinese intelligence services, was categorical: “There is no likelihood Zhang was on anyone’s payroll.”

And Pomfret, a former Washington Post China correspondent, adds the historical frame: “The use of the state secrets allegation is basically pretextual,” he told SpyTalk, “because once there’s an allegation you released state secrets to foreigners, you become immediately impossible to support.”

In any event, the upheaval is profound. Zhang was not a provincial commander, not a second-tier figure. This was a toppling at the summit of the military pyramid.

The closest American equivalent would be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the officer responsible for United States war planning being removed at the same time.

For about a year now, I have been imploring a longtime good friend and fellow scribbler not to let the cascading horrors of the Trump administration weigh him down. Let the work be the cure, I’d say. Shut out the noise. Fingers on the keyboard.

Elbows up, to coin a fine Canadian phrase.

Well, I confess I hit my own wall the past few days. The hair raising…

A KEY STRATEGY to contain espionage’s greatest threats to you via “rogue” artificial intelligence may come not from scientists or corporate and government players but from fiction slingers.

​A.I. spies and agent provocateur chatbots have been spiraling ordinary Americans into lives of delusions that they are being “watched” by forces other than the A.I.—which is telling them so. A.I. has driven teenagers to suicide. They send spy-scanned, sexualized photos of women and girls to strangers’ screens. A.I. helps create fake videos to flood social media sites with lies, as has been done with the recent tragic shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis mother, by a black-masked ICE agent.

​A.I. can leave us boggled—not knowing who or what to believe as our global politics swirl in wars, poverty, dictators and climate change. A new poll says 64 percent of Americans blame A.I. for false and misleading information leading to political violence.

Reel to Real

​Consider the shock experienced by Keanu Reeves’ character Neo in the 1999 movie The Matrix, when he discovers that A.I. has created a fake wombed reality for human beings in order to feed off their bioelectric energy.