SpyTalk

WASHINGTON AND TEHRAN have performed this dance before. Carrier movements. Air defenses. urgent calls with Gulf capitals. a fresh round of “final warnings.” Then, at the last second, either a backchannel produces a face-saving pause, or the first explosions make the entire debate irrelevant.

Tonight feels like that familiar prelude, but also unlike it.

TO THOSE OF A CERTAIN AGE, the legendary investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh needs no introduction, but there may be many young journalists, not to mention casual news readers, who have never heard of him.

Hersh is back in the news recently, but not because of any new blockbuster story.. Instead, he is the subject—at times reluctantly—of a new feature length documentary film, Cover-Up, now available on Netflix. At almost 90, Hersh does not appear to have yet slowed down and the new film offers viewers a truly educational and even entertaining overview of his career.

For two centuries now, the so-called “Great Game of Nations” has been centered on the shifting boundaries of Central Asia and its surrounding regions, with Great Britain and Russia, later joined by the United States, China and Turkey, vying for power.

Suddenly, In an historical blink of an eye, that focus has changed. Today, supercharged by the ambitions of President Trump, it’s the Arctic. And the lineups of friends and enemies have been scrambled beyond recognition.

For most of modern history, the Arctic was not a battlefield. It was a barrier—a frozen lid on the top of the planet that separated continents and contained the shortest, most dangerous flight paths of the Cold War.

During that era, the Arctic’s strategic meaning was almost entirely military and almost entirely vertical. American and Soviet bombers, and later ballistic missiles, could cross the pole on the shortest route between civilizations. The Arctic was not a marketplace. It was a warning system. Radar lines, under-ice submarine patrol routes and remote U.S. air bases like Thule (now Pituffik Space Base) in Greenland existed for one reason: to detect and survive the opening minutes of a nuclear war.

That world is over.

Today, the Arctic is not a lid. It is becoming an ocean.

Sick: The Havana Syndrome controversy exploded anew this week with claims that the U.S.had secretly acquired a foreign made “directed energy” or “sonic” weapon of a type that could have been the cause of the strange medical episodes that have stunned and permanently disabled scores of U.S. officials, starting with CIA officers serving in Cuba and other foreign posts and, in two alleged incidents, Washington, D.C. First came Sasha Ingber, a former TV and radio correspondent who had also worked in a State Department initiative to monitor and counter Russian disinformation. On Monday she reported on her HUMINT substack that “a number of months ago, the U.S. captured a weapon that has been associated with Havana Syndrome,” whose symptoms include vertigo, nausea, splitting headaches and mental confusion. Two sources demanding anonymity told Ingber it was “seized by U.S. Special Forces during an operation.” (Two more sources buttressed her reporting in a second post.) Sources told her “the weapon has been tested so that the U.S. can understand how the device works,” but that “no one said that it had ever been used.”

Right now, Iran sits at the center of what I have described in recent SpyTalk pieces as a brittle but dangerous system under stress. The regime looks solid until you touch it. Then it creaks. The streets are restless. The economy is suffocating under sanctions and mismanagement. The security services are working overtime. And Tehran’s answer to pressure remains what it has been for decades: push risk outward through proxies, deniability, and calibrated escalation.

That outward push now runs across the map. Hezbollah to the north. Militias in Syria and Iraq. The Houthis in the Red Sea. A shadow conflict with Israel that keeps slipping from covert to overt and back again. The United States is doing what it has been doing for months: keeping carrier groups and air power in place not because it wants a war, but because it is trying to prevent one - and preparing for the possibility that prevention fails. Russia and China are not referees. They are opportunists, deepening their ties to Tehran and quietly enjoying Washington’s strategic discomfort.

In earlier SpyTalk reporting, I made two arguments that matter here. First, that Iran is not stable - it is stressed. Second, that the real danger is not sudden collapse, but miscalculation: a stumble, a misread signal, a local escalation that cascades faster than anyone intends. In other words, this is not equilibrium. It is a stress test.

Here is the first line you should remember:

Iran is not on the edge of collapse. It is on the edge of a mistake.

Stress tests do not break systems gently. They break them suddenly.

Which brings me to a book I have been writing for some time now—a warning book about America’s long, complicated, and poorly understood relationship with regime change.

It is a history most Americans never learn. Not because it is secret anymore, but because it is uncomfortable. It does not fit the national story we like to tell about ourselves. In most classrooms, the United States appears mainly as a force for good—sometimes clumsy, sometimes imperfect, but fundamentally well-intentioned. The darker chapters of Cold War political warfare, covert action, and the deliberate destruction of foreign democracies tend to be treated lightly, if they are treated at all.

They should not be.

Because many of today’s fires were lit by matches we ourselves threw.

He is maybe the highest ranking U.S. intelligence official you’ve never heard of. Yet he’s a key cog in the Trump administration’s controversial campaign to gather and disseminate intelligence on civil liberties activists, anti-ICE protesters, Democratic Party donors and others whom the Trump administration has called “domestic terrorists.”

He is Matthew Kozma, 52, Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security. I & A, as it’s known, was created in the wake of 9/11 to fill a perceived gap in domestic intelligence collection with the FBI. The office has a broad mandate, from countering domestic threats from foreign terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State to investigating home-grown violent extremists, principally, according to Trump administration officials, “antifa,” which is not really a group but a loosely connected anti-fascist movement. A senior FBI official recently identified it in congressional testimony as the nation’s top terrorist threat, but upon questioning couldn’t answer simple questions about it.

Nevertheless, in December the definition of who is antifa, and what actions qualify to be considered domestic terrorism, was broadened. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an extraordinary operational blueprint that expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include “organized doxxing of law enforcement” and “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement,” among other activities, which made it easier to label individuals and groups as “antifa.”

“I strongly suspect (I & A) will be very involved in implementation of the order,” Miles Taylor, a former DHS chief of staff in the first Trump administration, told SpyTalk.

Three days ago I argued in this space that revolutions are not decided by crowd size or slogans. They are decided by systems under pressure. What has changed since Monday is not the nature of the contest inside Iran, but the phase of it. The country is now moving from the street phase into the system phase—the moment when logistics, payrolls, fuel, transport, ports, bazaars, and the loyalty of armed men begin to matter more than symbols or speeches. This is where history stops being theatrical drama and turns on fundamental, mechanical change.

Over the past days, unrest has continued to spread across much of Iran’s geography, touching nearly every major population center and many secondary cities as well. The scale and distribution of activity matters because it forces the regime to make hard choices about where to deploy limited coercive resources. The Islamic Republic was designed to survive moments like this, with layered security services, parallel courts, and emergency legal authorities. But even systems built for repression experience friction when they are forced to operate everywhere at once.

The decisive variable is no longer whether people are willing to demonstrate. It is whether economic life begins to stall in a sustained way. Street protests impose political costs. Sustained strikes impose system cost. When transport slows, when bazaars close, when ports back up, and when energy production and distribution become unreliable, the state’s most basic functions come under stress. At that point, loyalty is no longer an abstract concept. It becomes a question of who gets paychecks, fuel, food, and assurances on the safety of their families.

Iran is experiencing its most politically explicit and geographically widespread unrest in many years. Demonstrations, strikes, and clashes have been reported across major cities and commercial centers, accompanied by communications shutdowns and mass arrests. The regime is responding with a familiar survival playbook: repression, information control, and legal intimidation. President Trump has publicly warned he may intervene militarily if Iran continues using lethal force against protesters. The ultimate outcome is uncertain.

Key questions:

1. What is actually happening inside Iran and how serious is it?

2. Who is Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and what role does he really play?

3. What are the United States, Israel, China, and Russia signaling?

4. Where does this most likely go next?

Lights Out: “Delta Force didn’t arrive in the dark. The dark arrived first,” writes our SpyTalk colleague Seth Hettena about the Maduro raid on his own special ops-focused Substack, The After-Action Report. Fascinating and comprehensive, Hettena’s story details how U.S. electronic warfare specialists, interconnected with advanced U.S. spy and communications satellites, knocked out everything from city lights to Russian and Chinese missile defenses and radars, enabling the Delta Force team to sweep in and take out Nicholas Maduro and his wife with virtual impunity. Bottom line: the future of war is now.

Sound Weapon and Fury: A MAGA tweeter on X, meanwhile, got a lot of people, including White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, excited about his dodgy report on an unnamed Maduro “security guard” who claimed U.S. raiders killed “hundreds of us” and disabled others with “a very intense sound wave.” He said, “Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move,” adding, “I’ve never seen anything like it. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon or whatever it was.” The super efficient raid has stunned all of Latin America into submission, he also claimed. Sounds like someone has a Havana Syndrome jag. Or was it real? Tweeted Leavitt: “Stop what you’re doing and read this.”

Aldrich Ames, age 84, former CIA officer, died January 6, 2026, in prison, his home of record since shortly after his conviction on espionage charges in 1994. The cited cause was lung cancer. Ames had been a smoker for many years (like most of us) and was still one when I first met him in 1983 and for years after. The federal prison system’s prohibition of tobacco in 2006 probably caused him some distress, which probably no one who knew of him would be sorry to hear. I have a small measure of sympathy for him, very small, but he was a human being.