SpyTalk

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.

First it was Shin Bet.

And now the Mossad will soon have a new, partisan head—and that’s not good news for the already fragile and flawed Israeli democracy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman, his military secretary, as the 14th head of the nation’s elite foreign espionage agency is a continuation of his politicization and takeover of the entire intelligence community. It is also an expression of no confidence in the Mossad’s 7,000 employees, among whom Netanyahu did not find anyone worthy of leading the organization.

Putin Did It: A high level British inquiry fingered Vladimir Putin as responsible for the 2018 poisoning of ​​Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018 in a “reckless” display of power that led to the death of an innocent woman, Reuters reported Thursday. Skripal was found along with his daughter Yulia slumped unconscious on a public bench in the southern English city of Salisbury in March 2018 after Novichok was applied to the front door handle of his nearby home by Russian agents. About four months later, mother-of-three Dawn Sturgess, 44, died from exposure to the poison after her partner found a counterfeit perfume bottle which Russian spies had used to smuggle the military-grade nerve agent into the country, the inquiry said. “I have concluded that the operation to assassinate Sergei Skripal must have been authorized at the highest level, by President Putin,” U.K. Supreme Court judge Anthony Hughes said in his report. “The evidence that this was a Russian state attack is overwhelming.” (NBC)

Kremlin on the Thames: Russia is smuggling suspected intelligence operatives into the U.K. on cargo ships, the U.K.-based independent i Paper reported. “Two suspected spies used such transport to enter Britain in the spring and summer, based on intelligence we have seen.”

Kremlin on the Oder: Moscow has upped the tempo of drone flights over Germany, especially naval bases, in what appears to be preparations for a land attack on a NATO member in the coming years, German officials are saying.

ESSAY

History is complete with examples of world leaders who suffered severe mental decline during their rule, much to the detriment of their people, country, and millions of others. Britain’s mad King George III, who fumbled away the American colonies, comes readily to mind. And the obscenely cruel Caligula, who repeatedly issued bizarre military orders until his assassination in 41 AD. Then there’s Josef Stalin, whose swelling paranoia led him to dismiss or execute scores of officials and generals, including those warning of a secret Nazi plan to invade Russia. It’s amazing the USSR survived, however badly, until its collapse from decades of insanely communist misrule in 1991.

Close to home, the mental decline of Woodrow Wilson altered the course of history. In The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil details how the ailing president sabotaged the Versailles peace treaty and his own dream for a League of Nations when he couldn’t get fellow Democrats to go along with a provision on collective defense, a vacuum that led to the allies’ overly severe demands for reparations from Germany, thus opening the path to World War II. John Maynard Keynes, the budding economist and British delegate to the peace conference, later commented, “Wilson effectively killed his own baby, prompting many close observers to wonder whether he had gone mad.”

And then there’s Joe Biden, whose foggy syntax and memory loss were on full, ruinous display in that 2024 campaign debate with Donald Trump. That changed history. The faltering octogenarian’s stubborn, irrational refusal to give way to a younger successor until it was too late effectively ceded the election to an extreme narcissist who had already, in his first term, demonstrated his low impulse control, financial grifts and disdain for American alliances and institutions (even including, it would turn out, the White House East Wing).

But there have been many less well known others whose slow motion crackups led to the weakening, or even destruction, of their countries. For me, the one that most closely resembles what we’re seeing in Donald Trump’s increasingly erratic outbursts, personal insults, middle-of-the-night social media postings, and policy reversals—not to mention his penchant for dozing off during televised White House meetings—is Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ignited World War I and presided over Germany’s descent into postwar misery and chaos. A look at the Kaiser’s spiral into madness offers a handy, if unscientific measuring stick for what we’re seeing in Washington today.

My first run in with Soviet intelligence was when I was in my 20s and went looking for my relatives in the Soviet Union. I had joined a citizen’s exchange group in 1969 that participated in dialogues with Russian citizens in different cities. One of those cities, Kharkiv, now in Ukraine, was of special interest because my grandmother Sarah’s relatives lived there after migrating from Lithuania in 1905.