SpyTalk

Just days before the U.S. launched the war in Iran last February, FBI director Kash Patel fired five veteran agents who specialized in countering Iranian threats to the U.S. homeland — a move that the bureau’s former acting director Thursday called an “abomination” that has had a crippling impact on U.S. national security.

“It’s absolutely devastating,” …

Strange Trip: Both present and former FBI and DOJ officials are troubled over FBI Director Kash Patel’s reported plans this week to visit Russia as a likely guest of the FSB, Moscow’s murderous domestic repression and foreign assassinations service— especially now with President Trump making nice with Vladimir Putin and urging regime change in Ukraine. After a recent ”quiet campaign” by senior FBI officials to dissuade Patel went unanswered, they reached out to the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, Jim Himes (CT) and Jamie Raskin (MD), who sent a letter to Patel asking him “to reconsider” and “call off this trip,” Sarah Fitzpatrick reported in The Atlantic, He hasn’t responded. (Maybe he was too busy playing beer-league hockey.) “Christopher O’Leary, a former senior executive in the FBI’s counterterrorism division [said] he and others found the timing of the trip bizarre, especially given the pressure that FBI leadership is putting on agents to substantiate election conspiracy theories at home that Russian intelligence services continuously amplify,” Fitzpatrick added. “If there was real concern about interference in our elections,” O’Leary said, “then the FBI director should be in the United States leading the effort around the clock,” not going to Moscow. SpyTalk’s Dolia Estévez reported Friday on a suspected Russian intelligence service plot to use Mexican hitmen to take out Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent exile based in Washington, D.C.

KGB Dump: Some 20 Finnish lawmakers suspect it’s Russian agents who’ve been breaking into their homes and leaving their legendary calling cards: a dump in their toilets. CIA officers in Russia have long found such fecal gifts awaiting them at home. Kash’s security team can expect the same.

Former German Spy Chief Arrested: A former head of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, who played a key role in the George W. Bush administration’s mistaken case for WMD in Iraq, has been arrested and charged with “treasonous espionage,” along with a former aide who’s been arrested for “aiding and abetting” the scheme. August Hanning, 80, led the BND 1998 to 2005 under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, followed by a term as state secretary in the Interior Ministry in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet until 2009, after which, according to Der Spiegel, he built up a roster of controversial clients, including Russian businessmen and bankers, and allegedly “prepared an analysis for the Azerbaijani intelligence service.” His former chief of staff (identified only as Manfred D. following German privacy rules) stayed on at the BND and was paid to supply him with a stream of classified information over a 12-year period until 2022, German prosecutors said. In 2002, according to reports, ”Hanning played a big role in the Curveball affair, the unnamed source for moveable WMD labs in Iraq, which Colin Powell mentioned in his speech to the UN making the case for war. It turned out to be false.” In his 2007 memoir, At the Center of the Storm, then-CIA Director George Tenet bitterly described how he was played by Hanning and his own aides. More schuhes to drop on this one.

Rush to Judgment: The CIA and Justice Department have settled on a plea deal to avoid a public trial of former senior CIA exec David Rush, who, beyond his admitted grand larceny, reportedly confessed that in late 2025 he had disclosed “certain descriptive information of a U.S. government clandestine human source” that could “endanger the safety and life of the human source and the U.S. government officers working with the source,” as well as jeopardize America’s “ability to recruit human sources, who rely on the U.S. government’s assurance of absolute secrecy,” as NBC put it.

The Department of Justice recently unveiled an alarming criminal plot orchestrated by a network of Russian agents and Kremlin recruits to carry out attacks and assassinations in countries around the world, starting with the United States. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York accused five individuals of acting as agents of the Russian Intelligence Services Network (RIS), the Kremlin’s external assassination arm, with conspiring to conduct pre-operational surveillance as part of a plan to murder Russian dissidents for the first time on U.S. soil, with the possible involvement of hitmen brought in from Mexico.

The Guardian reported that “among the rumoured potential targets” of the thwarted plot, whom the indictment does not identify, “was Vladimir Kara-Murza,” the prominent Russian journalist who has been based in the Washington, D.C. area since his 2024 release from a prison in Siberia as part of a prisoner exchange with the U.S.

It is unclear whether Mexico played a role in the investigation of the alleged plot. The New York prosecutor’s office did not respond to our inquiry. And Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has not commented.

The potential involvement of Mexican hitmen in Russian operations of this scale could have serious consequences for Mexican national security and relations with Washington. The prosecutor in charge of the case called the Russians’ activities, carried out on orders from “state agents,” a “flagrant violation of U.S. sovereignty.” Mexico should be grateful that this time the FBI was able to dismantle the attack in time.

On Mar. 15, 1944, less than three months before D-Day, three OSS operatives dropped into Nazi-aligned Hungary on what they knew might be a suicide mission. Chief among them was Col. Florimond Duke, a former starting lineman for The New York Giants, and at 47, one of the oldest Americans to parachute into enemy territory during World War Two.

They didn’t really hide: Their immediate goal was to be captured by the Nazis.

So opens Jason Bell’s Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War. Bell, a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, has done extensive research into this sidelight to the looming Normandy invasion, drawing on previously classified reports and little-noticed memoirs, chiefly Duke’s and, to a lesser extent, Capt. Guy Nunn’s.

Their purpose for being captured was to make contact with secretly anti-Nazi senior Hungarian officials, who were expecting their arrival and were searching for a way to break with the Axis and surrender to the Allies. In the process, the plan was for the Hungarians to turn the commandos over to the German army.

Once in German hands, the three Americans—the third, besides Duke and Nunn, was Maj. Alfred Suarez—were to endure intense, even brutal interrogations before appearing to break and provide an orchestrated mix of half-truths and deceptions to divert the Nazis’ attention from France and persuade them that the real invasion plan was an amphibious assault on the Balkans and southeast Europe.

It was hardly the only deception operation floated at Hitler’s doorstep, of course, but perhaps the least known. With Operation Sparrow, it’s finally getting its due.

What could have become the greatest security disaster in Israeli aviation history—the crash of a hijacked FlyDubai aircraft on Israel in a manner reminiscent of 9/11—was only narrowly averted last Wednesday, just minutes before the looming catastrophe.

The disaster was prevented by a remarkable combination of skill, courage and luck: the ingenuity of the Indian captain, the bravery of Israeli passengers who intervened when the cockpit was breached, and the intervention of two British reserve pilots who happened to be aboard the aircraft.

But the attempted attack has exposed something almost as disturbing as the rogue pilot’s plot itself: a colossal failure of Israel’s aviation-security system. The Mossad and Shin Bet, the Ministry of Transport and the National Security Council were all, in different ways, responsible for aspects of the security chain. Yet the system failed to identify the danger before the aircraft took off.

The lack of coordination among the agencies, their evasion of responsibility and their instinct to blame one another are eerily reminiscent of the failures that plagued the U.S. intelligence community before Al-Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

The investigation into the co-pilot who attempted to crash the FlyDubai aircraft with 174 passengers and crew aboard is being conducted by the security services of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in concert with the intelligence agencies of Oman and Israel. Teams from the Mossad and Shin Bet have traveled to Dubai and Abu Dhabi as part of the investigation. The UAE, Oman and Israel have maintained close intelligence cooperation for decades, despite the absence of diplomatic relations between Jerusalem and Muscat.

The investigation and news reports have so far yielded the following details:

The rogue co-pilot, Hamam al-Hammami, was born 29 years ago in the UAE to an Omani father and a Syrian mother. In 2018, he began pilot training with Oman Air,

Red Alert: The U.S. scrambled to withdraw all 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from a U.K. base “after commanders received new threats about an Iran-backed plot against the installation,” two U.S. officials told The New York Times Sunday evening. “The need to move the bombers out of the base, R.A.F. Fairford was deemed so urgent that some of the planes and their flight crews left while aerial refueling aircraft were still being scrambled to support their flights to the United States,” the Times added. “The withdrawal was highly unusual: Such moves are rarely made so quickly from an allied air base in a peacetime country thousands of miles from a combat zone.” Over the weekend a sixth dual Iranian-British suspect who had been arrested in connection with an alleged plot to bomb the base, which has been used by American bombers in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, was released on bail. Five other men were released on bail on Monday, a day after the authorities found no explosives in vans intercepted near the base. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said this week that the British government believes Iran played a part in planning the events that unfolded on Sunday. Iran has denied the accusations.

Pilot Error: Israeli intelligence is taking another beating, this time over its failure to catch would-be FlyDubai hijacker Hamam al-Hammami’s Islamist radicalization, which became clear from photos found on his LinkedIn page, including one showing an El Al aircraft and a photograph of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former ideological leader of al-Qaeda. Not only was Al-Hammami’s prior grounding as an Oman Air pilot missed, his “social media activity, and the radicalization he underwent, also escaped the notice of those who should have detected it,” said Israel Hyom, the country’s large circulation rightwing tabloid. “The Emiratis will undoubtedly draw their own lessons, but Israelis should be concerned that here, officials are busy celebrating rather than worrying, and that those responsible for the failure are, as usual, avoiding the answers demanded by the disturbing gaps that have now been exposed.” Al-Hammami is undergoing interrogation in the UAE, where Saudi Arabia sent him after the near catastrophic incident.

Walk in the Woods: CIA Director John Ratcliffe was among top Trump national security officials who met secretly Friday at Camp David to discuss options on Iran and Yemen.

Imagine you were an undercover FBI agent in a Mexican warehouse with Russian gangsters last week when your phone buzzed with this headline: “Hackers Say They Have Data on All FBI Employees.”

All FBI employees. Job applicants, too, reportedly.

That actually was the headline last Tuesday at 404 Media, the reporter-owned independent news outlet that broke the astounding, not to mention alarming, story.

The ShinyHunters hackers: 20-somethings with an anarchist streak and a taste for millions in bitcoin ransom loot.

“The hack appears to have swept up home addresses, Social Security numbers, secretive job assignments and much more,” The New York Times reported after analyzing some of the records. “Many FBI employees first learned about the hack when news reports about it surfaced on Tuesday, according to current and former officials.”

Imagine that: You’re on the street in a dangerous place and your phone lights up with that headline.

And what did FBI management do? According to news accounts, they “instructed employees to remain vigilant at home and at work, report any unsolicited contacts or threats, avoid answering calls from unknown numbers and set up voice mail accounts with A.I.-generated voices.”

Oh sure. Kind of a shelter-in-place advisory.

Mossad’s Revenge: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long scapegoated his intelligence chiefs and military leaders for a failure to predict and prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre and kidnappings of some1,200 Israeli concert goers and residents in communities surrounding Gaza. Now those agencies are apparently getting their revenge. Within hours of each other on Friday, The New York Times and The Atlantic published detailed stories that appeared to obliterate Netanyahu’s postering. The Times story, building on a Sept. 8 report in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz saying that “Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, had given Mr. Netanyahu a secret warning that Hamas was planning a major attack,” added ominously that, the “warning from the Emirati leader…never reached the leaders of Israel’s security establishment, according to five former senior Israeli officials.” Not only that, when Netanyahu “gathered his security chiefs days later, on Oct. 1, 2023, for a meeting about the situation in the Gaza Strip, he never mentioned the warning, according to minutes of the meeting reviewed by The Times.” Then came The Atlantic’s story, which said Netanyahu was also briefed on the brewing Hamas attack by no less than Abbas Kamel, “Egypt’s intelligence chief and one of the region’s most influential security officials,” who considered the situation so dire he flew secretly to Israel in a chartered Cessna on Sept. 26, 2023, landing at Ben Gurion “in an isolated section of the airport used for sensitive diplomatic and security missions.”

Terror at UK Airbase: British police say they arrested five men Sunday on suspicion that they were trying to carry out of terrorist attack with explosives at an air base that the U.S. Air Force had been using to facilitate strikes on Iran. Several homes near the RAF Fairford base, which is about 90 minutes outside London, were evacuated. After “extensive interviews and inquiries,” the five men, “all from London and in their early to mid-20s,” were released on bail, authorities said. Odd. Much yet to be learned.

CIA Truth and Dare: “A new, previously suppressed book by a former CIA officer paints a satirical and slashing portrait of the agency’s deep-cover spying program as riven by systematic dysfunction,” veteran intelligence reporter Zach Dorfman, a recent hire by The Washington Post, scooped on Sunday. “‘The Pickle Factory,’ written by an ex-CIA nonofficial cover officer, under the pen name Sam R. Oyken, is billed as a work of fiction,” writes Dorfman. “Though often fantastical, it contains thinly veiled true-life details about the inner workings of the agency’s spying operations, according to former CIA officials.” It’s not a pretty picture.

CIA-KGB War on Screen: Filming has been completed on The Billion Dollar Spy, an adaptation of former Washington Post foreign correspondent and editor David E. Hoffman’s celebrated 2015 book of the same name. The film stars Russell Crowe as Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer in a Russian military design bureau whose hatred for Soviet communism drove him to volunteer to spy for the United States, and whose disclosures weakened Soviet air defenses and saved the U.S. an estimated billion dollars in R&D costs. Interesting sidelight: An online Russian magazine recently published a version of the Tolkachev case by Vladimir Zaitsev, the late KGB agent who caught him. More details on that over at Deeper Look, a Substack by former CIA officer Michael Sellers, who—get this—was also arrested in Moscow by Zaitsev. Luckily, he lived to tell the story. Tolkachev was executed.

Mossad’s Revenge: Israeli Prime MInister Benjamin Netanyahu has long scapegoated his former intelligence chiefs and military leaders for a failure to predict and prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre and kidnappings of some 1,200 Israeli concert goers and residents in communities surrounding Gaza. Apparently they’ve had enough. Within hours of each other on Friday, The New York Times and The Atlantic published detailed stories that appeared to obliterate Netanyahu’s postering.

In May 1985, four young American musicians landed in Moscow carrying their various instruments—a saxophone, a mandolin, a guitar, and a portable electric piano. Innocent enough, except they also brought sheet music secretly embedded with coded words listing the names and addresses of Jews and others who had been refused permission to leave the Soviet Union.

Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB, by Cal State music professor Merryl Goldberg and Vince Houghton, director of the National Security Agency’s National Cryptologic Museum, is Goldberg’s story of her 10-day adventure behind the Iron Curtain four decades ago.

This modest but engaging book recreates the atmosphere facing refuseniks and dissidents alike in the last years of the Soviet Union, along with efforts in the Ronald Reagan years to support them.