SpyTalk

Welcome to Spy Week, our curated compilation of important events at the intersection of intelligence, foreign relations and military operations.

East Wing Mystery: What happened to the White House bunker when President Trump impetuously tore down the East Wing? SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff was curious about the fate of the officially named Presidential Emergency Operations Center, which was first built for FDR during World War II and used at least twice since, by Vice President Dick Cheney, First Lady Laura Bush and others during the 9/11 attacks, and then in 2020 by Trump, who retreated there during the George Floyd protests. Did Trump’s mechanized excavators pulverize the underground PEOC, too? If so, where is it now? If not, where would you get the elevator?

When we first interviewed Abigail Spanberger for the SpyTalk podcast back in September, she had just announced she was giving up her congressional seat in the distant Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. to run for governor.

A Democrat elected in a district that had gone Republican for decades, Spanberger quickly won a reputation for bipartisanship in …

Elyse Graham, a historian and professor at Stony Brook University in New York, has written an entertaining and sometimes cagey book about highly educated British and Americans who joined the war against the Nazis in World War II.

Graham’s Book and Dagger, How Scholars and Librarians Became The Unlikely Spies of World War II, is misleading in the sense that it’s much more than what the title suggests. Her canvas is, in fact, far broader. To be sure, Book and Dagger is an encyclopedic landscape of Allied intelligence operations in Europe, from disinformation and sabotage campaigns to counterintelligence techniques and every form of trickery that undergirded the ultimate victory over the Axis powers in the war. But beyond that, in her first book for a non-academic audience, the author compares the fight against fascism then to the challenges America faces now.

CIA/Venezuela: “The Central Intelligence Agency is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal airstrikes by the Trump administration against small, fast-going boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela,” Aram Roston exclusively reported Tuesday in the Guardian, based on “three sources familiar with the operations.” Roston’s scoop came as no shock, given that President Trump has confirmed reports that he’s authorized the spy agency to conduct a covert action campaign against the regime of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro. Not mentioned: the shadowy role of Gary Berntsen, a former CIA station chief in Bolivia (who performed heroically in the post-9/11 hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan) in allegedly supplying the administration with information baselessly connecting Maduro to the Tren de Aragua criminal drug gang’s “invasion” of the U.S. No evidence has surfaced, meanwhile, that the boats Trump (illegally) ordered blown up were carrying drugs. Nor is any likely forthcoming from the agency, Mark Lowenthal, a former assistant director for analysis for the CIA, told Roston. “They are going to claim it’s classified and they are not going to release it publicly,” he said. “And they may be right. They have all sorts of exemptions in law.”

Grand Theft Russia: “Russia is protecting its nuclear submarine fleet in the Arctic with an undersea surveillance system built using high-tech equipment acquired from U.S. and European companies through a secret procurement network, according to newly uncovered financial records, court documents and Western security officials,” The Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported Thursday.

The Kashmiri American Council was one of those shadowy pressure groups that pop up in the nation’s capital from time to time. Purporting to be a dome…

Editor’s Note: A House of Dynamite has stirred up so much enthusiastic commentary we thought that readers who missed our interview with Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior CIA official and Sit Room director, mi…

SHE’S JUMPED OUT OF AIRPLANES, and so has her husband, a fellow Army general and veteran paratroops commander. But Michele Bredenkamp’s next job, should she be confirmed, will be mostly looking upward toward the heavens, where the agency she’ll run operates countless spy satellites. And that’s where the nominee to run the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency will be right at home.

Military intelligence has been the lifeblood of Bredenkamp’s career ever since she graduated in 1990 from tiny Jesuit-run Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala. with a ROTC commission and, soon after, attended the MI Officer Basic Course at Ft. Huachuka, Arizona. Over the decades she’s had extended deployments in South Korea, Iraq, combat jumps in Afghanistan, won multiple Bronze Star and other infantry awards and managed the Army’s top intelligence command.

But amid the current political environment, what might be her most important bonafides has been her ability to work harmoniously as chief military advisor to the controversial Director of National Intelligence and Trump loyalist, Tulsi Gabbard.

An organization representing hundreds of former intelligence, law enforcement and State Department officials expressed alarm Tuesday over a report that the Office of National Intelligence was running a secretive group dedicated to identifying and rooting out perceived enemies of President Donald Trump.

The Steady State, founded in 2016 and composed of some 340 former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security, urged Congressional lawmakers to look into The Interagency Weaponization Working Group, whose activities were closely examined Monday in an exclusive report by the Reuters news agency. The group’s mission, it said, was “basically to go after ‘the Deep State,’” a term that Trump and his minions use to describe officials who have opposed the president’s positions and mandates, especially in the national security realm. Prime targets have been Justice Department officials, FBI agents and CIA officials who investigated the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia or prosecuted Jan. 6 rioters.

Overt-Covert: President Trump confirmed this week that he had “authorized” covert actions to destabilize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro’s socialist dictatorship because “they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America…And..we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela…”—claims experts call baseless, as well as phony foundations for illegal military attacks in the Caribbean. (Colombia and Mexico are the major culprits.) Then, in a kind of off-hand remark to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy looking on, Trump said Maduro had offered concessions to avoid an armed conflict “because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States,” which has assembled an armada nearby.

It may be the most terrifying moment in Kathryn Bigelow’s riveting new movie, A House of Dynamite: A nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) has just been launched from somewhere in the North Pacific and Air Force trackers quickly determine it is headed to Chicago. The Pentagon’s much vaunted Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD) system is activated to intercept the missile. When the Secretary of Defense demands to know the likelihood of success, the deputy national security advisor waffles, then finally blurts out his sobering reply: The system’s “success rate” is no more than 61 percent.

“So it’s a fucking coin toss?!” the SecDef shouts.

And the fate of Chicago hangs on the outcome.