SpyTalk

It‘s been only four days since President Trump promised a gathering of Arab and Muslim leaders in Egypt that his new 20-point peace plan for the Middle East would lead to an “historic new dawn” of peace for the war-torn region. But already a bitter dispute between Israelis and Hamas over the missing remains of dead hostages is threatening that vision, with the growing possibility of renewed warfare.

A literary agent asked me the other day about writing another book. “Good lord,” I said. “I can’t imagine finding the time to do that while keeping SpyTalk up to speed.”

So you can imagine how astonished I am at what CNN anchor Jake Tapper does. He’s on the air every weekday with his own show, “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” Sure, he’…

Enemy of My Enemy: “Even as key Arab states condemned the war in the Gaza Strip, they quietly expanded security cooperation with the Israeli military,” The Washington Post reported Saturday, based on “leaked U.S. documents.” What brought them together?

Welcome to our new occasional feature, SpyFaces in the Crowd, in which we’ll offer mini-profiles of important players in U.S. intelligence that readers might not be familiar with.

Michael W. Ellis was on an ambitious Republican flight path even as a freshman at Dartmouth in 2002, although few of his classmates probably would have envisioned his swing far right into MAGA-land and eventual appointment two decades later as deputy director of the CIA in the second Trump administration.

NYPD Blue: The NYPD’s legendary counterterrorism unit is not being spared in the Trump administration’s budget cuts targeting Democrat voting districts.

Picture this: One of Israel’s top spies in Iran is a dentist. That’s right, you could say Mossad agent Kamran Esfahani is well positioned to look right into the mouths of Tehran’s senior officials. But that’s not to say The Persian is in any way a comic novel: It’s a deadly serious, if absolutely entertaining, journey into …

Last night the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act expired, 10 years after its passage, which mandated congressional reauthorization for its continuation no later than Sept. 30, 2025.

The moment has left many cybersecurity experts reeling.

Some key military intelligence agency operations will be shuttered if Congress fails to pass a budget bill by midnight tonight, according to a Pentagon planning document.

Not that you were fretting much about it, but secret operations at the CIA and other U.S. government intelligence agencies will mostly carry per usual (whatever that means) should Congress fail to come to a budget agreement and turn off the lights in many other offices at midnight Wednesday.

Of more immediate concern is the posture of worldwide U.S. combat forces this week with hundreds of their commanders en route from far flung posts to an all-flags-on-deck command meeting at Quantico ordered up by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which President Trump later invited himself to, creating yet another level of security concerns.

On the Western Front: “Several European countries are recruiting spies in Russia again.” So claimed El Mundo, Spain’s leading paper of record, in a story by its resident historian and veteran war correspondent Alberto Rojas. In response to a dramatic uptick in “the activity of Russian intelligence, espionage, and sabotage in Europe today,” Rojas writes, “the secret services of several countries on the continent have gone on the offensive. They are no longer just monitoring Kremlin intrusions into their security systems or recruiting individuals in need of funds via Telegram to carry out certain tasks in exchange for cryptocurrencies. Now they want to rebuild networks on the other side of the new Iron Curtain.”