SpyTalk

IT WAS ONE OF THE MORE DRAMATIC—SOME MIGHT SAY HEROIC—scenes from the post- 9/11 era. In the spring of 2002, then-FBI director Robert Mueller, was getting reports from his agents that CIA contractors were conducting brutal interrogations of a wounded terror suspect, complete with forced nudity, sleep deprivation, freezing temperatures and a planned mock burial, at an agency black site in Thailand. Appalled at what he was witnessing, one agent, Ali Soufan, called up headquarters. “I swear to God, I’m going to arrest these guys!” he shouted, threatening to cuff the contractors.

Mueller got the message. Get out of there, he ordered his agents—they were law enforcement officers, not goons.

Disinfo Derby. Russia never misses an opportunity to throw more gas on the fires of American politics, and so it went this month within hours of the Sept. 10 murder of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk, with Moscow’s disinformation warriors “seeding social media with the frightening claim that America is slipping into civil war,” possibly involving elements of a “deep state,” the A.P. reported. “Chinese and pro-Iranian groups also spread disinformation about the shooting, with those loyal to Iran’s interests backing antisemitic conspiracy theories while bots linked to Beijing claimed that Kirk’s death shows that the United States is violent, polarized and dysfunctional.”

OUR JOB HERE is to review new books, films and TV shows related to intelligence and national security. Sometimes, though, old is hauntingly new. In the case of Stefan Zweig, who completed his memoir, The World of Yesterday, 83 years ago, the Austrian writer’s warnings about political complacency and the danger of war speak to us with profound immediacy.

The World of Yesterday comes with multiple lessons. As we review a book written before most of us were born, we look back with an old reminder: As Italo Calvino once wrote, “a classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.” That’s certainly true of this 1942 classic, which speaks to us with a certain urgency.

Et Tu, Rufo? Amid plunging FBI morale, disdain by MAGA world over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and facing mounting suits by popular former top officials over his loyalty tests and political retribution firings, FBI Director Kash Patel’s pratfalls in the Charlie Kirk murder investigation has now ignited the simmering dismay of leading right wingers. “We would be wise to take a moment and ask whether Kash Patel has what it takes to get this done,” Chris Rufo, an influential conservative activist (835,500 followers on X), posted to social media on Friday.

Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad, does not conceal his longing to supplant Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's next prime minister.

Much like Charles de Gaulle, who bided his time in his country house for 13 years after the end of World War Two, waiting for the French people to summon him to save the republic, Cohen, cloaked in the luxury of a spacious office in a towering Tel Aviv skyscraper, waits for Israelis to call him forth.

A pair of U.S. senators is demanding an accounting from the FBI about why damning evidence pointing to a likely Saudi role in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks was hidden from key investigators and the public for more than two decades.

“Over the past year, crucial new evidence about the role of Saudi officials has been revealed publicly for the first time, even though it had been in the FBI since the weeks immediately after the 9/11 attacks,” Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said Wednesday in a virtual address to a counter-terrorism conference organized in New York by the Soufan Center on the eve of today’s 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.pm

They were once central figures in a political scandal that rocked Washington. Oliver North was a top National Security Council staffer in Ronald Reagan’s White House who, after helping to arrange the illicit sale of American weapons to Iran, diverted the proceeds to fund a secret war in Nicaragua. Fawn Hall was his fetching and ever loyal secretary— so loyal that she spirited incriminating documents out of the White House in her boots and the back of her skirt.

The ensuing Iran-contra scandal spurred investigations by Congress and by an independent counsel, ending the government careers for both of them. 

But all’s well that end’s well.

Cold Water Wash:  There’s an old saying in the special ops world: “Ask forgiveness, not permission.” Team Trump has mastered the second part, anyway, according to a blockbuster New York Times piece this week. In the first Trump administration, officials neglected to tell congressional overseers about an ultra-daring op in early 2019 for Navy SEALs to swim ashore in North Korea and plant a listening device to eavesdrop on perpetual enfant terrible Kim Jong Un. “They were on a top secret mission so complex and consequential that everything had to go exactly right,” reported Times staff writer Dave Philipps and freelancer Matthew Cole. It didn’t. The SEALs got spooked by what they feared was a North Korean naval patrol boat nearby.

WHO KNEW? Not the CIA, evidently, or most of the American diplomats, military officers and U.S. weapons salesmen luxuriating in late-royal Tehran, as an Islamic revolution bubbled in the souks. Even as the end appeared near in 1979, the Americans were in a perpetual state of disbelief that “the slight, pompous, pathetically dithering Shah of Shahs, or K…

The families of 9/11 victims are planning an aggressive new push to dislodge documents and other evidence from the CIA and FBI in the wake of a milestone court ruling last week allowing them to proceed with their lawsuit alleging Saudi government complicity in the worst terror attack in U.S. history.  

“We intend to open up discovery on every single front,” said Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the 9/11 families.  “We’re going to make this as painful as possible.”