SpyTalk

Rampage: The Trump-Gabbard campaign to whittle down U.S. spy agencies to a pencil nub continued this week by naming and shaming 37 intelligence professionals by publicly stripping their security clearances, rendering them fired without warning (or cause) and probably short-circuiting any future employment as expert consultants to their former employers. Among them: An undercover senior CIA officer who briefed Trump in advance of his Aug. 15 Alaska Summit with Vladimir Putin.

Rep. Jim Himes decided it was time to play hardball. 

For months, the Connecticut Democrat—ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee—had been firing off letters to the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, demanding she explain why she was firing top officials without cause and making other provocative moves, such as releasing documents she claimed showed “treason” by Obama officials, that appeared to have no purpose other than pleasing her boss, President Trump. 

To Himes’ endless frustration, none of his letters were answered. 

So Himes tried another tack: He recently passed word to one of Gabbard’s deputies that if she wanted his “help on some things”—such as reauthorizing a hotly contested warrantless surveillance program, commonly known as Section 702 —she needed to start answering her mail.

“I wrote a satirical piece and they took it as an instruction manual,” cracked former senior CIA ops officer Luis Rueda, reacting to news that “at least three people with connections to President Donald Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland.”

Back in June, Rueda, a veteran of U.S. intrigues in the Middle East, wrote a piece for SpyTalk called “How to Take Greenland,” a tongue-in-cheek jibe advising Trump to forgo an invasion of the mineral-rich Danish territory in favor of generating the conditions for a sneaky coup. Apparently some Trump partisans—neither their names nor sponsoring agency, if any, were identified—took his cue and started mucking around in Nuuk, the capital, trying to find friends and stoke anti-Danish sentiment.

I have not been one for listening to audiobooks while driving, ever since I got engrossed in one after crossing south across the George Washington Bridge a couple decades ago and ended up somewhere in Pennsylvania. Rock and roll has pretty much been my regular traveling companion when driving alone ever since.

But falling hopelessly behind in my leaning tower of SpyTalk must-read books this month, I decided to catch up on at least one by downloading an audio version of The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West before turning onto I-95 North out of D.C. for a six hour drive. And wow, was I rewarded.

Good morning! I succumbed to nature and humidity this week by heading to my beloved New England, with stops in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and, soon, New Hampshire. So there is no SpyWeek today. If you haven't caught up to it yet, however, do listen in on yesterday's unusually lively podcast featuring former ambassador and Russia hand Daniel Fried talki…

The attire may have been unusual. But the message was unmistakable. 

When Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov showed up last week at the Alaska Summit between President Trump and Vladimir Putin, there was no shortage of double takes when onlookers noticed he was wearing a grey  sweatshirt with the letters emblazoned on the front: “CCCP.”

That’s Russian…

A group of just fired FBI executives has  hired a pair of high powered Washington,  D.C. attorneys  to challenge their dismissals in federal court on the grounds they were  unjustified acts of political “retribution” by Director Kash Patel, sources familiar with the matter tell SpyTalk. 

The cashiered agents’ decision to hire Abbe Lowell, one of Washington’s most prominent defense lawyers, and national security attorney Mark Zaid seems destined to escalate tensions over Patel’s efforts to shake up  the bureau and purge an ever expanding coterie of veteran agents who have been perceived as insufficiently loyal to President Trump’s agenda.

“This is the high point of politicization of the FBI,” said Chris O’Leary, a former senior counter-terrorism agent who maintains close ties to the bureau workforce. “There seems to be no limit to what they’ll do. I don’t think it could be worse.”

Welcome to SpyWeek, our weekly intel news roundup, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations.

Baked Alaska:  Who knows what US intelligence is telling Donald Trump about his aborted summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, but Kremlin officials are crowing about it as a big win.  The general consensus globally was the same: “Putin Got Three Major Wins From Trump in Anchorage,” headlined TIME,“ But the Talks Aren’t Over.” Indeed, the New York Times’ Steven Erlanger reported that Trump told European leaders after his meeting with Putin that “he supported a plan to end the war in Ukraine by ceding unconquered territory to the Russian invaders, rather than try for a cease-fire…”— a move Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly rejected. Trump, nevertheless, was ecstatic. “I think the meeting was a 10 in the sense that we got along great,” he told Fox’s Sean Hannity.

KGB Mind Games: Putin presented Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff with an award to pass along to a senior CIA official whose son was killed in Ukraine while fighting alongside Russian forces, CBS News reported. The Order of Lenin was meant forJuliane Gallina, whose 21-year-old son, Michael Gloss, was killed in 2024. Gallina is currently serving at the CIA as deputy director for digital innovation.

Nobody knows how the struggle between the White House and D.C. authorities over policing in the capital is going to turn out, but one thing is for sure: Donald Trump has a friend in the D.C. Police Union.

This week longtime union head Gregg Pemberton welcomed Trump’s deployment of federal police agents and the National Guard troops onto the city’s streets. 

“We stand with the President in recognizing that Washington, D.C., cannot continue on this trajectory,” Pemberton said. “Crime is out of control, and our officers are stretched beyond their limits.” 

A top official in the Justice Department unit assigned to combat domestic terrorism  has resigned in frustration after watching his office effectively gutted with much of its funding cut off and its lawyers reassigned to immigration enforcement and other matters. 

“I no longer had a functioning job. There was nothing for me to do anymore,” said Thomas Brzozowski, who had served as the unit’s senior counsel for the last 10 years, in an exclusive interview on the SpyTalk podcast scheduled for posting on Friday.  “And so I couldn’t in good conscience continue to hold myself out as counsel for domestic terrorism when it became evidence to me that this was simply not going to be something that I would be permitted to work on.”

The net result, according to Brzozowski: “There has been a clear retreat by the federal government in its fight against violent extremism.” 

The resignation of Brzozowski, which has not been previously reported, is the latest sign of turmoil and disruption in the upper ranks of U.S. law enforcement under Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.