SpyTalk

Let's face it: if President Trump were getting any candid briefings on Vladimir Putin and the Alaska Summit from intelligence advisers, he never would've scheduled it—especially on such notice. Anybody who knows anything about Putin and Russia knows that the upcoming summit is a made-for-TV triumph for Putin, who’s been all dressed up with nowhere to go but China ever since he invaded Ukraine in February 2022. 

Trump insists he can make “a deal” with Putin.

TEL AVIV — One evening late last month, I was visiting with an Israeli friend at his Tel Aviv home when his cell phone loudly beeped and displayed a warning that a missile fired by the Houthi rebels in Yemen was heading toward central Israel. As air raid sirens blared outside, I asked if perhaps we should head to the communal bomb shelter nearby. 

“Not yet,” my friend said.

Wannabe Spy:  A U.S. Army enlisted man was caught in an act of espionage by the FBI, with the help of Army counterintelligence, in El Paso, Texas, the Justice Department reported. Specialist Taylor Adam Lee, 22, was arrested Wednesday after he delivered classified military information on U.S. tank vulnerabilities to someone he believed to be a Russian intelligence officer. He was seeking Russian citizenship, news accounts said, based on the DoJ’s announcement. He is accused of transmitting “export-controlled technical data on the M1A2 Abrams tank online and offer[ing] assistance to the Russian Federation,” during which he allegedly stated, “the USA is not happy with me for trying to expose their weaknesses. At this point I’d even volunteer to assist the Russian federation when I’m there in any way.”

Hanged for Spying: An Iranian nuclear scientist accused of working for Mossad was hanged Wednesday in Tehran. Rouzbeh Vadi was convicted of spying for Israel and passing on information about a nuclear scientist killed in Israel's June airstrikes on the Islamic Republic, according to Reuters, quoting the Ministry of Justice. Vadi allegedly passed along secrets to a Mossad agent in Vienna, he said in a televised confession.

One February evening 10 years ago, I strolled through the streets of Havana with the so-called Cuban 5— a band of Communist spies whose ringleader, Gerardo Hernández, had just been released from a U.S. prison in California. It was a wild and wholly improbable scene. Barely six weeks earlier, Hernández had been serving a double life sentence for conspiracy to commit espionage and murder, with no possibility of parole. HIs fate seemed doomed.

But then, thanks to a stunning agreement between President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro to restore diplomatic relations after more than 50 years of Cold War hostilities, Hernández was a free man, the result of super secret negotiations that produced a classic spy swap: Hernández and two of his Cuban 5 colleagues still in U.S. jails were let go in exchange for Cuba’s release of a CIA mole who had penetrated Havana’s intelligence directorate, and an American contractor, Alan Gross, who had been locked up for years by the Cubans on suspicions of espionage.

As they walked through the streets of Romerillo, one of Havana’’s poorest neighborhoods, Hernández and his Cuban 5 comrades were mobbed. It was instantly clear they had become symbols of national pride and, so it seemed then, harbingers of a new dawn in U.S.-Cuba relations. Women embraced and kissed them. Children beseeched them for their autographs, and everyone wanted a picture taken with them. There was, for Hernández, only one word to describe what was happening. It was a “miracle,” he told me that night, laughing, as much at the irony coming from him, a loyal Fidelista, as he looked up at a shrine to San Lazaro, the patron saint of Cuba.    

The inside story of that U.S.-Cuba spy swap—and the fleeting moment it seemed to offer for a rapprochement between two bitter adversaries—is told with fascinating new details in I Spy: The U,S,, Cuba and the Secret Deal that Ended the Cold War, an eight-part podcast on Audible produced and narrated by Dan Ephron, executive editor of Foreign Policy. It’s an engrossing drama filled with twists and turns, crushing setbacks and high level interventions (from the Vatican, of all places) that nonetheless shows the possibilities of creative diplomacy when pursued by a White House committed to breaking loose from what it saw as dead-end policies and stale Cold War shibboleths.

A BLACK FLAG hovers over military orders issued by Israeli Defense Force Chief of Staff Lt. General Eyal Zamir, backed by Defense Minister Israel Katz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as Israel prepares this week to expand the war in Gaza and to conquer the area. 

First coined by a judge in the trial of soldiers who carried out a cold blooded massacre of 49 Israeli Arab villagers on the eve of the 1956 Sinai campaign, a "black flag" refers to an unmistakably immoral and illegal order, one that must be disobeyed. 

The mass killings of Gaza civilians would seem to qualify for a black flag, yet not a single high-ranking officer in the Israeli military or defense establishment has refused participation in a campaign that has devastated the enclave, drawn international scrutiny for potential war crimes, and drawn Israel into being labeled a pariah state.

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

Sylvester Ghosted: A celebrated head of CIA clandestine operations, Tom Sylvester, who has been described as one of the most gifted intelligence officers of his generation, was slated to head up London Station as a kind of parting gift after decades of outstanding service—until somebody in Trumpworld got wind of his staunch support for Ukraine and NATO.  “Mr. Sylvester’s appointment was pulled after Foreign Policy magazine published excepts from a new book, “The Mission,” that included quotes from him,” the New York Times reported last Monday. “He was quoted talking about the importance of intelligence sharing with Ukraine beginning in 2014 and the agency’s efforts to cement partnerships with European allies.“  CIA Director John Ratcliffe pulled Sylvester’s ticket to London, perhaps the agency's most important station and one typically headed by a highly regarded veteran officer, in favor of “a younger CIA officer who is aligned with the agency’s new, more aggressive approach on recruiting sources and running clandestine operations,” said one official, probably from  the agency’s public relations office. Sylvester, highly skilled as an agent recruiter, will instead retire, the Times said.

Larry Pfeiffer, a top former official at the National Security Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA, came on the SpyTalk podcast this week to talk about the attack Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and Trump-world activists made on the Intelligence Community’s 2017 report assessing Russian influence …

IF AND WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN FALLS FROM POWER, scholars will examine several key events for signs of his regime’s decline. Chief among them will be the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But the most serious challenge to his rule since 1999, beside the 2012 protests against the rigged election that returned him to the presidency, was the Wagner Group’s June 24, 20…

SpyTalk has learned that Trump-friendly moneyed parties are pursuing evidence of the late financial adviser Jeffrey Epstein’s possible connections to Israeli intelligence through his now jailed girlfriend and former sex trafficking manager Ghislaine Maxwell. 

As with many other parties who have been scrutinizing the hazy sources of Epstein’s wealth, they’ve hired seasoned investigators to pursue a theory that the late, high rolling socialite and pedophile was at least partly bankrolled by Mossad to collect derogatory information on leading political figures, who include, of course Trump. One investigator shared bare bones details of the probe with SpyTalk on condition of anonymity, and said he did not have permission from his “hedge fund” employers to divulge their identity.

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

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Gabbard’s Gambit: The director of National Intelligence left a room full of reporters stunned last week when she took to the White House press room podium to claim that Obama administration officials "manufactured" intelligence and its reporting on Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election to hurt Hillary Clinton and benefit Donald Trump. Not just that, Gabbard said she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department on Obama and then-high ranking national security officials involved in the investigation. (Trump escalated the issue to “treason.”)

Criminalizing a debate over an official investigation is unprecedented, not to mention ominous. In an exclusive July 16 SpyTalk interview, Susan Miller, who captained the intelligence community’s 2016 election analysis, says there was “no coercion” from anyone in the Obama administration to tilt their findings in a way that besmearched Trump. In a Foreign Affairs piece headlined “Trump is breaking U.S. intelligence,” former CIA Director Michel Hayden and intelligence historian David Gioe compared Trump and Gabbard’s actions to Vladimir Putin’s demands for loyalty over truth telling.

But CIA Director John Ratcliffe praised Gabbard’s selectively curated declasification of documents, according to an agency spokesperson, calling it her “continued commitment to elevating the truth and bringing transparency to the American people…”

“But Gabbard has a problem,” commented Glenn Kessler, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written The Washington Post’s authoritative  “Fact Checker” column since 2011.