SpyTalk

By the time you see this, I hope to be somewhere off Kittery, Maine, enjoying the cool Atlantic waters. But I’ve left behind a special treat—our recent podcast interview with Luis Rueda, a senior former CIA operations officer, which many of you may have missed because, for entirely innocent reasons, I wasn’t able to promote it here in the SpyTalk newsletter.

Luis has been prescient about developments in the Middle East and elsewhere ever since I’ve known him, which is going on some 15 years now. His stint as chief of CIA operations for Iraq alone before the misbegotten invasion was enough of a learning lesson for him, and one that a number of us who’ve closely tracked events in that Godforsaken region have been privileged to learn as well.

TOTALLY OBLITERATED: President Trump and his administration spent the week rebutting a preliminary U.S. intelligence report that undermined his claim that the airstrikes he ordered “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. A classified Defense Intelligence Agency “Battle Damage Assessment,” issued a day after the strike, stated that the dozen bunker-buster bombs dropped by U.S. B-2 bombers failed to destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months. On Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a statement saying that “new intelligence” from a “historically reliable and accurate source/method” showed the sites had been “severely damaged.” DNI Tulsi Gabbard went further, saying in a post on X that the new intelligence confirmed the sites had been “destroyed.” The embattled national intelligence chief was notably not present at a Thursday Senate briefing delivered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Ratcliffe and Dan Caine, during which the JCS chairman said “the U.S. began highly classified planning to destroy Iran’s Fordo nuclear complex in 2009, virtually as soon as the Iranians began to build it,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The FBI has launched an investigation to find out who leaked what the DIA called “a preliminary, low-confidence assessment—not a final conclusion.” The knives are out, meanwhile, for the ODNI, with no less than Tom Cotton, R-Ark, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, proposing to slash the staff of the office by more than half, from 1600 to 650, NBC reported Friday.  (See also our Michael Isikoff’s interview on this subject with Gregory Treverton, former chair of the National Intelligence Council.)

EYES ON THE GROUND: In a flash of frustration over the DIA report, President Trump may have revealed a classified detail: that Israel (or someone) had personnel on the ground confirming the results of a strike inside Iran.

A former top U.S. intelligence official has joined a growing chorus contending that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard should either resign or be fired and her office “significantly” cut back in size in the aftermath of the controversy over the effectiveness of the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear program. 

‘“I do wonder why she's there,” said Gregory Treverton, a veteran U.S. national security official who served as chair of the National Intelligence Council between 2014 and 2017, on the SpyTalk podcast (scheduled for publication Friday). 

“By this time, it seems to me she should have resigned if she didn't get fired. She's plainly not part of the team and not trusted, even though she was obviously selected for her presumed loyalty to the president.” 

Treverton’s comments, echoing those made earlier this month by the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee,  came in the wake of a disastrous few weeks for Gabbard in which President Trump publicly dissed her, saying in an eye-popping comment to a reporter, “I don't care what she says” when asked about her testimony last March that Iran was not actively seeking to build a nuclear bomb.

Assessments of the damage caused by the recent U.S. airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites remained muddled Wednesday amid the growing debate over the effectiveness of the attacks on Iran’s nuclear program.

At a news conference in the Hague at the end of a NATO summit, President Trump and his top aides vigorously disputed a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysis that concluded the attacks had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. An angry Trump repeatedly insisted that the airstrikes, in which B-2 bombers dropped more than a dozen 30,000-pound GBU-57 “bunker buster” bombs on the nuclear sites while a U.S. Navy submarine supplemented the attacks with dozens of cruise missiles, had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.

The assertions have not been backed up yet by on-site observers, satellite photos or other kinds of intelligence methods that could confirm the extent of damage inside the nuclear facilities. 

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT’S CHOICE of a former career spy by the name of Blaise Metreweli to run MI6 climaxes a symphony of espionage facts & fiction that goes back decades.

Its most obvious chord made The New York Times and other major news outlets, and thus probably resonated with those who follow actual news not alternative facts — aka “lies” — flooding social media. 

“Bond, James Bond,” the most famous spy for everyone, was inevitably invoked. 

The Bond novels and movies rocketed to fame starting with author—and former British spy—Ian Fleming’s first novel in 1953, Casino Royale. The ensuing Bond movies’ opening segment is perhaps the cinematic world’s most famous movie clip: 

The audience peers through a moving, rifled barrel of a gun. The movie’s lead actor steps into sight circled by that firearm bore, whirls—and shoots the audience!  

Usually early in the Bond movies, our 007 license-to-kill hero links up with “Q,”  Her Majesty’s espionage armorer and tech support guru.

MI6’s new head, the Times said, “was most recently the director of technology and innovation, a position commonly referred to as Q.”

Fact meets fiction with a bang.  

And there’s this: The name of MI6’s new “C” ( not “M” as in the Bond sagas) is her name: Blaise Metreweli.

Blaise. As in Modesty Blaise, a spy character created by author Peter O’Donnell.  As they say, you can’t make this shit up.

Even with President Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire in the 10-day war between Israel and Iran, U.S. and European officials remain deeply concerned over Iran’s large undeclared stockpile of enriched uranium.

A few days before the U.S. attack on three major Iranian nuclear facilities, satellites photographed trucks at the Fordow enrichment plant loading up with Iran’s 408 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium. Iranian officials later confirmed the enriched uranium had been removed from Fordow and taken to a secret location. 

Vice President J.D. Vance and other senior administration officials, along with representatives of France of Britain, have voiced concerns that Iran, which also has a number of uninstalled advanced centrifuges, could further enrich the uranium to weapons-grade 90 percent, enabling Tehran to build a nuclear bomb despite the Israeli and U.S. attacks. 

But James Lawler, a former senior CIA officer whose 25-year career largely focused on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, says the extensive damage to Iran’s nuclear program so far makes such a development highly unlikely.

“Having the highly enriched uranium and the advanced centrifuges, while troubling, however, does not a nuclear weapons program make,” he told SpyTalk in an email.

First off I have to apologize for not jumping more quickly on the wave of history-making war news that broke Saturday night with Trump’s announcement that he’d sent a wing of B-2 bombers, protected by stealth fighters, to drop bunker busting bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities. Nagging medical issues have just drained my energy. The good news is that…

INTEL BE DAMNED: Donald Trump’s blunt rejection of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s assessment that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon—“I don’t care what she said”—sends a chilling message to the U.S. intelligence community: Don’t contradict the president. 

The remark, which appears to be driven by Trump’s personal feelings toward his DNI (see below), revives concerns from Trump’s first term, when he famously declared in 2018 that he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of election meddling over his own intelligence community’s findings. 

In March, Gabbard told Congress that the U.S. intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.” 

Vice President JD Vance defended Gabbard. “First off, Tulsi's testimony was in March, and a lot has changed since then,” Vance said on X.  

What changed? Not much, according to The New York Times. The U.S. intelligence community continues to believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to make a nuclear bomb, although it does have a large stockpile of uranium. Senior intelligence officials believe that an American military attack would likely push Iran to build one, the Times reported. 

Trump also appeared to parrot Israel’s hawkish estimate of Iran’s capabilities to build a bomb when he told reporters on Air Force One, “I think they were very close to having one.”

Hey there, SpyTalkers. Just wanted to give you a heads up that former senior Obama national security aide, U.S. diplomat and CIA analyst Edward “Ned” Price joined me and my podcast co-host Michael Isikoff yesterday to discuss the ongoing crisis of the Israel-Iran war. It was a very spirited discussion, with some sharp disagreements over the secret histo…

Iran’s vaunted cyber war capability turns out to be not so vaunted afterall.  It’s been the dog that didn’t—or hasn’t so far—barked in the war Israel launched against it last week.

For years, intelligence assessments have portrayed Iranian cyber capabilities as fearsome.    

The U.S. intelligence community’s most recent annual threat assessment, as presented by National Intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard to Congress in March, branded Iran’s cyber capabilities “a serious threat to U.S. networks and data” and ranked its operations alongside those of cyber heavyweights China, Russia and North Korea.