SpyTalk

One day last month, an Asiana Airlines flight sat on the tarmac at Incheon airport in Seoul, South Korea, waiting to push back from the gate for a routine flight across the Yellow Sea to China. The passengers had boarded; everything seemed normal. 

But then several minutes passed, and nothing happened. The airplane door remained open. Finally, the voice of a flight attendant crackled over the intercom, “Could [passenger X] please come to the front of the plane?” 

The passenger, a man in his forties surnamed Kim, rose from his seat and nervously moved forward. As he approached the cockpit, Mr. Kim was swarmed by airport police and South Korean intelligence agents, who escorted him off the plane and arrested him on the spot. 

Buried in Mr. Kim’s luggage were no state secrets or military plans, but arguably something equally vital to Korea’s national security: manufacturing data for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) semiconductors.

Israel One-ups Ukraine: As if to mimic Ukraine’s spectacular June 1 drone attack on Russian warplanes from trucks inside the country, Israeli commandos slipped weapons inside Iran that, based on exquisite intelligence-gathering, and in concert with devastating air strikes, assaulted strategic targets and wiped out virtually all of the regime’s top military commanders. "We established a drone base inside Iran, and at zero hour, Mossad operatives retrieved them from hiding spots,” an Israeli official told Fox News. “We placed precision missiles on numerous vehicles and embedded additional missiles throughout the country, hidden inside rocks. We activated this entire array in precise coordination with the Israeli air force." The masterful Ukrainian, and now Israeli ops, should be a wake-up call for U.S. defense officials,  Sen. Mark Warner,  ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told our Michael Isikoff back on June 5: A U.S. adversary might well try the same here.

Tulsi, Tulsi, Tulsi:  The irrepressible director of national intelligence is not shying away from the spotlight in the wake of yet more alarming revelations that might have already destroyed the career of a more traditional intelligence chief—to wit, her efforts to put a spy inside the ODNI’s Inspector General’s office, this following reports of her and her staff trying to manipulate intelligence on Venezuela to put it in line with Trump’s false “invasion” claims. Senior Democrats loudly complained, to no avail.  Now, this week Gabbard made and distributed  a weird video warning that  “the political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers."

We guess the Russia-friendly DNI was referring to pro-Ukraine Democrats (and a few Republicans). In any event, it was too much for even some Republicans. “She obviously needs to change her meds,” cracked Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking late Thursday shortly after Israel began its attack on Iran, claimed that in recent months Tehran had taken unprecedented “steps to weaponize” its large stockpile of enriched uranium. This new development, he said, indicated  Iran was developing a nuclear weapon that could be ready for use against the Jewish state "in a matter of months," thus compelling  Israel to strike “preemptively.” 

But Susan Miller, a recently retired senior CIA official who served as the agency’s station chief in Israel, said Friday her soundings of current intelligence officials revealed no change in the U.S. intelligence community’s  long standing threat assessment that Iran is not making a dash for a nuclear weapon despite its uranium enrichment.

“They are not developing a bomb right now,” Miller told SpyTalk in a text.

Miller’s assessment mirrored that of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard back in March.

JERUSALEM (AP) 8 pm EDT Thursday — Israel attacked Iran’s capital early Friday, with explosions booming across Tehran as Israel said it targeted nuclear and military sites.

Earlier today, SpyTalk reported:

More than two decades after the United States invaded Iraq on the basis of phony evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the gro…

Sadly, with President Trump distracted by tariff swats, deporting immigrants and crushing dissent, he seems to have taken his eyes off taking Greenland.  His birthday bash with Army tanks and guns rolling through Washington on Saturday may be a practice run, but as a former top Deep State operative, I’m here to tell him there’s an easier, more peaceful way to take the island: covert action—the kind of stuff I spent decades doing in the CIA.

Yes, a military assault would be quicker and more direct. It would stand a greater chance of success since Greenland has only 55,000 people, no military and we already have a military base there. It would also be more expensive (then again, the military-industrial complex can always use the work). But our military is otherwise occupied in hot spots like California and D.C. They’ve also got invasions of Canada and Mexico to prepare for.

The main goal of the CA (cool CIA lingo) would be to create the conditions whereby Greenlanders request U.S. intervention or annexation. Our usual preferred method—a military coup followed by a brutal dictatorship—is a nonstarter since there is no military in Greenland to work with, and clandestinely creating a military that we could later subvert would take far too long.

So we go to work on Greenland’s people, who don’t fully grasp how unhappy they are. The first step would be to divide them by generating fear, anger, and hatred. A divided society can be manipulated more easily and rendered ineffective, turning on itself and doing our work for us. 

IN THE FALL OF 1951, a new book scandalized one of the country’s most elite universities and made its brash young author, William F. Buckley, Jr.,  an instant celebrity. God and Man at Yale was Buckley’s audacious debut, a withering attack on his alma mater for  supposedly indoctrinating its students with liberal nostrums taught by atheist professors who ridiculed Christianity.

There were ferocious counter attacks from inside academia. “A twisted, ignorant young man,” McGeorge Bundy, then a Harvard professor, later President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor, wrote of Buckley in a review in The Atlantic magazine. Life magazine was somewhat more charitable, likening him to “the brat who comes to the party and tells the guests that their birthday boy is secretly a drug addict.”  

But for all the attention it got, helping to propel God and Man at Yale on to the best-seller lists, the press coverage  left out one highly pertinent detail about this verbose new conservative author.  At  the time of the publication of his book, Buckley was secretly on the payroll of the CIA, an undercover officer working out of the agency’s Mexico City station, posing as a businessman trying to break into the import-export trade under the alias “Geoffrey T. Bolgiano.” 

LITTLE MOSSAD: CIA veterans were kvelling over the operation Ukrainian intelligence managed to pull off at multiple sites deep inside Russia that took out a sizable chunk of the Kremlin’s fleet of strategic nuclear bombers. “​​The Little Mossad is growing up fast,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA senior operations officer who served in counterterrorism roles in the Middle East, wrote on X.

A year and a half in the making, the drone attack on June 1, dubbed "Operation Spider Web,” earned massive respect from within global intel circles for Ukraine’s security service, the SBU. “The SBU has transformed during the three-year war into the sharp tip of Ukraine’s spear after decades of being maligned as corrupt, shot through with traitors and more focused on chasing political opponents than security threats,” the Wall Street Journal reported.  Deploying drones concealed in trucks to strike four Russian airfields, the attack damaged 41 nuclear bombers and other surveillance aircraft, the SBU said.

Mike Baker, a former CIA covert operations officer, called it “brilliant … on par with Hezbollah pager operation.” Speaking on Fox News, Baker added, “This has shaken Putin more than anything.” Another CIA ops officer and prolific Substacker, Michael Sellers, also couldn’t hold back: “This was truly a beautiful operation, and the timing was perfect.”  More could be coming. “The front line inside Ukraine will remain a hellscape of drones and artillery,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote. “But covert operations could expand into a ‘dirty war’ beyond the front, with more targeted killings, sabotage, and strikes on countries that supply arms to Ukraine and Russia, respectively.”

UPDATED

Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a new interview that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard should resign and her office subjected to oversight hear…

HEGSETH LEAKS, KEYSTONE COPS EDITION: The White House isn’t happy with a Pentagon leak investigation after an advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed an aide had been outed by a National Security Agency wiretap. Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Hegseth, was initially blamed for the leak of an allegedly Top Secret document to a reporter that outlined options for the U.S. military to retake the Panama Canal. (Caldwell and two other senior aides were fired in a purge last month.) According to The Guardian, Tim Parlatore, Hegseth’s attorney and adviser who was overseeing the leak investigation, suggested that there had been a warrantless wiretap on Caldwell’s phone, a claim that alarmed White House aides because it would almost certainly have been illegal and a much bigger scandal than the leak. But White House aides later found the claim wasn’t valid and concluded that Parlatore fed them dubious information. The lawyer then denied having told anyone about an illegal NSA wiretap himself and maintained that any information he had was passed on to him by others at the Pentagon.

Phew. One Trump adviser recently told Hegseth that he did not think Caldwell – or any of the fired aides – had leaked anything, and that he suspected the investigation had been used to get rid of aides involved in the infighting with his first chief of staff.

RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA: A freshly declassified FBI document purports to show that Nellie Ohr, a researcher for Fusion GPS, the Washington, D.C.-based research firm funded by the DNC and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign to investigate candidate Donald Trump’s connections with Russians, lied to Congress about her private communication with her Justice Department spouse without facing consequences. That’s according to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who obtained the document.

In the fall of 2021, the CIA sent a highly unusual top secret cable to its officers around the globe. The agency had been plagued by compromises and sloppy tradecraft, resulting in serious setbacks in some overseas missions, the cable explained. In an extraordinary admission, it even revealed the specific number of agen…