SpyTalk

I could go on and on and on about the two cringeworthy speeches the President of the United States gave to military audiences over the weekend, the first to West Point cadets that rambled on about drag shows and “trophy wives,” the second today at Arlington National Cemetery where, steps from the grave o…

Slaughter on 17th Street: The White House National Security Council, which lost its director and deputy director over the Signalgate scandal and pressure from far right activist Laura Loomer, shed half its remaining 350 staff members in a mass eviction on Friday. “President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have orchestrated a vast restructuring of the National Security Council, reducing its size and transferring many of its powers to the State and Defense departments,” Axios first reported late Friday afternoon, shortly after “dozens” of employees in the Eisenhower Executive Offive Building (formerly the Old Executive Office Buillding) adjacent to the White House got notices they were put on administrative leave. “The staff sent home included both career officials who were detailed to the NSC and some political appointees,” The Washington Post reported. CNN reported employees were given 30 minutes to clean out their desks. Two new deputy national security advisers have been appointed, The Post said: Andy Baker, who has been national security adviser to Vice President JD Vance, and Robert Gabriel, a policy adviser to Trump.

Michael Ledeen, the controversial national security journalist, scholar and schemer who died at age 83 on May 17 from complications following a stroke, played a significant covert role leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as other productions of false intelligence for political ends.

Ledeen was featured…

It was an email guaranteed to grab my attention. 

“A former CIA Director needs you to read this,” read the subject line. I hastily clicked it open, of course, and discovered, much to my surprise, I was being given “exclusive access” to a “Top Secret memo.” A reporter’s dream,  even if, as I was instructed, all this was being shared on a “strictly off the record” basis.

Alas, the memo didn’t contain any national security secrets. Instead, it was a breathless fundraising pitch from Mike Pompeo, CIA director and secretary of state in Donald Trump’s first term, asking recipients to fork over money to Champion American Values, his political action committee, to help defeat Democrats in next year’s congressional elections. 

News that DNI Tulsi Gabbard had fired two senior intelligence officials because their findings on Venezuela had displeased her sent me scurrying for the origin of the phrase, “Don’t kill the messenger.“

Turns out there are lots of strands to its provenance, but one I’m partial to was the story told by Plutarch about an ancient Armenian general, Tigranes, who so disliked a messenger’s word that a Roman general was close on his heels that “he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man dared to bring further information.” The ensuing battle did not go well for the Armenian.

Gabbard’s dismissals of Mike Collins, who was the acting head of the National Intelligence Council, and Maria Langan-Riekhof, a career senior CIA and NIC intelligence analyst, was merely a virtual beheading, Washington-style.  But her imperious act was an unmistakable warning to other top intelligence professionals not to “dare”—quoting Plutarch here—to cross her with information that contradicts the Trump administration’s narrative, however false, on any subject related to national security. Similar dismissals have been carried out at the CIA.

Certainly to many outsiders, the episode was no more than a bureaucratic kerfuffle in a Washington teacup—merely a routine demonstration that, as partisans of all stripes like to say, “elections have consequences.” The public’s attention quickly moved on to other Trump amusements, like his gleeful acceptance of an old 747 from Qatar’s clever monarch.

But fence sitters on Trump’s foreign and national security policies need reminding that skewering intelligence to fit an administration’s story can have fatal consequences, measured in staggering body counts, as well as unexpected,  devastating reversals of fortune.

TULSI’S GAMBIT TO SAVE ODNI: This week brought a flurry of sudden firings and relocations at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, now helmed by former Hawaii Democrat-turned-Trump loyalist Tulsi Gabbard. Officially, it’s all about “deep state leaks” and “politicization,” but let’s be real—that’s just cover. What’s actually happening? Gabbard is in full turf-defense mode, trying to save her office (and her team) as Trump openly toys with scrapping ODNI altogether. According to The New York Times, the president has “openly mused” about axing the post-9/11-era agency, long seen as a bureaucratic fifth wheel in the 18-agency intel tractor. Gabbard, reportedly in direct talks with Trump, is now scrambling to rebrand and restructure ODNI. And some scramble it is. 

THE PURGE: Nothing pleases the boss like frog marching members of the “deep state” out of the building. And that’s what Gabbard virtually did this week by firing the top officials running the National Intelligence Council because she didn’t like their facts. Mike Collins, the acting NIC chair and China expert, and his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof, were both shown the door Tuesday, accused of “politicizing intelligence.” 

A key House Democrat, voicing mounting frustrations  within the U.S. intelligence community, decried President Trump’s plans to accept a $400 million jumbo jet from Qatar  as a  potential counter-intelligence nightmare and warned that the recent firing of two top officials was tantamount to “cutting the heart”…

If books could circulate in Technicolor, the cover of James C. Lawler’s new spy thriller, The Traitor’s Tale, would be flashing vivid and bright. Even before the opening chapter, two dozen prominent former agency officials and lifelong students of espionage offer glowing endorsements that go beyond what a single reviewer can say. Their verdict: Read this Book.

Lawler, who proudly embraces his nickname in the spy trade, “Mad Dog,” is a celebrated former CIA operations officer who once specialized in recruiting foreign spies and is largely credited with bringing down A.Q. Khan’s nuclear smuggling network. His novel is a sometimes brutal love letter to spycraft. It is also red meat for spy story junkies, an homage to denizens of the intelligence agencies and an x-ray of the business and people who work there—so much so that a brace of his former colleagues is gushing with praise and nostalgia. They want to join in and go back there with him to one of the most painful episodes in his long CIA career. For the rest of us, it is a signal that The Traitor's Tale is as real as it can get.

TARGET: GREENLAND: Yes, the giant ice cube with more reindeer than people is now a top-tier U.S. intelligence priority.

No, it’s not the plot of a Hollywood B-movie. The Wall Street Journal reported that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a classified “collection-emphasis message” to U.S. intel chiefs, asking them to look up anyone in Greenland who might be open to Trump’s strange obsession with the frigid island. This will sound familiar to Iran and Guatemala, which suffered White House-directed CIA coups in the 1950s. “The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island,” the Journal said, which include taking it over and extracting valuable minerals. Reuters scooped Friday that Trump officials are considering offering Greenlanders an affiliation like Micronesia has with the U.S.

A newly declassified U.S. intelligence memo directly contradicts public comments by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about supposed links between the Venezuelan government and the Tren de Aragua criminal gang while undercutting  positions the Trump administration has repeatedly taken in the courts to justify its mass deportation of gang members.