SpyTalk

The dirty little secret about so-called “true” spy stories is that much of them is not true. “Authors just pull stuff out of their ass iand put it on paper, and readers don’t know any different,” one former senior CIA operations officer recently lamented to me. A recent tendency to use the lens of the present to judge the past according to current fads has not helped.

Former diplomat John Brady Kiesling put it a tad more elegantly in a 2014 book, observing that “the blank spaces of redacted CIA documents are routinely filled in by imaginative historians with every crime imaginable.” Secrecy and a dearth of sources lead to many liberties being taken.

I recently flipped open a book by a renowned spy author and found five factual errors and one outlandish speculation in a single paragraph.

Thankfully, The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians, is not one of those books. With meticulous precision, author Johan Wennström has pieced together an important chapter of Cold War history, melding archival research and interviews to produce an account in which every fact is backed up. The result is a dense, but fascinating read that is all the more riveting because it’s true. It never loses sight of the human element, treating readers to a rich cast of ordinary heroes.

When Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels launched an offensive along the country’s Red Sea coast earlier this month, the government’s Saudi-aligned forces were taken by surprise. As the Yemeni defenders fell back and the Houthis closed in on the western port city of Mokha, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman placed two urgent calls to Donald Trump, pleading for U.S. air strikes to blunt the rebel’s advance. But the president, wary of opening a second front in his war against Iran, refused and told the Saudi leader to order his own air force into the fray. Trump did, however, offer to beef up the U.S.-Saudi intelligence cell already in the country.

But as the fighting intensified, Saudi warplanes—the centerpiece of the kingdom’s $174 billion-purchase of U.S. weaponry over the past two years—never showed up. Over the next few days, the Houthis captured Mokha and swept farther down the coast to seize their most strategic prize—the Bab el Mandeb Strait at the southern entrance of the Red Sea. And so now, from the rocky outcropping of Perim Island in the middle of the narrow waterway, Houthi artillery has choked off the only alternative the Saudis have had, beyond the blocked Strait of Hormuz, for exporting its oil, the lifeline of its—and much of the world’s—economy.

The surprise, speed and success of the Houthi offensive has raised questions about the degree to which the U.S. and Saudis were providing intelligence to Yemeni government forces in the weeks and months before the fighting began. According to the Pentagon, the strengthened U.S.-Saudi intelligence cell now numbers some 200 American military and intelligence personnel working with their Saudi counterparts in Riyadh, mostly on targeting.

As if Israel did not already have to contend with war on several fronts, and as it struggles—and apparently does not want to end those conflicts and other military confrontations—the Israeli government and its military chief have decided to open yet another front.

This time, though, the targets aren’t Iran or its Islamic proxies. Its enemies are two young Israeli filmmakers, Yuval Avraham and Rachel Szor, co-directors of a controversial documentary called “NAZA”— the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage.” The film, which last week won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and received a 25-minute standing ovation from the audience, portrays alleged war crimes committed by the Israeli Defense Force during the war in Gaza.

The film features some two dozen soldiers and officers from the elite military electronic intelligence Unit 8200, appearing in shadow and speaking anonymously. They describe the IDF’s use of an artificial-intelligence system known as “Lavender” to identify and kill Hamas operatives at various levels of the organization, while causing the deaths of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of innocent civilians as collateral damage.

Lavender, according to the film and an April, 2024 story in The Guardian that cited Avraham as the first journalist to reveal it, is an AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets in Gaza, based on their apparent links to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

However, it was not a “killer robot” that independently decided who to bomb. According to the investigation, Lavender generated or flagged lists of people considered suspects, while the operational decision to strike was supposed to remain in human hands. It’s not clear, however, that it did.

The screening of the film, produced by The Guardian, which has not yet been released to the public worldwide and will probably not be screened in Israel, has caused an enormous uproar back home.

The plan was diabolically audacious: In the summer of 1976 Chile’s secret police sent assassins to carry out a car-bomb murder in down…

Testing, Testing: As of Friday night the Trump administration still had nothing to say about Vladimir Putin’s escalation of so-called hybrid war attacks on European states, which included a recent drone strike on a Ukrainian train headed for Poland that came close to killing former U.K. PM Boris Johnson and former CIA Director David Petraeus. They weren’t Putin’s targets, said former CIA executive Glenn Corn, who was accompanying Petraeus. The attack was “intended to send a strong message: We don’t want you coming to Ukraine. This is our sphere of influence. This is a warning.” The strike was preceded only days earlier by Russian drones threatening aircraft carrying Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, including during flights over Moldova, a constant target of Russian subversion. (Washington Post, TimesNow) Meanwhile, it was learned by German broadcaster Deutsche Welle that a Cuban exile living in Russia “lured multiple people into carrying out sabotage for Russia in at least four EU countries.” DW also reported this week that a 57-year-old Berlin businesswoman who “chaired a lobbying association, giving her extensive contacts in military and political circles,” was arrested in January on charges of spying for Russia.

Target USA: The Justice Department announced charges Tuesday against five suspected Russian intelligence operatives for allegedly plotting attacks against the Kremlin’s perceived enemies around the world, including the murder-for-hire of “a prominent Russian dissident in Washington, D.C.” The “global assassination network,” which was mainly targeting civilian and military targets allies of Ukraine in Europe, was aimed at causing “destruction and mayhem around the world.” (NPR) (NBC)

Wedding Bills: “Who is Umar Kremlev, who paid for part of Donald Trump Jr’s wedding?” Puck’s excellent Russia hand Julia Ioffe took a deep dive this week on Kremlev, who Don Jr. and his socialite bride Bettina Anderson called just “a dear friend” after the financial arrangement was outed by ProPublica on Monday. “Turns out, he’s the business front of Vladimir Putin’s chief body guard, one of the most powerful men in Russia,” Ioffe wrote. “That’s about as close as it gets.” But she’s got much, much more.

The scene at a U.S. military base in Anchorage, Alaska last year is barely remembered today, but it remains illustrative of one of the confounding mysteries of Donald Trump’s presidency: How to explain his coziness with Vladimir Putin?

Trump had invited Putin to Alaska last summer after b…

Counterterrorism Cuts: “Reassigning seasoned counterterrorism investigators to immigration enforcement degrades post-9/11 threat coverage in ways that will only become visible after a missed plot,” concludes IC Brief, a public-facing independent intelligence analysis site. “Reallocating resources toward China, Russia and border/narco-trafficking priorit…

A key U.S. senator called for the Saudi government to “come clean” about its ties to the 9/11 terror attacks and move to promptly settle a lawsuit brought by the families of the victims, suggesting that congressional approval of a new nuclear agreement and other measures of interest to Riyadh could hang in the balance.

“I’ve made this argument face to face to Saudi officials at the highest level that they should simply do the right thing — put 9/11 behind them and do justice for the 9/11 families,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal at the Soufan Center Global Summit on Terrorism and Political Violence, an event across the street from ground zero timed to commemorate this week’s 25th anniversary of Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. The Connecticut Democrat is the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

“The Saudi government now wants a defense pact with the United States,” Blumenthal added. “It wants a nuclear energy agreement with us. I think I would oppose, or at least I question very seriously, whether there should be those kinds of agreements unless there is a resolution of the claims” made by the 9/11 families.

Most anybody who was sentient on Sept.11, 2001 has clear memories of the exact moment when they heard about or saw images of the attacks, first on the North tower of the World Trade Center, then the South, then the plane that plowed into the Pentagon, and finally, United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt. CIA officers, of course, had special reasons to react in shock and anger, but also dismay, because many had been warning for weeks that Osama Bin Laden was “determined” to strike in the U.S.. Some also worried about the fate of their colleagues on the 25th floor of Tower 7, which housed the agency’s New York office, now afire from the airliner crashes and collapses of the north and south towers. (All got out alive.)

At headquarters, and at far flung overseas posts, CIA officers cast off their shock and dismay and swung into action, knowing they were in the first minutes of a new and probably very long war.

Here are their stories, arranged by name in alphabetical order. You can click on their names for their bios.

Joseph Augustyn

I remember 9/11 as if it were yesterday. Many of us do.

I was Director of NROC [the National Resettlement Operations Center, which handles defectors] that morning, hosting an in-house breakfast in our conference room for a departing NROC officer. Like many of us, we saw on tv the strike on the first tower, and we all (about 30 of us), froze in place wondering what that was all about. Then watching the second plane hit the second tower, we dispersed quickly in absolute shocking silence to our individual offices, including me to mine with my NROC lawyer to watch in horror the unfolding events and trying to figure out what we in our NROC outbuilding [in Tyson’s Corner, Va. could do]. We reviewed quickly whether any of our recent defectors might have any intelligence or clue about what was going on, and then got a call from the White House asking if NROC had any suitable and available safe houses in the area for possible use by the First Family in case of evacuation. I immediately dispersed two officers to “get one ready,” although there turned out to be no need. This was the same day I was scheduled to take a plane South to visit with a few resettlement cases which, needless to say, was cancelled. We waited and watched in horror the rest of that day, many of us wanting to return to HQs to lend any assistance we could…which happened in the days following.

Robert Baer

I was on Capitol Hill and could see smoke from Pentagon. And of course I couldn’t miss the F-16’s buzzing Washington. Me being me, I jumped to the totally wrong conclusion that with four planes commandeered someone with battlefield experience had to be behind it—I don’t know, maybe Imad Mughniyah. But what wasn’t on my bingo card was a Saudi contractor living in San Diego who’d be arrested in Birmingham [England] with calculations for a plane to hit a target on the horizon and hanging out with Anwar Al-Awlaki playing jihad. It does makes me wonder what I got out of Arabic and spending the bulk of my working life trying to figure out the Middle East.

Gina Bennett

I was working in the main CTC vault where Alec Station was situated at headquarters on 9/11 and remember the feeling of knowing immediately when the FAA officer circulated the information about the first plane. We had been warning for months, and I think we all just knew. But the one memory that stands out the most to me was seeing colleagues, who earlier that morning had still believed we were over-warning about al-Qa’ida, be the first to volunteer to help after being instructed to evacuate the building for safety. It meant a lot to us.

Remember when you went back to school and you had to write a report on “What I did on my summer vacation”?

I’m not sure they do that now. I hear that they don’t even teach writing with pencils anymore.

Whatever, here’s mine. I had such a strange encounter on my week at the beach in Rhode Islan…