SpyTalk

We’re back with another edition of The SpyTalk Week in Review podcast.

Jeff Stein and Michael Isikoff discuss the current state of national security, focusing on the Trump administration's impact on the intelligence community, Russia's ongoing influence in American politics, and recent developments regarding Venezuela and Iran. They also delve into personnel changes within the intelligence community and reflect on the historical legacy of Frank Wisner and CIA operations during the Cold War.

Takeaways

• The Trump administration has fundamentally altered the intelligence community's dynamics.

• Russia's interference in U.S. elections remains a significant concern.

• The appointment of individuals with ties to Russian propaganda raises questions about the DOJ's integrity.

• Venezuela's alleged threats to the U.S. are not supported by intelligence reports.

• Changes in intelligence personnel can shape U.S. foreign policy significantly.

• Frank Wisner played a crucial role in covert CIA operations during the Cold War.

• The CIA's historical actions have often been shrouded in secrecy and misinformation.

• Oversight of intelligence operations has become increasingly important in light of past abuses.

• The influence of foreign powers on U.S. politics is a persistent issue.

• The conversation highlights the need for transparency in intelligence operations.

INTEL LEAK ON IRAN ATTACK PLAN: The New York Times reported that Israel planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as next month, but was waved off by President Trump in recent weeks in favor of negotiating a deal with Tehran to limit its nuclear program. Israel, in coordination with American officials, considered several strike options against Iran in May, including an ambitious plan combining airstrikes and commando raids, but then shifted focus to a large-scale bombing campaign before calling the whole thing off. Israel was furious. Channel 12 quoted a senior Israeli security official as saying, “The heart of the secret with respect to Iran was leaked — the methods of operation, the timing, the coordination mechanisms, and the element of surprise. This does real harm to Israeli interests regarding Iran.”  The Kan public broadcaster reported that Israel believes the U.S. leaked the information in order to pressure Iran in the negotiations.

As a national security reporter for Newsweek in the 1990’s, Doug Waller figured he was perfectly positioned to cultivate a top CIA official who had just left the agency. His quarry was John Waller, who had spent years in the agency’s clandestine service specializing in Middle East affairs and later served as the CIA’s inspector general. Doug Waller was convinced the two were distantly related and that the presumed family connection just might help him unlock a goldmine of intelligence secrets. 

“Hey cousin,” he told John Waller after tracking him down in retirement. “Can we talk?” The CIA man was polite but wise to Doug’s gambit. “That’s not going to work,” he told him in so many words. True to his agency heritage, he gave up nothing.

The reporter, though, was undeterred and continued to pore through agency archives and memoirs to learn more about the covert machinations of his namesake. This month, it paid off—big time —with the release of his new book, The Determined Spy, a massive 645-page biography of Frank Wisner, the legendary CIA pioneer who oversaw secret operations in the heady days of the Cold War.

It’s an illuminating, action-packed account that chronicles multiple CIA adventures—and misadventures—around the globe, most notably the agency-instigated 1953 coup in Iran that toppled the democratically elected government of the country’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and solidified the shah’s autocratic hold on power, an act that continues to reverberate throughout the region to this day. 

How you feeling? I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember ever feeling so bludgeoned by events in America than the combined weight of Trump’s head-spinning rejection of every cardinal tenet of U.S. national security policies over the past three months.

As longtime SpyTalk readers know, we've always tried to avoid partisan politics here. We’ve knocke…

Just when you thought it couldn't get any crazier, it has. Not to beat an old and now tattered drum, but events in our corner of the national security world continue on their Alice-in-Wonderland, hallucinogenic path under the Trump administration, which has astoundingly switched sides in the 80-year struggle to contain first Soviet, now dictatorial, imp…

If history and tradition hold, U.S. and Iranian spies will be hard at work trying to crack the secrets of the other side’s diplomatic strategies during the nuclear talks set to open Saturday in Oman.  

Each side’s espionage operations will range from efforts to bug meeting places and hotel rooms, to eavesdropping on diplomats’ phones, to piercing coded messages between delegates and their ministries back home, to bribing restaurant waiters to report on loose talk over dinner out in cosmopolitan Muscat, the capital.

Nobody should be surprised by that, said two knowledgeable former senior U.S. officials.

“This is standard operating procedure,” said one, a longtime veteran of Middle East intelligence operations, speaking on terms of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject.  “And, you know, we do it with everybody,” he added.  

“I remember that we did this during the Panama Canal treaty negotiations,” he said. “We did it through a variety of Central America peace talks …We did it with the Russians all the time.”

Another former top intelligence official said the same, calling the talks “a spy versus spy kind of situation.”

President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to investigate two prominent former senior Homeland Security officials, saying they could be guilty of “treason” because of their criticism of him.

Trump also stripped Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs of their security clearances, although it was not clear if they maintained any. The order “also suspends any active security clearance held by individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania,” where Taylor is an adjunct professor, “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”

Likewise, the order also suspends security clearances held by associates of Krebs at SentinelOne, a California-based cyber security firm, where he is currently employed as the company’s chief intelligence and public policy officer.

Taylor, who served as chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, drew Trump’s wrath for writing a blistering New York Times Op-ed, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," and later a book, A Warning, both under the pen name “Anonymous," detailing his concerns about the president’s policies. The Op-ed unleashed a furious media campaign to identify him. After he surfaced in October. 2020, he became a prominent TV critic of Trump

“You can't have that happen,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, adding, “I think he's guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we'll find out.”

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The executive order called Taylor “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.”

Taylor responded on X (formerly Twitter): “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

SpyTalk editor-in-chief Jeff Stein and contributor Michael Isikoff discuss Laura Loomer's recent controversial visit to the White House, the subsequent purge of national security professionals, the implications of Signalgate, Elon Musk's growing influence and conflicts of interest, and the ongoing conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination. The conversation highlights the challenges facing the intelligence community and the political landscape in the U.S.

Welcome to SpyWeek, our weekly newsletter, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations.

LOOMERED: It’s our job here at SpyWeek to tell what happened in the intelligence world last week, but let’s pause for a minute to consider what didn’t happen. 

No one was fired for Signalgate. The staggering incompetence that Trump’s national security team displayed—planning an impending strike on Yemen on the Signal messaging app and mistakenly inviting a journalist to the chat—would have been met with swift consequences in any other White House. Indeed, in 2016, Republicans, including no less than future Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded the arrest of Hillary Clinton for conducting government business over her personal email server.  It’s not even a fireable offense in the Trump 2.0 administration. 

With the financial markets crashing, most people have already moved on. Steven Stebbins, the Defense Department’s Acting  Inspector General, opened an investigation into whether Hegseth shared classified information when he shared detailed information on imminent U.S. strikes, including what weapons would be used and when they would occur, via the Signal app.  But the White House declared that the case is now “closed.” Let’s see how long he lasts.

Over at the White House, the only one reportedly left on shaky ground by Signalgate was National Security Advisor Michael Waltz.

In June, 1964, a curious book was released contending that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated the previous fall by a monstrous conspiracy of government agents and reactionary zealots determined to prevent him from making peace with the Communist world.

At the time, the Warren Commission was still assembling its report concluding that  Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone gunman who killed the president from his perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. But the new book that summer, entitled Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? argued that Oswald was in fact a “FBI agent provocateur with a CIA background,” whose well-documented Marxist sympathies—his defection to the Soviet Union, his efforts to form a chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee—were all a ruse to hide the fact that the real assassins were “officials of the CIA and FBI,” along with a wealthy Texas oil man, H.L. Hunt.   

But the book, authored by a German communist named Joachim Joesten, didn’t  pop up out of nowhere. As was revealed years later, it was a classic Russian disinformation ploy, published by an obscure New York-based outfit, the “Liberty Book Club,” which had been bankrolled with about $107,000 from the KGB.