SpyTalk

UPDATED: If you’re looking for job security, don’t apply for the job on the White House National Security Council in a Trump administration. Michael Waltz is learning that the hard way.

Every one of Donald Trump’s national security advisers has lasted less than 18 months in office, with Michael Flynn, the president’s first NSA in 2017, setting the brevity record of three weeks in the West Wing following the discovery of his backchannel contacts with Russia’s ambassador in Washington. John Bolton lasted the longest—17 months in 2018-2019.

Now, with every day’s drip, drip, drip of new revelations of astounding security lapses by top Trump administration national security officials, Waltz,  too, seems to have one foot out the door.

The asp in Waltz’s pants leg was delivered Wednesday by Laura Loomer, a far right lunatic who has won Trump’s favor even though she’s been judged too extreme by fellow conspiracy mongers.  Loomer actually got an invite to the Oval Office, once a privileged sanctuary of statecraft, from the president himself. There, according to a detailed account by the New York Times, Loomer “excoriated” various National Security Council officials as Trump, Vice President JD Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles, Sergio Gor, the director of the Presidential Personnel Office and Waltz himself looked on. Today, six of the aides were fired, the Times said, but Waltz was spared, not because Trump had confidence in him, but because Trump wanted to avoid the “bad publicity” of multiple firings “that plagued his first term,” officials said.

Three of the fired, according to CNN, were Brian Walsh, the NSC’s senior director for intelligence; Thomas Boodry, senior director for legislative affairs; and David Feith, another senior director.  The Times said Maggie Dougherty, the senior director for international organizations, was also shown the door. One of Loomer’s top targets, Deputy National Security Adviser Alex Wong, survived the bloodletting, according to reports.

Loomer, who has called the 9/11 terrorist attack “an inside job,” among other hallucinations, took indirect credit.

After the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the agency was left blind on the communist controlled island, its counter-revolutionary spies and paramilitaries either killed or rounded up, interrogated and imprisoned. So the CIA turned to Israel’s Mossad to provide it with detailed intelligence reports on the activities of Soviet personnel there, according to a newly declassified document released as part of the Trump administration’s disclosure of materials related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

In behind-closed-doors congressional testimony in June 1975, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, described how Israel’s Mossad soon dispatched one of its Russian-speaking operatives to Israel’s embassy in Havana with permission to spy for the CIA under Israeli diplomatic cover.

“He would go to a Hungarian restaurant where the Soviet officers would go,” Angleton told Senate investigators, according to portions of his testimony that were declassified last month. “And he would spot one of the waiters or a head waiter who was Jewish, and it wouldn’t be long before [the waiter] would say, ‘you are from the Israeli embassy,’ and pretty soon one thing led to another. His production was without question the greatest production there was.”

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

SIGNALGATE:  By now, you all know the story: Senior White House and cabinet officials discussed plans for an airstrike on Yemen via the Signal messaging app, and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz mistakenly invited a journalist to the party. (If not, catch up with Spy Talk’s Jeff Stein and Jonathan Broder’s piece on this epic screwup.) 

The operating principle for the Trump administration’s hamfisted response to Signalgate was an old saw of the intelligence trade: Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations. "There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal chat,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asserted to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. “It wasn’t classified information,” President Trump said. And so on.

And boy, did that strategy backfire. Accused of propagating a “hoax” and with nobody telling him there were any secrets in the text, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, released the whole thing. Israel was not pleased. Despite what the president and his team were saying, Israel had a secret it expected would be kept, well, secret.

Late last October, U.S. national security officials confirmed an alarming development: A Chinese hacker operation known as Salt Typhoon had targeted the cell phones of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, his runni…

William D. Murray, a storied former senior CIA operations official, keeps in touch with his old outfit, which has called him in from time to time over the many years since he’s been retired for a consult (although not recently). During a visit about a year or so ago, he recalled in a conversation with me today, he was passing through the security portal when a guard stopped him. The Fitbit on his wrist, he was told, had to go.

Right. It was a simple oversight. He knew the drill, which had been in place for decades: “Anything that emits or accepts electronic signals is forbidden inside the building,” he said. So he tramped back out to the parking lot and left it in his car. Anyone who’s ever visited the CIA, not to mention its employees, knows this.

So he had a simple question today: “Why is the director of the CIA using a cell phone at CIA headquarters?” And not just John Ratcliffe, he said. What about the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard? Or Pete Hegseth, or Mike Waltz—or any of the other officials in on the now infamous Signal chat about an impending air attack on the Iran-backed Houthis rebels in Yemen. “Everyone’s talking about Signal, but I haven’t seen anything about the phones themselves,” he said.

(The CIA public affairs office wasn’t anwering their phones this afternoon—or yesterday, either, for that matter.)

BREAKING: “Nothing classified” in that Signal chat? A “hoax”? Ok then, says The Atlantic—here’s the whole unredacted discussion. Judge for yourselves.

Poor Pete Hegseth. He got run over Tuesday by the clown car packed with Trump’s comical national security team, which would be funny, as they say, if it weren’t so serious. 

Two of the Trump administration’…

Desperate for some compelling entertainment to escape the latest bad news,  I picked up my clicker the other night and stumbled upon an old favorite, Breach, the masterful dramatization of the FBI’s desperate hunt for a Russian spy in its ranks. 

The mole turned out to be Robert Hanssen, a disgruntled  FBI computer systems whiz. Hanssen was “a complex man…a bundle of contradictions,” as the late espionage journalist David Wise described him. He was a good father and husband and an extremely devout Catholic, for example—all the while pursuing a secret relationship with a stripper and making hidden-camera sex videos of him and his wife that he shared with a friend. And even as Hanssen honestly applied his computer skills to FBI investigations and peppered superiors with suggestions for improvements in the system, he was helping the KGB round up several of the CIA’s Russian spies. Arrested in February 2001, Hanssen would spend the last 21 years of life in solitary confinement in the Florence Supermax in Colorado. 

Hanssen’s betrayal “doesn't make sense to any of us because it's not something any of us would partake in,” Michael T. Rochford, a top FBI counterespionage agent on the case, said during a panel discussion on the case years later. Getting “inside the head of a spy [is] like trying to get inside the head of a serial killer… It's hard for me to figure. I can't walk in those shoes.”

I’ve heard nearly identical thoughts recently while asking around about the possibility that one or more of the untold thousands of CIA, FBI, ODNI, Justice Department, Pentagon, military and other national security employees fired in the Trump-Musk purges could be tempted to sell secrets to the Russians, the Chinese or another adversary, especially if they were already struggling financially.

Some just can’t imagine it. Wiser heads can.

JFK FILES: The first tranche of some nearly 80,000 pages of documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy hastily dumped online this week revealed a handful of old secrets but created a fresh hell for those caught in the chaos of unchecked Trumpian “transparency.”

President Trump’s surprise announcement on Monday that the documents would be released the next day set off a scramble by officials to review the files for any potential harm. Not surprisingly, a lot was missed. The Washington Post discovered that Social Security numbers and other private information of more than 200 former congressional staffers and others had been made public. (One was former Trump lawyer Joseph DiGenova, who in the 1970s had investigated intelligence abuses for the House.) “Social Security numbers, addresses, full names: The only thing that wasn’t in the JFK papers was who killed JFK,” comedian Jordan Klepper quipped on The Daily Show.

Some of the most eagerly anticipated documents turned out to be complete duds.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH there is a mystical dimension where CIA operations officers work their recruitment magic on foreign adversaries while walking a swaying tightrope far above an abyss filled not only with America’s deadliest enemies but all too frequently with the snapping jaws of bilious bureaucrats and obstructionists whose primary tal…

On a day with Trump-Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, NATO freaking, Germany rearming and much more exploding on our watefront, we had to leave it to others for a first swipe at the avalanche of JFK documents released Wednesday.

Here are the leading headlines so far:

“JFK assassination files released, sending history buffs hunting for new clues” Associated Pr…