SpyTalk

Yes, Virginia, we do take time off—and this is one of them.

Due to the press of events since late February, I’d pretty much given up my annual late summer truck north to my ancestral home of sorts in Rhode Island. I’d lived in the Ocean State for only two years as a kid in the late 1950s, but I’d come back constantly over the…

In 1961, eight years before Slaughterhouse-Five made him famous, Kurt Vonnegut published Mother Night, a novel about fascism, complicity, and the lies people tell themselves in order to keep going.

I came to Vonnegut through Slaughterhouse-Five, like everyone else in my generation. I went back to Mother Night recently, expecting another war novel. It isn’t one, really. It’s set in the wake of World War Two but it’s really about a man who spent his life explaining himself, and it reads like it was written last year. In a time of war and intense political strife, what moral choices do we make and why?

This is early Vonnegut, and the closest he came to writing a straight spy novel, though it’s also a love story. None of the science fiction that was the author’s hallmark here, just a spy sitting in an Israeli jail cell, with Vonnegut fashioning himself as the editor of his memoir. At the same time, he poses a question that a double agent must ask: If the mask never comes off, is it really a mask?

Mother Night is the fictional memoir of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American playwright in Berlin who spent the war broadcasting vile propaganda into Europe for the Third Reich. Secretly, at the same time, in the “mannerisms, pauses, emphases, coughs, seeming stumbles in certain key sentences” of the broadcasts, Campbell transmits coded intelligence to the Allies.

If you’re a journalist these days and you get a call from the FBI, as I did the other day, your first instinct is to be on guard.

Did the bureau want to grill me as part of a leak investigation? Seize my phone (as it noto…

The unannounced flight of CIA Director John Radcliffe has stirred up a lot of fervid speculation over the reasons for the trip.

The latest comes mainly from the Wall Street Journal and Politico, the former of which declaring that “the surprise visit by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, according to people briefed on the visit.”

The trip “followed new U.S. intelligence assessments, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, that Russian president Vladimir Putin could try to test the resolve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with a limited assault on an Allied country in the next few years,” the paper added.

Politico also cited two anonymous “people familiar with the matter” as saying Ratcliffe “warned Russian officials in Moscow this week not to escalate conflict with America’s NATO allies, in particular Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in response to Moscow’s stalemated invasion of Ukraine.”

It added that Ratcliffe also used the trip to “press Russia to reduce military and economic support for Iran, according to one of those two people and a U.K. official with knowledge of the trip.”

Russia has reportedly aided Iran with satellite intelligence for its missile launches against U.S. and allied targets in the Middle East.

As controversy over the trip mounted Wednesday, President Trump said it was “sort of semi-routine, adding. “I hate to disappoint people…”

The Washington Post discovered Ratcliffe’s secret trip to Moscow by analyzing publicly available flight‑tracking data and geolocating social‑media video of a U.S. diplomatic motorcade in central Moscow.

Pam Am 103, Still: The trial of a former Libyan intelligence official charged in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland has been delayed because of “the discovery of new evidence that defense attorneys want to examine,” reported the A.P. Monday. “Jury selection was scheduled to begin Wednesday for the federal trial of Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi in Washington, D.C. His trial will be the first in the U.S. for the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing.” U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich’s order “didn’t specify the nature of the newly discovered evidence…Al-Marimi’s lawyers say prosecutors disclosed the new evidence to them on Saturday.”

Unsolved Mystery: The identity for the gunman (or gunmen) responsible for the Apr. 16, 2013 attack on PG&E’s Metcalf electrical substation,15 miles southeast of San Jose, remains a mystery—and foreshadows what could too easily happen should the U.S. face a well trained spec ops adversary, writes Christopher Cox in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Chilling: “[I]n the past decade, dozens of facilities — in Arkansas and Oregon, Florida and Washington — have been targeted, often using the same tactic as the one seen in 2013: puncturing the cooling system and letting the oil drain out,” Cox reports. Security at most stations remains lame. If saboteurs knocked out “nine total substations among” the three main U.S. power grids, they could “black out the entire United States.”

Gangs of New Russia: The Kremlin is “recruiting local gang members” to sabotage defence manufacturers across Europe “to test NATO’s resolve,” reports The Telegraph. “This week, Latvia detained three of its own nationals on suspicion of an arson attack against a drone manufacturer in neighbouring Estonia,” it said. “The attacks appear carefully calculated to fall just short of triggering Article 5, NATO’s mutual defence clause, intelligence officials believe.” Attacks have been reported in Poland. Russia has also been deploying so-called “hybrid warfare” to destabilize pro-E.U. Moldova.

The scoundrel of Kai Bird’s meticulous biography of Roy Cohn, the heavy-lidded villain of mid-20th-century America, is as much Donald Trump as Cohn.

Cohn died of AIDS 40 years ago, just after he was disbarred. That’s time enough for him to be fading into footnotes, despite his notoriety in the 1950s as chief counsel to Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Commie hunter.

But Cohn’s legacy lives on in Trump. Lessons learned: Always attack. Never apologize. Deny. Sue. Countersue. If you lose, declare victory. Keep your name in the news. Loyalty yes, integrity, fuggedaboutit.

Trump learned these dark virtues from Cohn along with a New York brassiness that made people overlook venality, a trick akin to The Big Lie. Both men had the attention hunger of psychic vampires.

There are few more enthusiastic evangelists for the promise of AI than Kai-Fu Lee. Suave and charming, with a taste for fine wine (and a Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon), Lee founded the Beijing-based Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital giant that is helping to finance some of China’s most innovative tech firms on everythi…

Rarely does one hear a discussion of the CIA, its fraught history, and its current challenges that’s altogether clear-heade…

IN THE END, IT WAS CARLOS THE JACKAL’S TESTICLES THAT DID HIM IN. Having boasted of bedding more than 400 women and killing 83 people by his own hand, he was suffering from a condition known as varicocele—“essentially a varicose vein in the scrotum,” as author Joby Warrick puts it. It was 1994, and the Venezuelan-born Marxist, anti-Semite champion of the Palestine cause and hired killer, age 44, had been given sanctuary by Sudan’s Islamist regime, which was also harboring Osama bin Laden.

Carlos’s Jordanian wife wanted a child, and his medical condition affected his sperm count, as well as his extra-curricular activities with other women. What Carlos didn’t know was that the CIA was tailing him. The routine procedure on his private parts provided the ideal opportunity to bring an end to his storied career as, in Warrick’s words, “the first of a breed of international super-terrorists, a larger-than-life outlaw whose deeds spanned four continents and captured the attention of the entire world.”

Israeli Plane Trick? It was a report from Israeli intelligence that prompted the Secret Service to persuade President Trump to ditch his tricked out Qatari-gifted 747 for the regular Air Force One and then secretly abandon that for yet another jet in Turkey, leaving Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, other White House staffers and the press corps to fly home on what became a decoy plane. But as it turned out, the CIA had “low confidence’ in the Iranian threat before Trump switched planes in Turkey, according to The Washington Post, which quoted a source saying that the warning fitted “a broader pattern of Israeli intelligence reporting that some officials see as designed as much to shape presidential decision-making as to inform it.”

Trump’s IRGC Back Channel: Since U.S. and Israeli warplanes targeted Iran’s civilian leadership for assassination in the opening days of the now six-month long war, the Trump administration has struggled to find somebody to talk to in Tehran. So they looked around and settled on Nechirvan Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region in Iraq, “who had something very few others do: the trust of both U.S. and IRGC leaders,” reports Trump telegrapher Barak Ravid at Axios.

Iran’s Secret Plan to Escalate the War: “Arab intelligence officials have picked up evidence—including communications between Iran and militia allies in countries such as Yemen and Iraq—of a strategic shift inside the country’s hard-line leadership to get their forces ready to widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S., officials familiar with the findings say. Alarming weaker Gulf countries like Kuwait, Iran’s leaders are increasingly talking about offensive operations on enemy territory.” (WSJ)

Disinfo on Iran Nuclear? An anonymous post on X in India in early August claiming Iran had gone nuclear and quoting its IRGC commander saying “his country would never give up its nuclear weapon ambitions as long as Israel and the United States possessed those weapons,” got traction in Washington—no matter that it was palpably untrue, reported the New York Times on Sunday.