SpyTalk

For those of us who have long witnessed the story of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, the idea of making a film whose message sparks feelings of humanity and hope may seem like an impossible feat. Yet the new short documentary, Leaving Hotel California, directed by Dutch filmmakers Aybuke Demirel and Chimène de Jonge, does just that. Rather than a story laden solely with sadness and indignation, we have a compelling vignette whose lasting lesson is that even when the past is strewn with cruelty and injustice, the human spirit can overcome the searing scars of the past.

Since taking office as Mossad chief two months ago at the agency’s headquarters in Glilot, a few miles north of Tel Aviv, the newly appointed and inexperienced director, Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman, has dismissed three of the organization’s senior operatives.

At first glance, this may appear to be an internal Israeli affair. But it could have significant international ramifications, particularly for the Mossad’s relationship with the CIA.

Three weeks ago, Gofman met at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the agency’s senior officials responsible for the Near East Division, part of the Directorate of Operations.

According to Israeli sources, the meeting was warm and cordial, despite a language barrier. Gofman, who was born in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic of the former USSR and immigrated to Israel at the age of 13, does not speak English. He also has limited familiarity with American culture and politics.

Moscow Mule? FBI Director Kash Patel’s scheduled Moscow sojourn only weeks before the U.S. midterm elections has generated lots of questions, but none so provocative as one from prominent Kremlin commentator Vladimir Vasiliev, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who suggested the FSB may offer Patel dirt on Democrats. “It is assumed that Russia has some kind of kompromat on the Democrats, and it could be provided by us, in one form or another, to the American side,” Vasiliev told Moskovsky Komsomolets, known as MK, “a Russian outlet with a long history of publishing information and propaganda from the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service,” according to Kremlin watcher Olga Lautman. Vasiliev added that “Moscow might naturally ask, ‘What will we get in return?’” There’s much more on this worth your time at Lautman’s “Unmasking Russia” newsletter. Patel also took an underreported trip to Beijing late last month to forge FBI ties with Chinese law enforcement.

For a community that once prided itself on being quiet professionals, the Navy SEALs are hard to miss these days. Bookshelves groan under the weight of endless SEAL memoirs that have become a content farm for Hollywood blockbusters and TV streaming series. A number of SEAL veterans have also built second careers as podcast hosts, leadership consultants, Hollywood consultants, or pitchmen for supplements, energy drinks, and merchandise. Seven retired SEALs are current members of Congress, and others hold senior posts in the Trump administration.

Few other special operations communities behave this way. Only a handful of former Delta Force operators and Army Rangers have written books, and a few serve in Congress, but most keep quiet. No one hears from the operators in the Air Force’s special tactics squadron or those in secretive units with classified codenames, who are the true quiet professionals.

So what happened to the SEALs? The short answer is that the War on Terror happened, and they lost their way. The longer answer, laid out in journalist Matthew Cole’s 2022 book Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six, is that SEALs became completely unaccountable, leading some to believe, not without reason, that they could do whatever they wanted—on the battlefield and off.

Seldom do we get as detailed an account of a covert action as we do in this compelling new book on CIA and MI6 operations against communist Albania during the early years of the Cold War. It is not a pretty picture. Throughout the book, author Stephen Long more than justifies his claim that “the Albania operation was a bitter and wasteful encounter for all the parties involved.” The story is fascinating to read in much the same way that it is hard to look away from a car wreck.

For years, Long, a professor of International Studies at Xi’an-Jiaotang-Liverpool University in China, has been a trailblazer with his carefully revisionist research into the CIA and MI6 operations in Albania (codenamed BGFIEND and VALUABLE, respectively). His work has been greatly enabled by the discovery of a large quantity of CIA records about BGFIEND and his use of two substantial troves of interviews with participants done by others in the 1980s and 1990s. The two main myths he tackles in this culmination of his work are that these were failed attempts to overthrow the communist regime of Enver Hoxha, then in the Soviet orbit, and that those efforts were doomed by Kim Philby, a Soviet mole within MI6 and the most famous member of the Cambridge Five.

With regard to the first myth, Long tells us that the British launched VALUABLE in 1949 with no thought to regime change, merely as a response to Tirana’s support for communist insurgents in Greece. By contrast, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the covert action component of the newly established CIA, did want an operation to “pilot…covert action capabilities and the strategic viability of a rollback effort against communism in Eastern Europe.” However, the way OPC actually phrased BGFIEND’s objectives at its launch in 1949 was that it aimed “at placing the Soviet position in Albania under great strain,” and that, “if ultimately successful, [this] might result in the overthrow of Hoxha’s regime.”

When the CIA and MI6 learned of each other’s plans, they agreed to integrate them. The combined operation would pursue Britain’s limited aim and if that succeeded and the international conditions were favorable, they would move toward the American goal of overthrowing Hoxha. They never got there.

VALUABLE achieved its goals by early 1950, when Albania ended its support for the defeated insurgency in Greece. At this point, however, the Americans and the British agreed that ousting Hoxha might give the Soviets an excuse to overthrow Josip Tito in Yugoslavia, who was asserting his independence from Moscow. So, the CIA and MI6 settled for harassing the Albanian regime and testing out covert action tactics to be used elsewhere.

There’s theory, and practice. One theory is that frivolous law suits are easily dismissed. When you’re the victim of a flimsy defamation suit, however, the reality is that practice is hard. For an independent journalist, like so many of us today, it’s not easy at all.

So it began with me one day this past January, when a process server showed up on my fr…

Headhunters: Mossad and the CIA are “obsessed” with hunting down and killing Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. So says The Times of London.

Panetta on Iran War: The U.S. is locked into an “unwinnable war” with Iran that has no clear end, former CIA Director (and SecDef) Leon Panetta said. He compared the ongoing military operation to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Hill)

Eviction Notice: Acting DNI Bill Pulte is reportedly resigned to vacating his office, reports Politico. Pulte had asked Trump “to delay Clayton’s swearing-in, or at least [let him] stay in the job longer,” a White House official told Politico earlier in the week, “arguing his mission of majorly reshaping the agency had not yet come to a close.” Last week Pulte boasted about “executing a 5th and Near Final Round of TERMINATIONS” at ODNI, “an approximately 30% Staff Reduction from Weeks Ago.” Jay Clayton, whose DNI nomination was finally confirmed by the Senate after a contentious hearing that raised troubling questions about his fealty to Trump over the law, is planning to move in Monday.

In September, 2022, powerful underwater explosions blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that had been built to provide Russian gas to Germany in what’s been called the most massive act of industrial sabotage in history. But for years its origins were a mystery, spurring multiple conspiracy theories about who might have been responsible – from the CIA to the Russians themselves. In 2023, Bojan Pancevski , chief European correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, began breaking stories about the affair, and now he’s pulled them—and much more—together in a riveting new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, that identifies the culprits as a shadowy group of Ukrainian operatives which he dubs The Start Up, with loose ties to their embattled country’s military and intelligence services. In this week’s SpyTalk podcast, he talked to Jeff Stein and Michael Isikoff about what he discovered, what the CIA actually knew in advance about the operation, and what’s going on in an ongoing German police investigation that has charged a key perpetrator with war crimes. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Stein: Bojan Pancevski, welcome to Spy Talk. A reviewer for the New York Times called your book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, “a spectacular feat of investigative journalism built on your intimate access to the senior Ukrainian intelligence chiefs who say they hatched the idea.” Tell us all about this group of Ukrainian chiefs who you dubbed The Startup.

Pancevski: So the people I call The Startup are veterans of intelligence and counterintelligence work. Some of them have been around for 25 years. And others are soldiers and military officers who’ve been fighting against Russia since 2014, when Vladimir Putin first invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. And as soon as the full scale invasion was launched on their country in February 2022, they all joined the armed forces. They were fighting in the Battle of Kyiv for a month, the capital. So they were integrated into this elite unit of the Ukrainian special forces. And with that unit, they kind of carved up their fiefdom.

Stein: They were rogues, really.

Pancevski: Essentially, within the intelligence community, which is vast, you have groups of people and officials at a very senior level who are being sponsored or patronized by oligarchs, by business interests, by politicians, by political parties. These people are beneath the surface. And they form networks. So it’s not very unusual to have a group of people who are operating under the central command of the military but only to a certain point. There are moments when they do their own thing. And perhaps they don’t report everything they do. It’s a very difficult thing to explain to an American or a British person or a German person for that matter, where things are much more regulated.

Stein: I want to clear out some underbrush right away. The CIA was blamed for carrying out this operation. The Russians were blamed for carrying it out. There was a cast of characters blamed. You make an airtight case—and the Germans are prosecuting a case—that it was this group of Ukrainians, right? No question whatsoever.

Pancevski: That’s exactly right. I spent three years investigating the case. My investigation is corroborated by the findings of the German investigation. The Germans have found evidence they say implicates people connected to this group. They have found traces of explosives, they have found DNA, they have found fingerprints.

The Senate confirmed Jay Clayton to be director of National Intelligence on a party-line vote Tuesday evening, a move evidently driven by the twin urgencies of reviving a controversial electronic surveillance law and ridding the agency of Bill Pulte, a Trump sycophant who boasted hours earlier of carrying out a “fifth and final” round of mass firings during his nearly two-months tenure as acting director.

The exact number of DNI employees let go has not been disclosed, but last week The Washington Post reported that the “ODNI had about 2,000 employees at the start of Trump’s second term,” adding, “It is now little more than half that size, according to congressional aides.” Since Pulte took office, ODNI has lost about 200 personnel to firings and reassignments.

Crunch Time: Any enthusiasm Democrats once had for Jay Clayton to head U.S. intelligence evaporated last week with the nominee’s wishy-washy testimony at his confirmation hearing, where, like other nominees President Trump has sent to Capitol Hill, he not only refused to state plainly that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but left open the possibility that he might (improperly) get involved in vote counting like his predecessor Tulsi Gabbard. “In question after question, Clayton made his loyalty to the president clear. That approach appeared to unnerve Democrats, who predicted that Trump would ask Clayton to help him improperly sway, discredit or steal this fall’s midterm elections,” MS NOW’s David Rohde reported. With the extended absence of the mysteriously ailing Sen. Mitch McConnell, that gives Republicans only a three vote margin to push Clayton over the finish line. Trump didn’t make it easier for them, “delivering a TV speech from the White House “in which he again tried to cast doubts on that election and amplified debunked theories about Biden’s win,” the A.P. reported. “Clayton told senators that he had no involvement with that speech,” which the president amplified again in his crudely partisan remarks at the White House Correspondents Association dinner Friday night. On Monday July 27, The Steady State, an organization of some 400 former national security officials, called on the Senate to reject Clayton’s nomination. “Mr. Clayton has consistently shown an unwillingness to draw clear lines between the interests of the Intelligence Community and the political interests of the President who nominated him, it said in a statement.

Whither Ratcliffe? Trump’s continuing assault on the 2020 election results ostensibly puts CIA Director John Ratcliffe in an awkward position, since he was director of National Intelligence during the 2020 elections and oversaw its classified formal assessment that there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.” Not only that, the IC investigation found that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US”—another finding that Trump vehemently disputes. In his TV speech, Trump also alleged that China manipulated voting to Biden’s advantage—another falsehood not only devoid of evidence but technically impossible, according to countless state and federal election officials, judges and elections experts. China debated getting involved, the U.S. intelligence investigation found, but stayed on the sidelines.