SpyTalk

“Oh wait,” I said to the server. “What about the lettuce?” I’d just ordered a cheeseburger classic, the one with, you know, lettuce and tomato. “It’s safe,” she declared. The unspoken reference, of course, was to the cyclosporiasis that had left thousands ill—across the midwest, I’d heard, so I accepted her assurance at face value.

Mistake. Sometime afte…

What’s really left to say? I could go on an on (and have) about why Jay Clayton is unfit to be director of National Intelligence, starting with the fact his appointment would arguably break the law, which requires the office holder have “extensive national security expertise.” (As a former SEC commissioner and briefly U.S. Attorney for the Southern Dist…

Trump Enlists Spy Agencies in Elections Denialism: “With like-minded allies now positioned in key roles throughout the government, Mr. Trump has trained the full arsenal of the federal government on one of his most persistent obsessions: sowing doubt about the security of the country’s election systems,” the New York Times reported Friday. “Major agencies such as the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the Homeland Security Department and the U.S. Postal Service have taken steps to revive his false claims about the 2020 election and try to assert federal control over state-run elections.” It added, “His efforts got additional reinforcements on Thursday from the country’s intelligence agencies, which provided the White House with a trove of declassified evidence that Mr. Trump held up as evidence of a broken election system.”

Pultergeist: President Trump’s badly received elections-fraud speech Thursday night nearly went way off the rails and put CIA officers in danger because of aggressive kibitzing by Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, according to a new report. Pulte, concurrently the MAGA federal housing official known for finding original ways to investigate Democrats as well as DNI, “had in the days leading up the speech pushed to reveal the names of intelligence officials accused of concealing election interference from Trump, according to two senior officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations,” Politico’s Dasha Burns reported on Saturday. “That set off a scramble inside the White House with senior officials, including chief of staff Susie Wiles, fearing that it could undermine the president’s broader point about election vulnerabilities and put intelligence analysts’ lives at risk, the two officials said.”

Declass Goof: There were a few genuine nuggets on Chinese espionage in Trump’s massive declassification of intelligence reports, SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff reported on Friday, but there were also some that underscored the case—vehemently denied by Trump—that Russia strived to help him win the 2020 election. “President Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies to spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 US election,” a Sept. 10, 2020 U.S. intelligence report assessed. “These claims include that when the former Vice President was in office, he engaged in criminal activity in his dealings with Ukraine and individuals tied to Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.” It further said Russian agents Andrii Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik were “conspiring to intensify their efforts as the election approaches to orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal implicating former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party at the peak of the 2020 US presidential campaign. Their aim is to defeat the former Vice President and ensure the President’s victory.” Portions of the document were gleefully posted by Hunter Biden, among others Trump opponents.

Docs Danger: Trump’s massive dump of sensitive intelligence reports was not only unprecedented but dangerous, former senior CIA officer Julia Curlee told Massimo Calabresi in the New York Times.

Barack Obama was stunned.

“You got to be kidding me!” the then-U.S. senator from Illinois said when he was told, in the summer of 2008, that his presidential campaign, and that of his rival, John McCain, had been hacked by a foreign “entity.”

The cyber heist of both campaigns’ computer systems was first reported by Newsweek that fall in a special post-election edition and was considered a significant, and somewhat spooky, revelation at the time.

But it wasn’t until five years later that I confirmed what was widely suspected from the outset: the hacks came from cyber warriors associated with the People’s Republic of China—the culprits in what Dennis Blair, Obama’s first director of national intelligence, called a “case of political cyberespionage by the Chinese government against the two American political parties.”

As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The long ago 2008 cyber attack has taken on new relevance in light of President Trump’s much hyped speech Thursday night revealing that the Chinese had actually stepped up their election espionage game since then, hacking into and acquiring voter registration records on more than 220 million Americans, including names, addresses, phone numbers and party affiliation during the 2000 presidential campaign between him and Joe Biden.

That, and much more, was revealed in a cache of newly declassified intelligence documents released on the White House website as Trump was delivering yet another baseless attack on elections security.

This week, in the middle of the night between Wednesday and Thursday, feeling disappointed by England’s defeat by Argentina in the World Cup, I received some unexpected news.

I’m still not sure how to describe it. Was it gratifying? An honor? Frightening? Should I be concerned?

It was an official announcement issued by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. And there, in its target list, was my name.

You had to wait for it. It didn’t come until nearly two hours into the all-but-scripted hearing on Jay Clayton’s nomination to be the new boss of U.S. intelligence.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee did their parts. They threw the expected jabs at Clayton, starting with the ritualized question on who won the 2020 presidential election, a Punch-and-Judy exercise every time a Trump nominee or official appears before them. None of the witnesses can muster the courage to say simply, “Joe Biden won the election.” They know a Trumpian trap door would open under them if they told the truth.

So, too, did Clayton, who entered the high ceilinged, walnut paneled, warmly lit Capitol Hill hearing room with his reputation yet unsoiled, demur. No matter that neither of his previous government stints—as Securities and Exchange commissioner in the first Trump term and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in this one—remotely qualified him for the job, which by law requires the holder have “extensive national security expertise.” His major qualification for the nomination was fealty to Trump. His major qualification for the job was that he wasn’t the guy there now, MAGA apparatchik Bill Pulte.

But Clayton quickly made clear how far he was prepared to debase himself.

The latest dreary news about the hollowing out of U.S. intelligence under the Trump administration came yesterday via The Steady State, an organization of some 400 former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security.

There, David Abramson, a 25-year veteran of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), a relatively tiny organization that has often proved more prescient than its far bigger CIA brother, detailed how, beginning in July 2025, “the State Department dismissed some of its most experienced intelligence analysts merely to appease the Trump Administration’s demands for cuts.”

Room at the Top: Jay Clayton, Trump’s on, off and on again pick to run U.S. intelligence, was already bound to face tough questioning about his qualifications and views when he eventually appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee for his confirmation hearing: Would he be a raw tool of President Trump’s retribution campaigns, like his Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, who immediately began cleaning house of career professionals on day one? And what about his qualifications for the job, which by law demands the DNI “shall have extensive national security expertise”? Being a former S.E.C. Commissioner and U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, host to many a terrorism trial, hardly reaches that standard—but no matter. The bipartisan fervor to eject housing magnate and MAGA enthusiast Pulte—not to mention secure passage of the lapsed Section 702 surveillance bill—apparently eclipses any of Clayton’s shortcomings. To be sure, questions about news breaking late Friday that Clayton signed subpoenas for several New York Times reporters to appear before a grand jury assembled to investigate a leak that Trump risked a national calamity by flying to Turkey on a jet donated by Qatar with insufficient defense systems will undoubtedly come up at his Wednesday hearing, but they likely won’t threaten the nomination of Clayton, who has received praise from some prominent Democrats.

Trump’s Plane Switch: Secret Service officials may have insisted Trump abandon the 747 Qatar gifted him and leave Turkey on the regular Boeing jet used as Air Force One because of an Israeli warning of an Iranian plan to kill Trump, according to news reports. “The details of the plot that Israel warned about were not immediately clear, and two sources familiar with the matter said the US had not vetted it themselves nor were they tracking it before the Israeli warning,” they said. “The US government has long warned that Iran may try to kill Trump in retaliation for the 2020 drone strike he ordered which killed a top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani.” The jet from Qatar, although extensively refitted by U.S. engineers and technicians, allegedly lacked systems to deter missiles. (WSJ and CNN)

ODNI Shape Shifting: Meanwhile, the game of musical chairs continues at the ODNI.

Soon after Israel’s 12-day air war against Iran last June culminated in the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, the Mossad secretly began plotting its next war against the Islamic Republic — this one aimed at nothing less than regime change, according to several newly retired senior Israeli intelligence officials.

The war plan that emerged, these former Mossad and military intelligence officials said, included the now widely publicized Israeli and U.S. airstrikes that decapitated Iran’s top leaders, destroyed Iranian troop concentrations and further degraded Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure. But the plan also included previously unreported details surrounding a proposed ground invasion under Israeli and American air cover by Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish forces who were armed, trained and equipped by Israeli and U.S. military advisers, the former officials told SpyTalk.

In addition, they said, the plan called for Mossad and CIA influence operations aimed at inciting popular uprisings against the Tehran regime — all of which, Mossad planners assured President Trump, would eventually lead to the collapse of the country’s radical Islamic government and its replacement by a more pragmatic leadership.

The Trump administration was on board from the get-go, the former Israeli officials say.

“Over the course of several months, we held numerous meetings between our strategic teams and their most senior officials,” one of the former officials told SpyTalk, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss highly sensitive intelligence matters. “Nearly every idea or proposal we raised was shared with the CIA. Their people reviewed it, offered comments, and put forward counterproposals.”

The former Mossad official’s assertions of the CIA’s deep involvement in the regime-change plan—especially in the efforts to prepare Kurdish fighters for the ground invasion of Iran—appear part of an Israeli effort to push back against a Trump administration narrative that CIA Director John Ratcliffe rejected the major parts of the regime-change plan as “farcical.” In the administration’s telling, Israel and its powerful Washington lobby still managed to convince Trump to green light the remaining components of the plan, dragging him into a war that has failed to achieve his primary goals of regime change and the elimination of the Iranian nuclear threat. Even more upsetting, some administration officials complain, is the war’s precipitation of a new global economic reality: Iranian control of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf’s gateway for a fifth of the world’s supply of oil and natural gas.

That’s not quite the way things happened, these former Israeli intelligence officials insist. Moreover, they say, the CIA was a full partner from the very beginning of the planning process, which began soon after the June war last year.

I was vaccinated against Trump Derangement Syndrome long before he showed up on the Potomac. Nixon, Ford, the Bushes, Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq, Afghanistan—all had sanded off the edges of my rage over the years. Plus, of course, there were always criminal manservants—the H.R. Haldemans and Paul Manaforts, to name just two—that deserved equal disdain, ma…