SpyTalk

The best spy novelists are deceptively crafty. They are able to step back from the chaotic noise of our daily headlines to remind us that, at least in fiction, honesty and goodwill can still outmaneuver the worst aspects of humanity.

In his gripping new page-turner, Traitors, the veteran mystery writer Robert B. McCaw gives us exactly that kind of hero for this cynical age. His protagonist, Robert Cooper, is a regular guy, a grieving widower with a daughter he adores, true blue to those around him, pained to think that anyone in his circle could have evil intent. A dogged idealist in the old-time mold of Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper, he refuses to bend, even as the world around him demands it. In McCaw’s telling, that decency turns out to be the most dangerous weapon in Washington.

He spent a lifetime quashing threats, but in the end he could not defeat the one that eventually catches up to all mortals, no matter how powerful: time.

Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, a longtime CIA nemesis, spymaster and architect of internal repression, died in a Havana hospital last week, age 94.

Long near the pinnacle of Cuba’s leadership, Valdés kept a low profile internationally, as befitted the man who controlled one of the world’s most effective secret police forces, stifling Cuba’s internal opposition for decades. Inside Cuba he was revered, respected and feared as one of the four or five “Comandantes” closest to Fidel Castro, outranking for many years even Castro’s brother and successor Raul Castro.

Last Monday, long lines of Cubans showed up at his funeral to pay their respects. Abroad, opponents of the regime celebrated his death. “Valdés’ nicknames — ‘El Carnicero de Artemisa’ (The Butcher of Artemisa), ‘Charco de sangre’ (‘Pool/puddle of blood’), and ‘El Verdugo de Cuba’ (The Executioner/Hangman of Cuba) — reflect his direct association with this machinery of terror,” wrote John Suarez, executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, an anti-Castro organization.

But Valdés had also earned the grudging respect of his adversaries in the CIA, going all the way back to 1961, when he played a key role in the resounding and humiliating defeat of the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. Over the ensuing decades, as the regime’s minister of interior and chief of its Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI/DI), Cuba’s intelligence service, he exported the revolution abroad and thwarted one CIA plot after another at home.

Christina A. Norton, the new chief of staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is a party-loving MAGA activist with no background in national security issues but who last year boasted of running “the largest election integrity operation the Republican Party has ever seen,” according to copies of some of her past Instagram pos…

Fast Acting Pulte: Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte has hired a Republican elections-monitoring operative as his chief of staff, signaling that he intends to get involved somehow in the upcoming congressional elections, the New York Times reported on Friday. Christina Norton will continue to hold the same job at the federal housing agency he still leads, but “much of her recent work for the G.O.P. has centered on election issues, including efforts to monitor voting sites during the 2024 presidential election.” In 2024 she oversaw “a poll watcher program that included conservative conspiracy theorists, including Jack Posobiec, who helped spread the false ‘Pizzagate’ stories about child abuse at a restaurant in Washington.” (The ODNI has no remit for domestic law enforcement, although in January erstwhile DNI Tulsi Gabbard threw herself into the FBI’s seizure of Georgina ballots.) On Thursday, Pulte addressed headquarters staff and proclaimed, “My message was simple, we are focusing DNI on being an apolitical intelligence agency that gives the President the best intel and operates based on the law and the statute.” Earlier in the week, Pulte ousted more than 50 top staffers at the ODNI, including, SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff reported, “the senior national intelligence officers for Russia-Ukraine, Europe, East Asia, China and weapons of mass destruction.”

Tulsi and the Guru: In TV interviews and policy statements over the years, Congresswoman and DNI Tulsi Gabbard “repeatedly used words and phrases recommended in memos that do not identify who was providing the advice,” The Washington Post’s Jon Swaine reported in a blockbuster deep dive last weekend, but strong indications are that it came from her breakaway Hare Krishna guru in Hawaii Chris Butler, Swaine and his colleagues wrote in a Thursday follow-up piece. “The Post obtained the memos from Rebecca Saltzburg, a former digital strategist for Gabbard’s campaigns, who was also a member of the faith group that Gabbard grew up in, a Hare Krishna offshoot called the Science of Identity Foundation.”

RIP John Stockwell: The former CIA covert operative in Vietnam and Africa, whose idealism and love of adventure eventually ran aground in agency operations he found morally repulsive, died this month in Austin, Texas. He was 88. “Mr. Stockwell’s body was found in a wooded area near his home on June 14,

From the front lines at Liberty Crossing:

The termination notices came early in the morning via email—from Human Resources. Then the new managers in the front office came by and, in a cool, “professional” manner, assured the cashiered staff that they weren’t being axed because they were suspected of being part of some “Deep State” plot to undermine the president. But the more than 50 intelligence officials and analysts—including a huge chunk of the senior staff at the National Intelligence Council (NIC)—who were abruptly fired this week by the new acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, were given no further explanation for their dismissals.

The NIC is charged with being the ODNI “bridge” that conveys finished intelligence products to policymakers. But no cause for removal was cited to the dismissed staff members; no adverse personal actions were reported to justify any of the cuts, which in most cases transferred officials who had been detailed to ODNI back to their home agencies. “It was done with a sledgehammer,” said an ODNI source intimately familiar with the tumultuous events inside the office’s Liberty Crossing complex in northern Virginia this week. “But there seemed to be a randomness to it.”

It could have been worse. According to one report, Pulte planned an immediate bloodletting of some 300 jobs from the 1,300-strong staff.

DNI Debacle: Hundreds of career intelligence professionals were bracing for their abrupt dismissals Thursday when Bill Pulte showed up for work as acting director of National Intelligence a day early and asked “for a list of every employee in the office so he could assess whether to fire them, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.” According to Politico, Pulte directed the staff “to pull together a list of about 300 candidates to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center [alone] in the coming weeks.” The appointment of Pulte, a Trump loyalist with no intelligence experience (or even an appropriate security clearance) set off bipartisan alarm bells in Congress, which refused to renew an already troubled electronic surveillance counterterrorism program as long as Pulte was DNI. Staffers were also puzzled by Pulte’s initial asks: (1) to take home the highly classified President’s Daily Brief; (2) a personal protective detail; and (3) “whether he gets his own government plane, appearing almost overly fixated on his ability to travel between DC, Florida and Chicago—between which he splits his time,” according to CNN. Pulte will also continue as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which he has weaponized to investigate the personal finances of officials on Trump’s enemies list. Pulte’s appointment “is not just another poor personnel choice, former senior CIA operations executive John Sipher wrote in a New York Times Op-ed, “It is a warning about how this administration views intelligence itself—not as a sober instrument of national security and a profession built on evidence, but as a warehouse of disconnected secrets that could potentially be cherry-picked, stripped of context and used against the president’s enemies.”

Screen Test: Trump chose John Ratcliffe to be CIA director because, “if you were going to cast a guy to play CIA director, that’s who you’d pick,” the president told New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for their blockbuster book, Regime Change, according to a review published Sunday in the paper.

Tulsi and the Cult: For decades, erstwhile DNI, MAGA convert and former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s political pronouncements and decisions were dictated by her eccentric and secretive Hindu guru in Hawaii, Chris Butler, The Washington Post’s Jon Swaine discovered during a years-long investigation, published Sunday. SpyTalk reported on Gabbard’s cult ties in a two-part series in Dec. 2024.

Take a seat, Jay Clayton, your flight is delayed. Mr. Pulte, we’re ready for you to board.

And so it went at Zero-Dark-30 Wednesday when President Trump announced—on Truth Social, where else?—that he was pulling the nomination of Clayton to be the next director of National Intelligence.

Clayton, a SEC commissioner in the first Trump administration who is currently the top Justice Department prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, was arguably not legally qualified for the job, since by law it requires “extensive national security experience.” But Republicans audibly sighed with relief that his Clayton pick put a wooden stake in Trump’s rash pick of Bill Pulte, whose only “qualification” for the job is a demonstrated passion for using his position as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to investigate the mortgages of Trump’s “enemies,” to be the acting DNI.

But at 3:54 am Eastern, that turned out to be premature. Clayton was off the table—and perhaps soon out of a job, since Trump had already announced his successor to replace him in the SDNY.

UPDATED

FISA Section 702 is back in the headlines. And given the shaky state of affairs at the top of U.S. intelligence, it’s no wonder.

That passage in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has long been controversial, because it permits the warrantless collection of Americans’ private communications—calls, texts, and emails—linked to targeted foreigners. Its supporters say it’s an indispensable tool for thwarting terrorist plots against the U.S., and that U.S. persons are not being illegally monitored—just “incidentally” picked up in those communications. The problem is that once information is in the hands of the government, it is then often shared and investigated further among U.S. intelligence agencies, in particular the FBI, in so-called “backdoor searches.” In other words, 702 has been used to authorize violations of Fourth Amendment protections against illegal searches.

Passing the Torch: The headline in the conservative Washington Examiner read, “Republicans race to confirm Trump DNI pick Jay Clayton to break spy program gridlock,” which was as good a barometer as any on the reception Trump’s first pick of MAGA hatchetman Bill Pulte to fire Biden holdovers and rifle through the files of U.S. intelligence in search of “rigged elections,” got across Capitol Hill. “The president said Pulte will take over for Tulsi Gabbard on June 19, and his announcement of Clayton’s nomination did not change that timeline,” CBS reported. The Senate Intelligence Committee was so alarmed it swiftly scheduled a June 17 confirmation hearing for Clayton, a registered independent who is currently U.S. Attorney for the powerful Southern District of New York and who headed the S.E.C. in the first Trump administration (during which he filed charges against Elon Musk for distributing misleading information about securing funding for Tesla). The nomination still left a 2-day gap for Pulte to run amok at the ODNI, so Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s top Democrat, expressed hope that “there was a way that Tulsi Gabbard will stay in her position until we could get [Clayton] confirmed...”

Just a brief note on David Rush, who appears to have been one of the greatest con men to have ever walked the halls of the CIA, which is saying something.

A few passages in the latest development in this mind-bending saga of Rush allegedly conning the CIA out of some $42 million worth of gold bars, cash and countless luxury watches took me back to my fir…