SpyTalk

The Axeman Cometh: In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday, President Trump said he has privately told soon-to-be Acting DNI Bill Pulte that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is “unnecessary and/or too big.” “I’d like to see it smaller,” he added, “I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there.” First up on the cutting board: Holdovers from the Biden and Obama administrations. Longtime Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius suggested Pulte’s title could be ““The Acting Director of Political Retribution,” adding, “Top analysts are said to be wary of joining the ODNI’s National Intelligence Council because they fear political pressure to spin judgments.” Reuters, meanwhile, reported Tuesday that “The CIA has stopped contributing to some intelligence assessments, including those related to the Iran war,” produced by the ODNI. “At the heart of the disagreements is a clash over a task force set up in April 2025” by outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard,, sources told Reuters’ Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay. CIA Director John Ratcliffe “contends that Gabbard’s Director’s Initiatives Group has acted recklessly by circumventing traditional intelligence-sharing and declassification protocols,” while “ODNI officials say the CIA has consistently blocked the group’s access to intelligence.” Smart money says the ODNI’s troubles will accrue to Ratcliffe’s credit. . . not that Trump listens to him.

Gold Rush (cont’d): Astonishing details continued to emerge this week from the saga of David J. Rush, the senior CIA official accused of stealing $40 million worth of gold bars and millions in cash from the agency and squirreling them away in his home.

Drop into any U.S. intelligence office and you may well see a large security poster on the wall. It features a photo of Russia’s infamous mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, handcuffed after his 1994 arrest. Below it, in bright yellow letters, is a quote from Yuri Kobaladze, press spokesman for the Russian foreign intelligence service. At the time, the U.S. and Russia were on more or less friendly terms, following the collapse of Soviet communism in late 1991.

“There are friendly states,” Kobaladze said, commenting on the Ames case, “but no friendly intelligence services.”

Truer words were never said about espionage, and about relations between the U.S. and Israel in particular. Alarmist headlines over the last 48 hours saying that the Defense Intelligence Agency had raised its threat assessment of Israeli espionage to the “critical” level—the security world’s equivalent to a blizzard—shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The fact is that Israeli espionage and clandestine influence operations against the U.S. have been an open secret in Washington for decades.

In the spring of 2003*, CIA counter-terror officials were literally freaking out over intelligence reports suggesting that al-Qaeda might be plotting to smuggle a nuclear bomb into the United States. They even had, or thought they had, a key suspect in the plot: Saifullah Paracha, a gregarious Pakistani businessman with high level connections in Islamabad who just happened to own an import export firm in New York City.

Notwithstanding that Paracha was a lawful U.S. resident, the CIA wanted him rendered to a black site and subjected to torture. “We MUST have paracha arrested without delay and transferred to CIA custody using enhanced measures,” the operations chief for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Mission center wrote in an email at the time.

The long forgotten story of Paracha and the feared al-Qaeda nuclear plot is revisited with fascinating new details by Michael Lebovitz, a former Guantanamo prosecutor, in his new book, Second Wave:. Inside Al Qaeda’s Post-9/11 Attack Plan and America’s Secret Effort to Stop It.

I’ve often thought of Steve Carell’s hilarious performance as the feckless boss in The Office while observing the ups and downs—mostly downs—of our many directors of National Intelligence. A few years after the ODNI’s first director, John Negroponte, took the job in 2006, I learned he was taking leisurely two hour lunch breaks at The University Club in downtown Washington, where he’d often sign up for a steambath and massage and spend time in the reading room catching up on the day’s newspapers and magazines.

“He’s figured out the job,” I wrote back then. Being DNI was “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” in the immortal words of FDR’s Vice President John Nance Garner. It hardly needed saying that the CIA, which had ruled the intelligence roost since 1947, saw the ODNI, founded to coordinate the work of the sprawling 17-agency intelligence community after their failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, as a mere annoyance. The FBI, likewise, respectfully declined the ODNI’s request to oversee its counterterrorism work. Over time, many of the agencies were said to be dumping underperforming employees into the ODNI, which grew and grew … and grew, way beyond its original personnel ceiling.

And the job ate up many a DNI.

Goldfinger: How about that wild story of David John Rush, the former CIA executive accused of pilfering “a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses”? Reports said Rush, a veteran of 17 years at the spy agency, squirreled away the loot between Nov. 2025 and just this past March, when some $40 million worth of gold bars, each weighing about 2.2 pounds, were discovered in his home.

We have questions. Did he just load them into his Cybertruck or whatever and drive them home? Employ a Brinks-style CIA vehicle? And what were those “work-related expenses” his bosses found so persuasive? Covert action of some sort, goes the guess. He must’ve been a great story teller, with dim bosses. But curious minds want to know why the CIA has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold bars piled up in some warehouse in Virginia.

On the first day of the joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran in late February, an Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missile evaded Israel’s heralded air defenses and heavily damaged a secretive geospatial intelligence facility inconspicuously located in a residential Tel Aviv neighborhood, SpyTalk has learned.

The huge Feb. 28 blast in Tel Aviv’s historic Lev Ha’ir quarter, which demolished a residential apartment building and caused serious structural damage to several others nearby, was widely reported by both Israeli and international media. The blast also killed a Filipina caregiver.

But the damage to the National Geodetic Institute, which was located just 50 feet away in one of the neighborhood’s apartment buildings, well within the missile’s blast radius, has gone unreported until now.

ONE DAY IN LATE AUGUST 1968, the word came: Our friend Ed Sonnichsen had been killed in Vietnam.

Shock rolled through our small group at…

Gone Girl: The best eulogy of sorts for Tulsi Gabbard’s pathetic tenure at the ODNI goes to Shane Harris over at The Atlantic: ”It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s low regard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as its soon-to-be former occupant,” Harris wrote, “that while the commander in chief was making final preparations to invade Venezuela and kidnap its president, Tulsi Gabbard was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii.” Alas, for her, much the same went during planning for the Iran war, which she was opposed to as an “America Firster” and which caused her to be “forced out,” according to a Reuters report, despite her desperate and despicable effort to hold on by concocting a criminal conspiracy case against Obama administration officials for investigating Russian influence on the 2016 campaign and bizarrely flying off to Georgia to put herself in the middle of the FBI’s seizure of election ballots. The immediate beneficiary of her departure was said to be CIA Director John Ratcliffe (a fait accompli, really, many months ago). The question now is what happens to the ODNI, a longtime bête noire for the CIA, which once ruled the sprawling spy agencies by statute but lost its grip when it bore principal blame for the failure to disrupt the 9/11 attacks.

Tulsi Gabbard was not long for Director of National Intelligence, the scuttlebutt went for months in Washington—just too many missteps with President Trump, but particularly in regard to her widely reported opposition to “forever wars,” and specifically the administration’s war on Iran. She struggled to align Trump’s claims about the state of Iran’s uranium sites and ICBMs with the findings of U.S. intelligence—and the president’s own boasts—that they had been destroyed during the 12-day U.S. and Israeli air campaign against Iran last June.

“Her departure ends a stormy 15-month tenure in which the former Democratic congresswoman was largely excluded from President Donald Trump’s inner national security circle, even as she pushed his political priorities on election security, declassification and Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential contest,” according to an account in The Washington Post. She said she was resigning June 30 to help care for her husband, who she said has been stricken with a rare form of bone cancer, but a Reuters report said she was “forced out.”

In any event, her successor, at least on an acting basis, will be Aaron Lukas, a onetime international trade specialist at the Cato Institute who signed up with the CIA in the early years of the so-called war on terror. Spytalk Contributing Writer Tomás Dinges authored a “SpyFaces in the Crowd” profile of the principal deputy director of ODNI back on April 23, which we present again here.

“It is the craziest idea I have ever heard—and I have heard no shortage of borderline insane ideas,” one former Mossad chief told me after reading this week’s New York Times report claiming that the Mossad had persuaded the CIA to consider installing former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader if Israel succeeded in creating the conditions for the collapse of the clerical regime in the first weeks of the war.

Inside both the CIA and the upper echelons of Israeli intelligence, there was deep skepticism about the viability of the operation, which was conducted under extraordinary secrecy. Yet Mossad chief David Barnea and his deputy, known publicly only as “A,” men who for years have attached enormous importance to “influence operations”—i.e. psychological warfare—evidently persuaded the doubters to give the plan a chance.

According to sources who requested anonymity, indirect contact has taken place over the past three years between the Mossad, the CIA and aides to Ahmadinejad—and perhaps even with Ahmadinejad himself. Those contacts allegedly occurred during the former Iranian president’s visits to Guatemala and Hungary, two governments considered especially friendly toward both Israel and the United States.