John F. Kennedy is today rightly remembered for his firm and steady resolve that averted nuclear catastrophe during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But nine months later, Kennedy was torn with indecision as he faced another, very different foreign policy crisis.

In the summer of 1963, Kennedy was at a loss about what to do about the increasingly repressive behavior of South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem. A cabal of State Department officials was pushing for a U.S.-backed military coup and got the president, who was on a weekend getaway with his family in Hyannis Port, to hastily sign off on a cable essentially green lighting one.

But Kennedy was filled with doubts. Barely five days later, he dispatched a follow-up cable whose wording should ring through the ages.

“Until the very moment of the go signal for the operation by the Generals, I must reserve a contingent right to change course and reverse previous instructions,” JFK wrote to his new ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. “I know from experience that failure is more destructive than an appearance of indecision…If our national interest should require a change of mind, we must not be afraid of it.”

Admitting a foreign policy misstep and reversing course is rare indeed in presidential history (and anybody cognizant of the failures of Middle East policies over the past 25 years might wish it was done more often). But as veteran journalist Jack Cheevers shows in his gripping new book, Kennedy’s Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America’s Descent into Vietnam, the young president’s tentative, “contingent” reversal of course was—at best—a half-step followed by more back and forth shuffling that left U.S. policy a muddle. Lacking any clear direction from Washington, Lodge—an imperious Boston Brahman whom JFK had defeated in his 1952 Senate race—worked with a free wheeling CIA agent to encourage (and fund) a gaggle of disaffected South Vietnamese generals to move forward with their scheming to overthrow the government of this U.S.-backed ally.

“While the generals revved up their plotting in October [1963], JFK drifted along, buffeted by the pro-and anti-Diem cliques in his administration and unwilling or unable to take a firm position on the coup,” writes Cheevers, offering a conclusion that is sure to rankle the admirers of Camelot. “By his indecisiveness, Kennedy relinquished whatever leverage the United States might have had” to influence events on the ground. (You can listen to Cheevers talk about his book starting Friday on the SpyTalk podcast.)

The result, as is well known, was an unmitigated disaster. The generals, led by Duong Van Minh, a French-educated hulk of a man known as “Big Minh,” who proudly displayed his two busted front teeth as a symbol of his toughness and held a grudge against Diem for being sidelined from his command, had little popular support, much less governing experience. Under Minh’s orders, Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his much feared brother who served as chief of the secret police, were loaded into an armored personnel carrier, their hands tied behind their backs. The South Vietnamese president was shot in the back of the head; his brother butchered with a bayonet. Kennedy, who wanted them flown safely into exile if the coup went forward, was horrified. The U.S. government had blood on its hands.

The Vietnam coup was the original real-life version of the dictum that Colin Powell, then a young U.S. Army captain serving as a U.S. “advisor” in South Vietnam, would issue four decades later on the eve of another misguided war: his so-called “Pottery Barn rule” for foreign interventions: “If you break it, you own it.”

The U.S. had been party to an insurrection, leaving the country all but rudderless in the midst of its battle against the North Vietnamese-backed Viet Cong. It now owned the outcome. America’s long “descent” into a full-scale land war in Southeast Asia—something Kennedy had been warned against and never wanted—had begun.

Cheevers’ massive book, weighing in at 671 pages and based on years of prodigious research into a mountain of declassified files and personal papers, has clear lessons for today, starting with the most obvious one: Getting rid of the top guy doesn’t solve your problem, as America learned the hard way in Iraq and again most recently, in Iran. It is especially the case when there is no clear strategy for what comes next.

THAT WAS NO SECRET to many of those inside Kennedy’s administration who were adamantly opposed to the coup idea all along. Among them was William Colby, formerly the CIA station chief in Saigon, who by 1963 had been elevated to chief of the agency’s Far East Division. Like the rest of the CIA brass, Colby had been cut out of the weekend discussions when Kennedy signed off on the original “green light” coup memo. When Colby saw it, he immediately pinpointed the problem, recognizing that none of the generals plotting to depose Diem inspired any confidence—in Washington or even among themselves. The coup plan “appears to be throwing away bird in hand before we have adequately identified birds in bush, or songs they may sing,” Colby wrote in a prescient memo to his successor as station chief, John Richardson. Colby would later call the coup “the worst mistake of the Vietnam War.”

The story Cheever tells is a sprawling one, with Shakespearean overtones. If JFK’s doubts, his betwixt and between hemming and hawing, evokes Hamlet, the secret plots, conspiracies, betrayals, (and subsequent regrets) from Washington to Saigon, are straight out of Julius Caesar. At its center is Diem, a devout Catholic and fervent anti-Communist, who just a few years earlier was being hailed in Washington as the savior of his country. Life Magazine had proclaimed him “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam.” When he flew to the U.S. in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower personally greeted him at the airport. In Washington, he addressed a joint session of Congress. In New York, he got a ticker tape parade.

But by the early 1960s, doubts about Diem were growing. He was aloof, stubborn and often refused to take advice from visiting U.S. officials, lecturing them for hours on end about how they didn’t understand his country. More disturbing, despite the trappings of democracy, he had little respect for democratic norms. When Buddhists took to the streets to protest what they perceived as discriminatory treatment, Diem and his hardline brother’s instincts were to crack down and round up the demonstrators, throwing them into prison and torturing them. In time, Buddhist monks began burning themselves in spectacular fashion, captured on camera by U.S. newsmen and shocking the American public.

Cheevers argues, somewhat controversially, that at least some of the criticism of Diem was overblown, contending that there was no systematic persecution of the Buddhists and that some of the monks were savvy agitators. Notably, Frederick Nolting, Kennedy’s first ambassador to Saigon, shared that view and defended him to the end.

But the case for Diem wasn’t helped by the headline-grabbing antics of Nhu’s wife, aka Madame Nhu, otherwise known as the Dragon Lady. With her tight dresses, heavy makeup and bouffant hairdo, Nhu lashed out at the Buddhists as a bunch of “crooks” and “Communists” and offered to supply the gasoline for the next monk who wanted to “barbecue” himself.

Even more damaging for the image of the regime, aggressive reporters on the ground—most notably David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of UPI—wrote relentlessly about Diem’s abuses while challenging, much to Kennedy’s irritation, claims by the U.S. military and the Diem regime they were winning the war against the Viet Cong.

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These days, the very mention of a U.S.-sponsored coup is likely to conjure memories of what the CIA did during the 1950s, when the agency’s covert operatives overthrew leftwing governments in Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with dictatorships. It is, therefore, a bit jarring to read, as Cheevers lays it out, that it was actually liberals at the State Department who pushed upon Kennedy the idea that Diem should be disposed of and replaced with the generals.

At the time, there was little, if any, dissent within fashionable foreign policy circles against the Cold War consensus that the U.S. could not allow South Vietnam to fall to the Communists. The question was how best to ensure that didn’t happen, and the progressive-minded coup plotters argued that sticking with an authoritarian like Diem was counterproductive, that it undercut the U.S. case that it was backing a war for freedom and democracy in Southeast Asia.

Still, it is a startling to learn that, of all people, it was John Kenneth Galbraith—the Harvard economics professor then serving as U.S. ambassador to India, and one of the leading liberal intellectuals of the day—who first suggested to Kennedy in late 1961 that he should ditch Diem, even if it resulted in a military coup, on the grounds that it was the only way to ensure that the “bright promise” of the New Frontier didn’t get “sunk under the rice fields.”

A year and a half later, it was a mid-level official in the State Department, Roger Hilsman, who took up the cause. A former U.S. Army officer with a PhD in international relations from Yale, Hilsman had been tapped by Kennedy to head the State Department’s intelligence bureau—where he forcefully began pressing the idea that Diem had to go. Kennedy, fed up with the lousy press he was getting over his Vietnam policy, was clearly receptive. “The time may come when we’re gonna have to do something about Diem,” he told Lodge in an Oval Office meeting on August 15, 1963. “I think we have to leave it almost completely in your hands and your judgment.”

(Kennedy had several acerbic comments about others during this conversation, taped via a secret Oval Office system he could activate with a button on his desk. He groused about Halberstam’s stories in the Times and “this bitch,” Madame Nhu. “Is she a lesbian or what?” he asked Lodge. The new ambassador averred she probably was.)

There is a line of thinking that Kennedy only brought in Lodge— an old political rival who had been Richard Nixon’s running mate in 1960 and even then was being mentioned as a possible 1964 GOP presidential candidate—to give bipartisan cover to whatever failures in Vietnam lurked around the corner.

But none of that mattered to Hilsman over in Foggy Bottom. On a Saturday in late August, with backing from his boss, Undersecretary of State and veteran diplomat Averell Harriman, as well as National Security Council staffer Michael Forestal, Hilsman drafted what Cheevers calls “one of the most fateful directives of the Vietnam War.” Diem, he wrote, needed to ditch his brother Nhu— something he had consistently refused to do—and if he still balked, he should lose U.S. support. Rather than leaving it to Lodge’s judgment, the ambassador should be instructed to “make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement if this should become necessary,” and he should tell Diem’s restive generals that Washington would give them “direct support in any interim period of breakdown.”

Rush to Judgment

Hilsman, Harrisman and Forestal—“the Gung-ho boys,” Cheevers calls them—pushed Kennedy to immediately sign off. At the time, other principals were away for the weekend and out of the loop. CIA chief John McCone was yachting in Puget Sound. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was hiking in the Grant Tetons. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was at a Yankees game in New York. So much for a deliberative, interagency review. Kennedy signed off on Hilsman’s memo and U.S. policy— which for a decade had firmly backed Diem— was instantly turned upside down.

At this point, despite Kennedy’s later reservations, Lodge pushed the coup with gusto. “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government,” he wrote in a cable from Saigon to the State Department on Aug. 29, three days after the Hilsman-drafted “green light” cable. A savvy bureaucratic player, Lodge demanded the removal of Richardson, the CIA station chief who, along with his boss, McCone, was cool on the coup idea. And he used a more sympathetic, off-the-reservation, pro-coup CIA officer, Lucien Conein, as his conduit to the coup-plotting generals, offering them advice and pressing them for their plans. When the time came for the generals to move, Conein showed up at their command center with a diplomatic pouch stuffed with about $42,000 in cash— a U.S.-funded kitty to bribe lower ranking military officers to join the mutiny.

Even while his CIA man was doing so, Lodge showed up for one last meeting with Diem at the palace. A master of duplicity, Lodge engaged in diplomatic niceties, revealing nothing about the ongoing plot to depose his host. But Diem may have sensed something was afoot.

“Please tell President Kennedy that I am a good and frank ally,” Diem told the ambassador as he was getting up to leave. Lodge replied that he always admired Diem’s courage and had since “formed sentiments of friendship for him.” (Not long after, with Diem and his brother murdered, Lodge hosted leaders of the new military junta for a black tie celebratory dinner complete with cigars, champagne, and toasts.)

Remorse

When Kennedy learned of the gruesome murders of Diem and Nhu, he could barely contain himself. Shown the news during a national security council meeting, Kennedy “leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before,” later recalled Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s favorite general, whom he had named as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. After Kennedy left the room, Cheevers writes, Taylor remarked: “What did he expect?”

Anybody reading Cheevers’ account will no doubt be looking for clues to the perennial question still debated by historians: What would Kennedy have done about Vietnam had he lived? Cheevers quotes from multiple memoirs indicating JFK talked quite a bit about getting out of Vietnam—once he got re-elected in 1964. “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history,” he told his appointments secretary, Kenneth O’Donnell. “I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care.” But as Cheevers so amply documents, Kennedy said many contradictory things on the subject, and when it came to the most momentous decision he had to make involving Vietnam, he had endless trouble making up his mind.

For what it’s worth, Kennedy’s final, public pronouncement on Vietnam, unmentioned in Cheevers’ book, was starkly different from what he told O’Donnell. In a speech he planned to give at a lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was going to portray the war in Vietnam as part of a global clash with international Communism that required unflagging U.S. support. Listing South Vietnam as first among nine foreign countries on the front lines of this war, Kennedy was to say: “Our assistance to these nations can be painful, risky and costly, as is true in Southeast Asia today. But we dare not weary of the task…Reducing our efforts to train, equip and assist their armies can only encourage Communist penetration.”

But of course, Kennedy never got to speak those words. Just 20 days after Diem was assassinated, so too was he, leaving behind a legacy on Vietnam that is checkered at best.

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Shooter Roamed: White House Correspondents’ Association dinner gunman Cole Allen marvelled at how easy it was for him to walk about the Hilton Hotel fully armed. “Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat,” he wrote in a note obtained by the New York Post. Cole had booked a room in the hotel and smuggled in a shotgun, handgun and knives, reports said. On Saturday, he wrote, “The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.” He continued, “Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again,” adding: “Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit,” invoking a nickname for the M2 Browning .50-caliber machine gun. “Actually insane.” The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported Sunday that the Trump administration “provided a lower level of security for the White House correspondents’ dinner than it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, even though the president and many Cabinet members were in attendance.” That was a decision by DHS secretary Markwayne Mullins, in accord with past practice for the annual event, but will no doubt undergo a critical review. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democrats and some members of the news media for the violence, which she attributed to a “left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him.” Critical social media denizens quickly responded with quotes and videos of Trump encouraging or celebrating political violence.

Where is Tulsi? It’s a question long asked by many a close observer of the Trump administration’s national security apparatus, such as it is, with real estate operators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’ s son-in-law, leading diplomatic talks with Russia and Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doing double duty as national security adviser, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe at the Situation Room table for the mid-February planning season for the war on Iran, not the nominal head of U.S. intelligence.

“When the war began, the White House put out a picture of Gabbard and (JD) Vance meeting with a few Cabinet officials in the Situation Room, looking like they’d been sent to the kids’ table at a wedding,” Atlantic magazine fireballer Tom Nichols wrote on Saturday. “Since then, Gabbard has made herself scarce: She was, after all, once an anti-war Democrat who sold T-shirts opposing a conflict with Iran. Trump is also irritated with her because of her closeness to Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center; Kent was her chief of staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and he was her pick to run the NCTC.”

Nichols, a Russia specialist and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, adds: “After less than eight months on the job, Kent resigned to protest the war and has since gone public with blistering criticisms of the administration. (Trump reportedly believes that Gabbard was shielding Kent from the White House.) But Gabbard was apparently in poor standing with the administration even before the war began: In early February, she opposed renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; Trump ignored her advice and is pushing Republicans to extend the law.”

Then there’s her disturbing record falling for Russian and Syrian disinformation. So despite her clumsy efforts to remain in Trump’s favor by enlisting in his retaliation campaign against Obama “Russiagate” officials, she’s been effectively benched for the Iran war.

Which is fine with Nichols. “Does the United States even need a director of national intelligence?” he asks (and is hardly the first to do so). “Gabbard’s appointment was full of risk from the start because of her background, but her inconsequential impact on actual matters of policy might be one more reason to downsize the bloated national-security infrastructure put in place during the panic that gripped America after 9/11.”

Manchurian Candidate revisited: The CIA has long been said to have begun its psychedelic drug testing on unsuspecting Americans because the North Koreans and Chinese were using them on American POW’s. That was a plotline in Richard Condon’s 1959 thriller, whose 1962 movie version turned the imagined conspiracy (based on rumors Condon had picked up) into a widely believed ”fact.” In reality, it was somewhat the reverse: the CIA tested LSD, etc. on North Korean POW’s, a fact first reported in 1979 by State Department intelligence officer-turned-journalist John Marks in his groundbreaking book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. Now comes freelance writer Garrett Kim, who reviewed documents released to the private National Security Archive in 2024-2025 and says, “Notably absent from these declassified documents is any proof that similar experiments were undertaken by enemies of the U.S.” A fascinating read, in The Intercept.

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More Kash Capers: The FBI director was arrested twice in his youth for alcohol-related incidents that he said were “not representative of my usual conduct,” Trevor Aaronson reports in The Intercept, drawing on Patel statements in his 2005 Florida Bar application. One arrest was for pissing in public on the way home from a night of drinking—not unheard of for a 20-something man. But “(t)two decades later, as Patel pushes back against allegations that drinking is impairing his leadership of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, these arrests show how Patel’s alcohol use has been subjected to scrutiny before in his professional life.”

Kash Caper II: The FBI began secretly investigating a veteran New York Times journalist last month after she reported that Patel was using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins with government security and transportation. “Agents interviewed the girlfriend, queried databases for information on the reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, and recommended moving forward to determine whether Ms. Williamson broke federal stalking laws,” a source told the Times. Justice Department officials decided there was no grounds for the FBI to charge the reporter.

Ex-CIA Director’s Iran advice: “I have learned many lessons over many years about dealing with Iran, often the hard way,” former CIA Director and life-long diplomat William J. Burns wrote in a New York Times Op-ed piece Friday, offering some tips for President Trump on how to get out of a war he started but cannot control. “We didn’t have to dig the hole this deep,” said Burns, who in the Obama administration led the secret nuclear talks that culminated in the deal that capped Iran’s centrifuges and uranium enrichment for 15 years and put IAEA inspectors inside its nuclear facilities. “Fortunately, there’s still time to put our shovel down, learn some hard lessons and apply them with a little more humility,” added Burns, who served as CIA director under Joe Biden. “Humility” is obviously a stretch for Trump, but Iran’s chokehold on Hormuz and surviving missile and drone arsenals would seem to narrow his options to those that eventually worked with Iran, albeit only after years of struggle, Burns wrote: diplomacy and patience. “[F)orce alone—without patient, painstaking diplomacy, backed up by good intelligence taken seriously by policymakers—rarely delivers,” he added. “Nor are negotiations dictation. They almost always involve a complicated, drawn-out process of give and take, in which expertise matters and many different points of pressure are applied.” The odds of replacing the regime with its internal opponents, meanwhile, remains “farcicle,” as CIA Director John Ratcliffe advised Trump it would be back in a Feb. 12 Situation Room meeting. “In other words, it’s bullshit,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

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Iran in Our Pants: Iranian hackers have been infiltrating U.S. utilities, particularly the computers that control municipal energy, water, and wastewater agencies, The New Yorker’s Sue Halpern reported Thursday. Not only that, but “threat hunter researchers” … have reported that “the [Iran backed] hacking group Seedworm had infiltrated the networks of an American airport, a bank, and a U.S. software company that does business in Israel as a defense and aerospace contractor.” It hardly needs saying that the group was in “a potentially dangerous position to launch attacks,” as Helpern put it.

Meanwhile, Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal “sheds around $707 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” NextGov/FCW reported early this month. Axios cited a government official saying “[r]oughly 1,000 people have already left the nation’s top cybersecurity agency during the second Trump administration…cutting the agency’s total workforce by nearly a third.” And just days before the U.S. strikes on Iran in February, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents and staff members from a counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats from Iran, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN, because “[e]ach was involved in the investigation of President Donald Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.” This week Trump’s pick to lead CISA, Sean Plankey, withdrew his nomination after the GOP Senate majority was unable to achieve the unanimity needed to advance his nomination after months of wrangling, “largely due to resistance from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) over a contested Coast Guard shipbuilding project.”

Chinese Cyberspies: The White House has accused China of undertaking “industrial-scale theft” of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property, the (paywall protected) Financial Times reported, according to Reuters. “The accusation marks the latest escalation in tensions around Chinese groups allegedly raiding advanced American AI research amid an arms race to lead in the technology. It comes just weeks before President Donald Trump will meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing.”

Domestic Terror: “The sophisticated theft of 15 crop-spraying drones last month in New Jersey has the FBI worried as experts warn of ‘ridiculously bad’ consequences and ‘a potential nightmare scenario’ if terrorists get their hands on the machines, Jack Murphy and Sean D. Naylor reported this week in The High Side, their Substack newsletter. “The unsolved theft has revived fears rampant in the post-9/11 years that terrorists might use crop dusters to disperse biological or chemical weapons with the aim of inflicting mass casualties inside the United States. The difference now is that the potential threat consists not of one pilot flying a small propellor-driven plane, but more than a dozen remotely piloted vehicles. Heightening the concern even further is the fact that the crime occurred against the backdrop of the United States’ war against Iran.”

Israel-Iran spy wars: Two Israel Air Force technicians who worked on F-15 fighter jets, have been charged with acting as agents for Iran after allegedly handing over “documentation of the engine diagrams, as well as photographs showing the face of a flight instructor,” according to the Jerusalem Post. “They were also asked to gather information about former IDF chief Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Herzi Halevi and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” the Israeli TV station KAN reported. Iran, meanwhile, executed regime critic and protester Erfan Kiani “in a horrific public hanging after being accused of spying for Israel,” the U.S. Sun reported.

Spy Mystery Who really was Benjamin Jamil, founder of the once ubiquitous Counter Spy Shops, which “sold anti-bugging equipment, bulletproof clothing and night-vision goggles to jealous spouses and paranoid businessmen,” making him “the outfitter to the suspicious”—and deeply involved with an espionage underworld’s cast of characters. Fascinating investigation by Jeff Maysh in the FT.

Vatican Rag: “US spies on Vatican: Trump’s war on Pope Leo includes cloak and dagger,” the national security journalist Ken Klippenstein headlined Friday. We don’t know about that (except that any espionage service worth its name spies on everyone they can as a matter of course). But this detail caught our eye: “Even the U.S. military has a Vatican-specific language code on its books as a distinct linguistic capability,” Klippenstein wrote. “‘QLE’ designates Ecclesiastical Latin—the Vatican’s preferred liturgical register—as distinct from classical Latin (”LAT”), which is used primarily for historical and legal documents. It’s a small detail, but an illustrative one: the national security state is thorough, and it has been thorough about the Vatican for a long time.”

A Waste of Spies: There’s a new documentary film out on the late CIA operations maestro Peter Sichel—the “Jewish James Bond,” whom the Guardia’s Philip Oltermann recounts was a “refugee from Nazi Germany whose gratitude to his American hosts was such that he volunteered to join the U.S. Army and became the CIA’s first station chief in Berlin as a mere twentysomething, filing early warnings about Soviet activity that have been credited with ringing in the Cold War.” In the film, Sichel, who died in 2025, bemoans the CIA’s 1950s-era coups against “democratically elected leaders in Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo and especially Iran,” which cost “a lot of lives.” The Last Spy is not yet available for streaming in the U.S.

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Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman is certainly not cut from the mold of many a head of the Mossad, Israel’s legendary spying, assassinations and dirty tricks service.

The agency’s 14th head since the country’s establishment in 1948 isn’t expected to assume his post for another two months. But his appointment by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already stirring unease—with implications for Israel’s relations with its closest ally, America.

For starters, Gofman is widely regarded as the most controversial, politicized, and inexperienced candidate ever chosen to head the Mossad, a man whose grasp of strategic special operations and international relations appears limited. These are not peripheral skills, of course.

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In his early thirties, Aaron Lukas was on a glide path to wonky influence in Washington D.C. His two-year stint as chief speechwriter for Robert Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, had followed seven years at the Cato Institute, the libertarian gold-standard of conservative Washington think tanks. While still with Zoellick, he continued publishing with Cato.

In April 2004, though, Lukas’ career path was about to take a dramatic swerve. The same month that his last Cato article was published (about trade protectionism), he was on the payroll as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. A year later he was working in CIA operations—the spying and covert action side of the business. And now, 21 years later, Lukas is the principal deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a mouthful of a title responsible for executing the mandate of the agency’s director, Tulsi Gabbard. His job is coordinating and communicating intelligence from and budgets for the entire, 17-member U.S. Intelligence Community. It’s a position that’s been held by such intelligence heavyweights as Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general, NSA chief, and CIA boss under President George W. Bush.

How exactly Lukas, 54, went from a fresh-faced libertarian trade analyst from Arkansas to a “seasoned intelligence professional and former CIA chief of station” according to his official ODNI biography, who handed out “briefcases of cash” as an agency operative (as he put it in a January recruiting pitch), is not entirely clear. But there are hints to be found in his early interests, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

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In choosing legal representation for his $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic, FBI Director Kash Patel turned to a firm with long personal, financial and political connections to him but a mostly losing record with high profile Republican clients, including President Trump and his 2020 election-denying allies.

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Kash Bar: Le tout Washington was rocked Friday by a deeply reported piece in The Atlantic describing FBI Director Kash Patel as a habitual drunk who’s often unfit for duty in the morning due to his late night carousing. “Several officials” told The Atlantic’s veteran investigative reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick that “Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights..” One morning, officials told Fitzpatrick, the FBI sent a SWAT-type team to bust down Patel’s apartment door because he wasn’t responding to calls and texts. The damning story follows on previous reports critical of Patel’s use of an FBI jet to visit his Nashville girlfriend and highly publicized misstatements on ongoing investigations. On April 10, a “paranoid” Patel, the story says, already believing his job was hanging by a thread, couldn’t log into his FBI account and “panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a ‘freak-out.’”

The persuasive report on Patel’s alleged alcohol problem comes, of course, amid escalating security challenges from Iran, Russia and China, a major responsibility of the FBI, which has lost several Iran experts due to Patel’s role in Trump’s retaliation campaign over his 2020 election loss.

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Few Americans have had more experience dealing with Iranians than Mark Alan Fowler. A CIA case officer for more than 20 years, Fowler was for part of that time deputy chief of the agency’s Iran task force, working out of a satellite station in Germany, charged with getting Iranian scientists, businessmen, security agents and officials to turn coat and spy for the Americans.

HIs success was intermittent, but the lessons Fowler took away from the experience were clear and unmistakable: When talking to the Iranians, be direct, be specific and above all, be patient.

“For Iranians, signing a contract is seen merely as a starting point to continue negotiating,” Fowler, who’s gone on to work as a private consultant on Iran matters, wrote in an Op-ed piece this week for The Washington Post, quoting a Middle East businessman who understands the terrain.

Fowler’s insights suggest a note of caution amid a flurry of diplomatic activity in recent days that has sustained a bombing pause, led to a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon and, Friday morning, a re-opening of sorts of the Strait of Hormuz. (Iran said it was open; Trump said his blockade would continue until terms of a peace deal were met.) On Saturday, Iran said it had reimposed “strict control” over the Strait until the blockade was lifted. Where things stand now is far from clear.

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MANY WASHINGTON SEX SCANDALS AGO, I asked a retired former head of FBI Counterintelligence what the bureau did when it discovered the KGB or other malefactors making inroads with a member of Congress. A couple of FBI agents, he said, would make a discreet visit to the Hill and let the member know that their new friend was actually a spy. Then it was up to him or her what to do about it.

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Update: the Iranians refused to accept the “final” U.S. offer, Vice President Vance announced around 9:30 pm Eastern time, after 21 hours of talks in Islamabad. The sticking point, he implied, was Iran’s refusal to renounce its nuclear program.

Gabbard Gap: Seems like a week can’t go by without someone asking, “Where’s Tulsi?” On Friday the subject was raised by Mark Caputo at Axios. “President Trump sounded ready to dismiss top intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard until he got an earful last week from one of his oldest friends and advisers, Roger Stone,” Caputo wrote. “Trump was displeased with Gabbard when she didn’t wholeheartedly endorse the Iran war during her recent testimony to Congress about threats to the U.S., according to five advisers and confidants who spoke with the president.” Thing is, “Her fellow Cabinet officials backed her, as did Stone when the president called him last week,” according to this account. So he kept her around. “’Roger sealed the deal. He saved Tulsi,’ a source familiar with Trump’s thinking told Axios.” (Inside-the-Beltway aficionados will appreciate the subtext here: Trump called Stone. The legendary Republican dirty trickster hasn’t lost a step.)

Missile Debate: Iran has “thousands” of missiles left and can retrieve launchers buried under rubble, U.S. and Israeli officials told the Wall Street Journal this week. That’s in sharp contrast to what an increasingly erratic Pete Hegseth claimed a few days ago. The “Secretary of War” told reporters that Iran’s missile program was “functionally destroyed,” with launchers and missiles “depleted and decimated and almost completely ineffective.” And yet, they persist. Sources told the Journal that Iran’s missile inventory had been “roughly halved” since the war began Feb. 28 “yet it retains thousands of Medium–and short-Range ballistic missiles that could be pulled out of hiding or retrieved from underground sites.”

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A former chief of the U.S. Central Command in the first Trump administration says the president’s threat to bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages is “shocking” and advised U.S. military officers to refuse to carry out “illegal” orders for air strikes that would primarily destroy civilian infrastruc…

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In 1881, members of a Russian revolutionary socialist organization calling itself The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) assassinated Tsar Alexander II. The monarchy, aiming to divert public attention from the populist group, employed its secret police, the Okhrana, and Russia’s antisemitic press, to stir up hatred against the Jews. Incited by the slogan, “Beat the Jews and save Russia,” and later, “God is with us,” pogroms broke out across Russia.

That history comes to mind with the behavior of some Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In a cruel irony, their hatred toward Palestinians of all kinds is reminiscent of those days. The thugs, murderers, arsonists, and looters are Jews, who also believe that God is with them.

The organization that was supposed to act with full force against such Jewish terrorism is Israel’s domestic counterterrorism service, the Shin Bet, together with the army and the police. But today, as in Russia 145 years ago, the authorities have not only turned a blind eye to the violence, some have secretly encouraged it.

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Who’s Got a Secret? Evidently eager to claim credit for the rescue of that downed Air Force F-15 weapons officer from Iran, the CIA unveiled a covert action op and let it be known it “initiated a deception campaign to try to confuse Iranian forces and convince them the airman had already been rescued and was moving out of the country in a ground convoy,” an administration official told the New York Times and many others. The official also said, “Navy SEAL Team 6 commandos extracted the officer in a massive operation that involved hundreds of special operations troops and other military personnel.” An Air Force Warthog also took crippling fire during the search for the downed F-15 crew, with its pilot bailing out over Kuwait. All this followed Trump’s claim Tuesday in his national address that Iran has “no anti-aircraft equipment” and that their radar capabilities were “100% annihilated.”

Needs Improvement: U.S. intelligence has been superb at picking targets in Iran but not so good—awful, actually—in predicting the Islamic Republic’s response to the attacks, former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos and journalist-turned corporate risk analyzer Jeremy Hurewitz wrote Saturday at Just Security, pointing out what’s become obvious with every passing day. “First, the Islamic Regime has not fallen, which means the long-term threats it poses to its population and the world remain. More specifically, hardline elements appear to remain in control according to well-sourced Iranian diaspora reporting, and they are still fighting with daily ballistic missile and drone attacks against U.S. interests in [the] region, Israel, and the Gulf states. The Iranian leadership almost certainly feels that it is in a relatively solid position strategically as the energy crisis they have created through attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz is causing global economic disruptions.” On Sunday, Trump used “an expletive-laden social media post to taunt Iranian leaders,” as the New York Times put it, saying that the U.S. would destroy their civilian infrastructure if it didn’t release their stranglehold on Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” Trump roared on Truth Social early Easter morning. “JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Tulsi Tumult: For a spy agency boss, Tulsi Gabbard sure gets an unusual amount of attention—mostly of the unwelcome sort. Now, with Trump reportedly polling aides about a replacement for the DNI and ultra-MAGA agitator Laura Loomer on her case, her days would seem to be numbered.

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Most espionage aficionados are quite familiar with spy jargon like dead drops, brush passes, secret writing, and so forth. Experts and former practitioners, though, are familiar with a lesser-known element of the spy business, summed up in the acronym “MICE.” It stands for the various reasons that officials—say, Iranian nuclear scientists—turn coat: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. After reading an extraordinary piece about spy ops in The New Yorker magazine this week, I propose adding another letter—D, for death threats.

The idea came to mind about two-thirds the way through reporter David D. Kirkpatrick’s compelling deep dive into the tumultuous life, career, and travails of one Kevin Chalker, a former CIA operations officer who once played a key role in persuading Iranian nuclear scientists to defect—or be killed.

And he was very good at it, Chalker told Kirkpatrick, an assertion the writer corroborated with other sources.

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AS THE IRAN WAR DRAGS ON and the stated objectives for it remain shifting and unmet, tensions are mounting within Israel’s intelligence establishment—both between the Mossad and the Israeli Defense Forces, and between Israel and some parts of the U.S. intelligence community and White House.

This is reflected in published reports that sources within the IDF’s Military Intelligence service and its Operations Directorate, along with officials in the White House, were behind a New York Times story last week claiming that Mossad chief David Barnea had assessed, prior to the war, that his service “would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition—igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government.”

“That Hasn’t Happened,” the incriminating Times headline blared.

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One of the biggest mysteries surrounding President Trump’s plans for a $400 million ballroom where the White House East Wing once stood appears close to being resolved: The envisioned new structure will include a “massive” new underground military bunker to protect officials from drone attacks, replacing the underground bomb shelter that had been sitting there largely unnoticed for more than 80 years.

The fate of the existing shelter, originally constructed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, has been a backdrop to the controversy that has raged for months over Trump’s demolition of the East Wing.

But new details about the president’s plans—revealed Sunday night by Trump himself—point to a remodeled and enlarged underground facility designed in part for the new era of drone warfare.

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Dagan’s Warning: The legendary late Mossad boss Meir Dagan warned publicly back in 2011 that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intent to launch a military campaign against Iranian nuclear sites was “a stupid idea” and risked “a regional war in which Iran and also Hezbollah will launch missiles.” Dagan, chiefly responsible for launching Mossad’s campaign of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists decades ago, added later that, “If Israel were to attack, [Iranian Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei would thank Allah: It would unite the Iranian people behind the project and enable Khamenei to say that he must get himself an atom bomb to defend Iran against Israeli aggression.” Tom Griffin, author of State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory: From Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism, reminded us of these previously reported remarks Sunday by way of revisiting last week’s New York Times report saying that the current Mossad chief, David Barnea, had forecast that “his service would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government.” The surfacing of Barnea’s—let’s say, premature—prediction, wrote Griffin, appeared to be just another chapter in “the Washington blame game over the Iran War, [whose] recriminations have extended to Tel Aviv.” Meanwhile, Reuters is reporting that Washington can only say “with certainty that it has destroyed about a third of Iran’s vast missile arsenal” after four weeks of bombing. Some 50,000 U.S. troops are now in the region for an impending sortie into Iran.

Intel Paradox: There’s been no shortage of intelligence on Iran, writes Yonatan Touval, a foreign-policy analyst and writer based in Tel Aviv. “The spy craft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive,” he noted Sunday in the New York Times. “Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered ‘target-production machine’ capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That,” he concluded, “is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.”

And yet: Trump and Netanyahu ignored all the warnings from the likes of Meir Dagan and countless experts since that a military campaign was unlikely to “obliterate” Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon (as Trump famously and falsely claimed last June), much less result in regime change. “[N]ever has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing.” Touval wrote. “They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.”

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Michael Patrick Mulroy—”Mick” to all who know him—has been a Marine, a highly decorated CIA paramilitary officer, and a deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in the first two years of the first Trump administration.

President Trump, he said on this week’s SpyTalk podcast, is between the ol’ rock and a hard place with his four week lon…

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When unidentified drones recently flew over Ft. McNair, a residential military base in Washington, D.C. where Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had moved for security concerns this year, it made real the possibility of an Iranian retaliation on American soil.

The threats, soon after the joint U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran in early March, weren’t exclusive to this base. At bases in Florida and New Jersey, the military elevated its force protection protocol to “Charlie,” the highest alert before an actual attack, according to The Washington Post.

The FBI also warned police departments in California that Iran could retaliate for American attacks by launching drones at the West Coast, according to an alert reviewed by ABC News.

As the military ramps up security protocols to address threats, so do cities and municipalities. But the nation’s largest city, New York City, has a much, much greater capacity to head off threats, and the leadership with experience to match.

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A wise editor once quipped to me that one definition of news is stuff that people have forgotten.

So it might come as news to President Trump and Pete Hegseth, the so-called Secretary of War, that the Pentagon carried out war games simulating an attack on Iran years ago and it didn’t go so well. In fact, it was a disaster.

Maybe Trump and Hegseth haven’t forgotten them. Maybe they’ve never known, or been briefed, on it.

Whatever, with the 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force kitting up to join the 31st Marine Expedition Unit for what looks like an invasion of Iran’s coastal islands, or maybe more, there’s not a minute to spare for them to dig up the report.

Lucky for them, there’s not much digging to do.

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is urging Defense Department civilians to help out ICE and the Customs and Border Patrol agency on a voluntary basis.

“I encourage all who are interested to volunteer for this detail opportunity,” Hegseth said in a little-noticed Feb. 19 memorandum. ”Supporting interior immigration enforcement actions, apprehending illegal aliens and securing our borders are vital to the national security of the United States.”

In another appeal for volunteers last Thursday, Timothy D. Dill, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower & Reserve Affairs, wrote that he was “renewing the call for additional dedicated civil servant volunteers to meet continued mission-critical roles in support of DHS.”

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