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.

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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...”

It was CIA Director John Ratcliffe who recommended Clayton to Trump, said the New York Times, making it an unusual case of someone picking their own boss. Sweetening his chances, Clayton went on CNBC June 8 to question California’s elections integrity after the GOP candidate lost the race for mayor of L.A. He’ll certainly face sharp questioning about that and more in his confirmation hearing, if only by Democrats, starting with his questionable qualifications for the job, which by law requires a nominee to have “extensive national security experience.” (He does not.) It’s likely he’ll also be asked about his handling of the Justice Department’s Epstein files. In Nov. 2025, then-A.G. Pam Bondi announced she’d appointed Clayton to find connections between Democrats and the late pedophile. With the spectre of Pulte looming over the hearings, though, Clayton may well get a swift confirmation despite his baggage and lack of required “extensive” experience.

Tulsi’s Long Goodbye: The outgoing DNI, resigning to help her husband cope with a wicked cancer diagnosis, left chocolates and a turd on her way out the door this week, depending on your point of view. Longstanding victims of the so-called Havana Syndrome attacks got a present in the form of her revocation of “two Biden-era intelligence assessments that cast doubt on the idea that the mysterious ailments … were caused by a foreign adversary…” which she said in a memo “had improperly excluded evidence, suppressed alternative analyses and relied on an ethically flawed medical study.” Former senior CIA operations specialist Marc Polymeropoulos praised her decision, saying, “It is high time that the government finally came clean on accountability.” (New York Times)

On the other hand, Gabbard also gave new life to a long debunked Russian disinformation claim that the U.S. operated biological warfare labs in Ukraine and elsewhere. “ODNI will continue working with partners across the Administration to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what ‘research’ is being conducted,” the ODNI said. Christopher Miller, the Financial Times’ longtime chief correspondent in Kyiv and author of The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine, accused Gabbard of “us[ing] her platform and access to intelligence to perpetuate one of her and Russia’s favorite conspiracy theories, disingenuously twisting facts, deliberately misinforming the public and delivering a gift to the Kremlin.” He also mocked the slides and a map she released to support her claim, saying that “if the DNI can’t even get the location of Kyiv right on the map…then what care do you think she took with everything else?” Legendary Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev invited people to “read our investigation from 2025 where we presented evidence that the hybrid ops unit of GRU’s 29155 came up with the whole “bio-labs” concept—and co-opted Tulsi into it.”

Price of Pulte: Alarmed by Trump’s Pulte nod, the House adjourned Thursday without ratifying the extension of the NSA’s access to internet providers for warrantless electronic intel-gathering, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But it may be undead: “The law is clear that…the directives issued to companies …remain valid until their expiration date [in March], even if the underlying statute expires,” the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy and legal center, said in a one-page analysis.” (NBC)

CIA in Tren-dy Hit: The CIA supported the op earlier this week in Venezuela to kill Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, a founder of Tren de Aragua, officials said. “The Central Intelligence Agency, which has dedicated expanded resources to Latin America during President Trump’s second term, supplied the intelligence that led to the strike on Mr. Guerrero Flores, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the operation.” (New York Times)

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ICE Barbie to Haiti: Wondering what erstwhile DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is up to these days? Turns out the former South Dakota governor, whom Trump made a vague “special envoy” when he canned her over the bad publicity she and her ICE and the Border Control agencies had attracted, has been handed Haiti to straighten out. On Newsmax Saturday, Noem claimed “we’ve got some gang suppression forces” that will be deployed there.

Great Pretender: The senior CIA officer accused of squirrelling away some $42 million worth of gold bars, cash and countless luxury watches in his home as part of a phony super-secret op he set up, David John Rush, bragged about being a Top Gun Navy pilot (on top of everything else he lied about on his résumé) to fellow members of a volunteer fire department in rural Virginia. More seriously, “Rush had worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology and was a liaison to the Defense Department for a sensitive nuclear submarine program,” NBC News has reported. “He was given the assignment at the request of Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, with whom he had a close professional relationship over the years.”

Foxy Lady: Former Trump administration adviser, intelligence official and CIA operative Amaryllis Fox Kennedy helped her father secure at least $12M from a Russian investment bank that cooperated with the Kremlin, according to leaked documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Reporters (ICIJ). “Kennedy, a former CIA officer, was involved in the deal in 2009 and 2010 as head of an offshore corporation owned by her father,” Hodson Thornber, said the consortium. “She was employed as a spy during those years.” Kennedy was involved in an effort “on behalf of her father to pressure a Moscow-based investment bank to fulfill a 2008 agreement to pay roughly $30 million for Helios’ shares in a large Ukrainian agricultural company,” the ICIJ alleged. “The Russian bank, Renaissance Capital, included former senior Russian intelligence officers in its top ranks.” Kennedy, daughter-in-law of HHS Secretary RFK, Jr. denied involvement in “any deals related to the farm business or Ukraine,” adding, “I’ve never met any of the people involved, nor ever visited Ukraine.”

Long Reach of Mossad: Outgoing Mossad boss David Barnea carried out a “restructuring” that “enabled the Mossad to carry out dozens of operations simultaneously, compared to earlier periods when it could focus on only one or two major operations at a time,” a former agency official told The Jerusalem Post. The Trump administration last week leaked a report compiled by the DIA and other military intelligence entities saying that “the counterintelligence threat level posed by Israel had been increased in recent weeks to the top level, from high to critical.” It also said the Israelis were eavesdropping on peace talks between U.S. envoys, Iran and Pakistan.

Long Reach of Mossad II: France has accused Israeli firm of interfering in Scottish elections and targeting the Scottish National Party. The disinformation detection agency Viginum said the Israeli firm BlackCore “had this year used proxy social media accounts to target” Scottish First Minister John Swinney, the SNP, and the Scottish government “on four occasions.” (Guardian)

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Beijing Bait: The DOJ and FBI have disabled 13 job-offering websites aimed at “current and former security clearance holders with access to classified and sensitive U.S. government information” that they said were “backed by suspected Chinese agents.” Among the suspect platforms were Upwork, Expertia AI, Hubstaff Talent, Wellfound, and Post Job Free. (DOJ)

U.S. Citizen Arrested on Spy Charge in China: Burmese-American scholar Min Zin, was arrested by authorities in China on suspicion of spying, China’s foreign ministry said Friday. “It is uncommon for Beijing to arrest a U.S. citizen on national security allegations,” the A.P. reported. An associate of Zin said “he disappeared June 3 after going to Kunming, in China’s Yunnan province, for a conference.”

Spy Fish: China’s Ministry of State Security claimed Friday that foreign espionage and intelligence agencies are using “large marine animals” to spy on its coastal waters. “Among the espionage techniques being used, it claimed, were large marine animals, including ‘spy turtles’ and ‘spy fish,’ that had been found ‘attached to sensors’ as they swam in Chinese waters,” according to the Guardian. The animals were “collecting sensitive marine environment data such as water temperature, salinity and ocean currents in real time, and transmitting them overseas via satellite,” the MSS said, “without providing specifics about where the animals had been found, or who had equipped them.” The Navy freely admits it “trains bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to detect, locate, mark and recover objects in harbors, coastal areas, and at depth in the open sea.” During a May 5 Pentagon briefing, a reporter asked about reports of “kamikaze dolphins” deployed by Iran’s military in the Strait of Hormuz. “I haven’t heard the kamikaze dolphin thing,” Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replied, “wondering aloud if the idea was similar to ‘sharks with laser beams,’ a wry reference to the early-aughts’ Austin Powers movies.” (Business Insider)

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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Cascades of shock, astonishment, disdain, intrigue and speculation swirled Wednesday over a blockbuster report that Israel plotted to return former hardline Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power as part of its regime-change plan for Tehran in the first days of the Iran war.

“This is without doubt one of the craziest stories I have ever covered, if not topping the list,” said Ronen Bergman, a member of the New York Times reporting team that broke the story of high level intrigue late Tuesday night, in a note to his followers accompanying his distribution of the piece.

The plan, according to sources who spoke to the Times, was for U.S.-Israeli air strikes to decapitate the regime’s leaders and at the same time kill off guards keeping Ahmadinejad, who’d fallen out of favor with Ayatollah Khamenei and senior leadership, under virtual house arrest. With the former president freed, then, supposedly, Kurds armed by the U.S. would be mobilized to invade Iran and head toward Tehran, where they’d add to the unrest and help topple the government. Ahmadinejad, widely rumored inside Iran to be a secret Israeli asset, an expat expert told SpyTalk, would then take power.

“[T]he Israeli plan foresaw a combination of influence campaigns carried out by Israel and the Kurdish invasion creating political instability in Iran and a sense that the regime was losing control,” reported the Times. “In a third stage, the regime, under intense political pressure and the weight of damage to key infrastructure like electricity, would collapse, allowing for what the Israelis referred to as an ‘alternative government’ to be established.”

The scheme seemed laced with mind-boggling paradoxes and intrigues. The new regime would be headed by Ahmadinejad, whose two terms as president, from 2005 to 2013, were marked by a severe crackdown on political dissent, an expansion of uranium stocks, and inflammatory rhetoric directed at the U.S. and especially Israel, which he would only refer to as a “Zionist regime” that had to be “eliminated.”

Since then, however, his views had dramatically softened, says Hooman Majd, an Iranian-born American journalist, author, and political commentator focused on Iranian affairs, who served as a translator for Ahmadinejad on his trips to the United Nations.

“Over the last few years, he had sort of changed his stance on being anti-Zionist. He even gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper, for example, which is a big no-no for an Iranian politician,” Majd, author of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran and other books on the regime, told SpyTalk in an interview. “There is not a single Iranian politician who’s ever done that, and certainly no Iranian president would ever do that, former or otherwise”—which prompted questions about his loyalty and eventually led to what amounted to his house arrest and jailing of his political aides.

Suspected Treachery

Rumors swirled that Ahmadinejad was not just disenchanted with the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei but had been secretly working for Israel all along, Majd said. The whispered, convoluted reasoning went that his extremist presidency, which had effectively derailed warming relations with the U.S. and Europe under his predecessor Mohammad Khatami, served only to bolster Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign for regime change.

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Witt’s Run: The defection of former Air Force intelligence specialist and OSI agent Monica Witt to Iran was revealed by the Justice Department in 2019, so it’s not clear why the FBI ballyhooed this week that it was offering $200,000 for information leading to her capture (unless it was an attempt to deflect attention from yet another report on the unbecoming behavior of Director Kash Patel.) Witt is believed to have converted to Islam and defected to Iran in 2012-2013. The pattern of her evolution from a Farsi-trained, airborne cryptologist to ideological defector got an interesting treatment from the Warsaw-based law firm Skarbiec, in “The Sergeant Who Became Fatemah Zahra.”

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On June 13 of last year, an Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missile with a warhead containing 4,000 pounds of high explosives evaded Israel’s air defenses and scored a direct hit on the headquarters of the IDF’s air force, located in a high rise tower just outside central Tel Aviv’s Kiriya Defense Ministry complex. Jerusalem’s military censors prevented Israeli media from identifying the heavily damaged building, but two trusted sources confirmed it housed the air force headquarters.

Was it a lucky hit, or a harbinger of what was to come? Israel’s much-heralded success in knocking Iranian missiles—and drones—out of the sky during 2025’s 12-day war initially suggested the Kiriya strike may have been a fluke.

But it later emerged that Iranian missiles also had hit five Israeli military bases during that brief war, according to data published this past March by Oregon State University, which tracks bomb damage in war zones via satellites.

Those bases included the sprawling Glilot complex just north of Tel Aviv, which houses the headquarters of nearly all the services making up Israel’s intelligence community. Another was the Tel Nof air force base in the south of the country, where Israel’s squadrons of F-35 warplanes are hangared. The damage inflicted by those strikes, too, went unreported. And only in late March did The New York Times reveal the extent of destruction that Iranian missiles and drones wrought on U.S military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Those Iranian missile strikes should have cautioned President Trump on the ease with which he expected to defeat Iran. It’s not that the information was unavailable to him.

Indeed, in its 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted that Iran “continues to bolster the lethality and precision of its domestically produced missile and UAV systems, and it has the largest stockpiles of these systems in the region.” The threat assessment went on to note that Iran’s missiles and drones “can strike throughout the region.”

Asked if Trump had been briefed on the size and precision of Iran’s missile arsenal before going to war, Norman T. Roule, a former senior CIA officer who served as the national intelligence manager for Iran, said he had no specific information about such briefings. But he added: “U.S. military and civilian intelligence analysts would be expected to monitor closely the size, nature, and capabilities of Iran’s missile arsenal, ensuring that such assessments are immediately available to senior policymakers and warfighters when required for their planning.”

“The Trump administration grossly miscalculated who they were fighting and the enemy’s capabilities across the board,” said Thomas Joscelyn, an expert on Iran and a senior fellow at JustSecurity.org, produced by the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.

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President Trump appeared to shrug off an alarming surge in Chinese espionage and cyber assaults on the U.S., suggesting to reporters aboard Air Force One winging home on Thursday that he and Xi Jinping traded slight complaints about the other’s covert operations but didn’t linger on the subject.

Asked whether he raised China’s aggressive cyber infiltrations of U.S. government agencies and infrastructure during their talks, Trump said, “I did. And he talked about attacks that we did in China. Y’know, what they do, we do too.”

“They’re talking about the spying. Well, we do it too,” he said. “We spy like hell on them too.”

“I told him, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about and you’re doing things to us that we probably do know about,’” Trump added.

The president’s casual brushoff of record-setting Chinese espionage threats was a sharp departure from one of his major campaign themes in 2016 and again in 2020, when he repeatedly denounced China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property.

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Beyond a thirst for global domination, ambitious strongmen share a desperate need to manipulate history to bolster their legitimacy. This obsession with the past is at the heart of Stephan Talty’s compelling new book, The American School of Spies, The Archaeologists Who Fought the Nazis and Saved the Treasures of Ancient Greece.

As the Wehrmacht swept across Europe during World War II, Adolf Hitler obsessed over a fantasy: that his “Aryan” race had its true roots with the gods of ancient Greece. This unfounded belief was the cornerstone of “Germania,” a colossal reimagining of Berlin intended to be the capital of a Thousand-Year Reich, a city of classical-themed statues, arches and monuments—a despot’s plan for a permanent memorial to himself.

When his onslaught across Europe reached Athens in April 1941, Hitler dispatched teams of German archaeologists across the Greek archipelago to search for proof of their Aryan soul. (“Aryan” is an ancient Sanskrit term meaning “noble,” or “civilized,” which became popular among white 19th-century European racial theorists.)

“The Nazi classicists,” writes Talty, “set to work, digging their pickaxes into the Greek soil in order to finally prove that ancient Greece had been founded by Aryan people.”

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Sin City: During a visit to the Vatican this week in an effort to smooth over his boss’s feud with Pope Leo, Secretary of State (and double-hatted National Security Adviser) Marco Rubio took umbrage at a reporter’s question about how President Trump could say the U.S. and Iran are maintaining a ceasefire when they’re shooting at each other. “Only stupid countries don’t shoot back when you’re shot at,” Rubio said. “And we’re not a stupid country.”

Then again, “before the war began the U.S. Intel Community, including CIA, was in agreement that Iran wasn’t developing a nuclear weapon & that Iran would target U.S. bases in the region & shut down the Strait of Hormuz if they were attacked by Israel & the U.S.,” former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent wrote Thursday on X, saying that the reasons Trump went ahead with the war anyway needed to be investigated.

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Ever since Vladimir Putin first became president of Russia more than a quarter century ago, biographers and journalists have never failed to take note of his roots as a young KGB agent based in East Germany.

But in recent weeks, amid rum…

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