Headhunters: Mossad and the CIA are “obsessed” with hunting down and killing Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. So says The Times of London.

Panetta on Iran War: The U.S. is locked into an “unwinnable war” with Iran that has no clear end, former CIA Director (and SecDef) Leon Panetta said. He compared the ongoing military operation to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The Hill)

Eviction Notice: Acting DNI Bill Pulte is reportedly resigned to vacating his office, reports Politico. Pulte had asked Trump “to delay Clayton’s swearing-in, or at least [let him] stay in the job longer,” a White House official told Politico earlier in the week, “arguing his mission of majorly reshaping the agency had not yet come to a close.” Last week Pulte boasted about “executing a 5th and Near Final Round of TERMINATIONS” at ODNI, “an approximately 30% Staff Reduction from Weeks Ago.” Jay Clayton, whose DNI nomination was finally confirmed by the Senate after a contentious hearing that raised troubling questions about his fealty to Trump over the law, is planning to move in Monday.

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In September, 2022, powerful underwater explosions blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that had been built to provide Russian gas to Germany in what’s been called the most massive act of industrial sabotage in history. But for years its origins were a mystery, spurring multiple conspiracy theories about who might have been responsible – from the CIA to the Russians themselves. In 2023, Bojan Pancevski , chief European correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, began breaking stories about the affair, and now he’s pulled them—and much more—together in a riveting new book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, that identifies the culprits as a shadowy group of Ukrainian operatives which he dubs The Start Up, with loose ties to their embattled country’s military and intelligence services. In this week’s SpyTalk podcast, he talked to Jeff Stein and Michael Isikoff about what he discovered, what the CIA actually knew in advance about the operation, and what’s going on in an ongoing German police investigation that has charged a key perpetrator with war crimes. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Stein: Bojan Pancevski, welcome to Spy Talk. A reviewer for the New York Times called your book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, “a spectacular feat of investigative journalism built on your intimate access to the senior Ukrainian intelligence chiefs who say they hatched the idea.” Tell us all about this group of Ukrainian chiefs who you dubbed The Startup.

Pancevski: So the people I call The Startup are veterans of intelligence and counterintelligence work. Some of them have been around for 25 years. And others are soldiers and military officers who’ve been fighting against Russia since 2014, when Vladimir Putin first invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. And as soon as the full scale invasion was launched on their country in February 2022, they all joined the armed forces. They were fighting in the Battle of Kyiv for a month, the capital. So they were integrated into this elite unit of the Ukrainian special forces. And with that unit, they kind of carved up their fiefdom.

Stein: They were rogues, really.

Pancevski: Essentially, within the intelligence community, which is vast, you have groups of people and officials at a very senior level who are being sponsored or patronized by oligarchs, by business interests, by politicians, by political parties. These people are beneath the surface. And they form networks. So it’s not very unusual to have a group of people who are operating under the central command of the military but only to a certain point. There are moments when they do their own thing. And perhaps they don’t report everything they do. It’s a very difficult thing to explain to an American or a British person or a German person for that matter, where things are much more regulated.

Stein: I want to clear out some underbrush right away. The CIA was blamed for carrying out this operation. The Russians were blamed for carrying it out. There was a cast of characters blamed. You make an airtight case—and the Germans are prosecuting a case—that it was this group of Ukrainians, right? No question whatsoever.

Pancevski: That’s exactly right. I spent three years investigating the case. My investigation is corroborated by the findings of the German investigation. The Germans have found evidence they say implicates people connected to this group. They have found traces of explosives, they have found DNA, they have found fingerprints.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of reporting which is entirely wrong about the CIA involvement, but it’s sort of caught on. And there’s a pretty big group of people who are willing to believe in it because it’s quite convenient to blame the CIA for everything if you come from a certain political perspective.

Isikoff: It seemed to me that the people you’re writing about fall into this gray zone of, not quite official, but not quite entirely rogue either. Walk us through the story of how this came about to begin with. And who came up with the idea for such an audacious operation such as this?

Pancevski: As soon as the Battle of Kyiv was done, around a month into the full scale invasion, they kind of sat down one night in the office of one of the backers, financial backers of this group—I failed to mention earlier a lot of units in the Ukrainian Armed Forces are privately funded.

Isikoff: And could you say who that financial backer was?

Pancevski: No. I don’t name anyone by their actual name. In the book I call him “the walking lawsuit” because he’s had encounters with the law in various shapes and forms, although he himself served in government in a very senior position.

So they drafted a list of targets, which they thought would be relevant for cutting the revenues that Vladimir Putin was deriving from Europe for his war machine that was kind of grinding down their country. And pretty much all of them had to do with the export or the exploitation of hydrocarbons, oil and gas, because that’s one of the main sources of revenues for the state budget of Russia.

Stein: Germany was supplying them with billions of dollars, buying Russian oil and gas.

Pancevski: That’s right. They were sending literally billions to Vladimir Putin, which is extraordinary. Germany and the EU were sending money and weapons to Ukraine to basically kill the Russian invaders. At the same time, they were sending billions to Russia, which Russia used to equip its army and kill Ukrainians. So the Ukrainians who were planning this decided they need to put an end to that. They had a list of about a dozen targets, and one of them was the Nord Stream pipeline system, which they had known and hated for a very long time.

It was an extremely controversial project in Europe. Nord Stream is the biggest offshore pipeline system in the world. It took around 15 years to build. It cost around 20 billion dollars. For Germany and its western European sort of neighbors, it was a source of cheap gas—and what’s not to like? For countries like the United States, Great Britain, Poland, and Ukraine, it was a dangerous geopolitical instrument devised by Vladimir Putin to kind of bind Europe closer to himself and make Europe reliant, if not addicted to, Russian energy exports.

Stein: I want to talk about a couple of the colorful characters in your book who were part of the sabotage team. Tell us about one who was called “the mysterious woman behind the Nord Stream explosion,” a civilian diving instructor from Ukraine.

Pancevski: So the plan was conceived and carried out by a group of intelligence and military operatives, but they couldn’t find deep sea divers who could go to the bottom of the ocean, which is around eighty meters below the surface. They couldn’t find combat divers in their special forces with that skill set. So they decided to recruit civilians because Ukraine had a pretty significant community of deep sea divers. And among these people who ended up being recruited for the operation was the sole woman who was part of the sabotage team. And she too, like the rest of them, was an internationally certified deep sea diver instructor. She had at that point, almost 20 years experience in deep sea diving.

Stein: Her background did not exactly cut her out to be involved in this kind of military operation, right?

Bojan Pancevski: Well, like all of them, she’s an extremely interesting figure. When she was young—I don’t want to reduce her to that, but when she was around 20, she posed for erotic magazine covers and stuff like that. That was around the time when she discovered diving, actually. That was a long time ago. It’s just something she did in her youth. She was an erotic model.

These people are larger than life. So she was part of the crew that was selected to blow up the pipelines, and they used a sailing yacht as a cover, a small sailing yacht called Andromeda, which they rented out in Germany. So they set sail from German shores and they had initially a crew of six—three military officers and three deep sea divers, including the woman. Later on, three days before the end of the operation, another diver joined them.

Stein: And she was first into the water.

Pancevski: Right. She turned out to be the most motivated and she kind of showed leadership in difficult situations. They were diving towards the end of September, which can be a stormy period in the Baltic region and they ran out into a pretty serious gale storm. They had to take shelter in Sweden unexpectedly and without having planned that in advance. They were kind of washed upwards towards South Sweden, where they spent four days in ports sheltering, and the storm just wouldn’t subside. And it was the woman who motivated the all-male crew to go ahead because they were not quite sure they were already risking their lives in what they were doing.

Isikoff: I do want to just point out the magnitude of what was done here. And one passage in your book leapt out at me. When the pipeline was blown up, it unleashed “nearly 500,000 metric tons of methane, the largest ever human-caused gas release into the atmosphere, matching the annual carbon footprint of a small industrial nation. The power of the blast equaled the thermal output of a major nuclear reactor. Marine life perished for miles.” I’m just trying to contemplate the amount of explosives that were needed to pull this off.

Pancevski: That’s the interesting bit. A lot of experts made an initial error to estimate that five hundred kilograms of TNT would have been required to cause that level of damage because the explosion was incredibly violent. I mean, it was first registered by the early warning system for earthquakes as an earthquake. But the truth is, it was an ingenious device constructed by a retired professor of engineering in Ukraine, whom the people who planned the attack tapped. And he came up with this idea. He studied how pipelines work, and he said essentially the pipeline is highly pressurized. You’ve got the pressure of the water on top of the pipeline. You only need a tiny amount of explosion to kind of cut a slice into the pipeline. One explosive device was around thirty, forty kilograms. It’s not much. It’s something you can carry on your back. They were concealed in sort of canisters, in kind of divers bottles. But the event was incredibly violent. Gas kept pouring out for over a week.

Stein: How deep was the CIA’s knowledge and monitoring of this operation?

Pancevski: So this is what happened. The people who planned the operation were very seasoned intelligence operatives from Ukraine, and they had worked closely with the CIA since around 2014 [when] the pro Russian government was swept away, and it kind of opened the doors to Western agencies, including the CIA, to help them defend themselves from the Russians. So these guys were very closely working with the CIA to the point that they even visited Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the agency. That’s I think in 2018. They also had been doing the same with Polish, with Swedish, with other Western intelligence services. So when they sat down to plan the technicalities of the operation and figure out the tradecraft, they realized they had never worked at the bottom of the sea. So they sought advice and guidance from friendly field agents from these agencies, including the CIA. So they approached a guy with whom they had friendly relations who worked for the CIA and asked them how to do something like this. The guy gave them a couple of pointers and a couple of guidelines. And they were entirely useless because what he had proposed would have cost them millions of dollars involving undersea drones and ships and things like that. That’s the way the Americans would do it, right? With high tech, etc.

Stein: Lots of money. We’re good at that.

Pancevski: And Ukrainians were—thank you very much. We don’t have these resources. How about we just use a small yacht and a bunch of civilians? And that’s what they did in the end. But in the midst of their planning, shortly before they were about to execute the operation—it was initially planned to be executed on the 19th of June 2022—the Dutch Military Intelligence Service got wind of the project. The Dutch Military Intelligence Service is an extremely capable outfit.

They got human intelligence about the project and they notified the CIA in an encrypted memo where they outlined the plan and even named some of the personalities involved. And as soon as that happened, it went all the way up to the top to William Burns, who was head of the agency at the time.

And he personally and others ordered that this be stopped and that the Germans be warned about what was happening because they thought this was a terrible idea.

Stein: Why did they think it was a terrible idea?

Pancevski: Well, because at the time Burns was tasked by President Biden to get the German chancellor, who at the time was Olaf Scholz, to actually unleash a kind of a much more substantial help for Ukraine. It had the so-called Leopard tanks. There was a big debate about Leopard tanks because at that stage of the war before the drones came, tanks were important, armor was important for the front line. And Biden was trying to get them to send these tanks. And he specifically tasked William Burns, who was a frequent visitor to Berlin, and he even had meetings with the chancellor to kind of lobby him to do this. So when they found out that someone’s trying to blow up the pipeline, they realized if this happens and word gets around, the chancellor will be under pressure politically to not help Ukraine. And therefore they thought it’s not worth paying that price. It’s absolutely not worth it. It’s much more important to get Germany on board as a reliable ally to shoulder the burden financially and in terms of material rather than blow up the pipeline. That was the decision made. And immediately they did warn the Germans. This is documented. They warned the external intelligence agency, the BND, and they also warned the internal security agency. Both of them are communicating with the CIA. And then they went to the Ukrainians and warned them not to do it.

They even went as far as to target specifically a senior officer who was involved in the plot, a four-star general who was personally approached by the CIA and told to commit in writing that he will not do this, that this operation will not go ahead and which he promptly did. He committed in writing. But then they went ahead and did it anyway. So that was the involvement of the CIA.

Stein: And then afterwards they put out a lot of lies about or encouraged lies that the Russians had done it.

Pancevski: Well that’s the other chapter of the story. There was a lot of so- called disinformation and misinformation. Germany, America and other Western allies were very quick off the bat to point the finger at Russia, although they knew it wasn’t Russia.

Isikoff: So if this went to such senior levels that the director of the CIA is personally trying to put a stop to this and the United States government is warning the Ukrainians, don’t do it, it’s hard to believe President Zelenskyy himself would not have been aware of this.

Pancevski: So Zelenskyy denies any knowledge of the operation. He says he was never notified by the military or by the Americans or by anyone. His advisors tell the same. I spoke to one of his advisors who’s in charge of the Nord Stream portfolio now. He said they maybe contacted our services, maybe they called at a technical level, but it never reached the presidential office.

Isikoff: Does that strike you as credible? If the director of the CIA himself is personally involved in trying to put a stop to this, how could it not have gone to the president?

Pancevski: Hey, look, anything’s possible. Zelenskyy is on the record hating the pipeline, like pretty much all Ukrainian officials. The then-head of the armed forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, is now ambassador to Great Britain. People around Zeluzhni, senior military officers, say that he had at one point notified President Zelenskyy about what was happening, that he briefed him on a series of operations, including the Nord Stream operation. Zelenskyy denies that, and his people deny that in very strong terms. So, you know, we’ll see.

Isikoff: So the idea that the CIA was behind this seems to me comes in part from Biden himself. He was president at the time, when the question of the Nordstrom pipeline came up, he said, you know, that’s not gonna happen, we will bring an end to it. So that seemed to give motivation to the U.S. government. It was committed to stopping this pipeline.

Pancevski: Yeah, Biden was the president of the United States in January 2022 He had a joint press conference with the then-chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, in the Oval. And he was asked about Nord Stream 2 because Nord Stream 2 was about to get certified and come online just before the full scale invasion. And he said if Putin marches into Ukraine, we’ll put an end to it. And then there was a follow-up question: how will you do that? And he said, Don’t worry, we’ll do it, we’ll put an end to it. What he meant was sanctions. He didn’t mean to blow it up. There’s no need to blow up a pipeline if you’re the United States of America. The pipeline at this very moment is dead as dodo, not because it’s blown up. It’s because it’s sanctioned by the United States and by the European Union. Ever since the incident, Putin has been trying to repair the pipelines and to bring them back online. But that’s not possible because they are under sanctions. Repairing them is absolutely impossible.

So it’s kind of lunacy to think that Biden would go on television and say we’ll blow up the pipelines. You know, why would he do that, right?

Isikoff: One of the legendary investigative reporters of all time, Seymour Hersh wrote a lengthy article claiming to have inside sources saying that this was all approved at the White House by the National Security Council. and that obviously fueled a lot of the thinking the CIA was behind this.

Pancevski: We had a very, very long phone call…that was a bit of a disappointment. Obviously he’s a legendary figure and much respected. But he seems to have one source. He made claims which are entirely outlandish. He named certain ships and vessels and assets in his reporting, and open source investigators found that these ships were elsewhere at the time. They were not even there where they were meant to be. So that’s rather disappointing. I don’t know, maybe he was misled by a source. Maybe it was a rogue source, potentially. I mean, who knows?

Isikoff: Tell us about the German police investigation, where that stands, who’s in custody, who’s not in custody, and how high up the chain can this go? If there were senior people in the Ukrainian government who signed off on this, had knowledge of it, it would seem that they would be within the orbit of this investigation.

Pancevski: What’s happened so far is that the German prosecutor issued international arrest warrants for the seven people they claim were on the sabotage boat who were part of the sabotage crew. For some of them, they have fingerprints, they have DNA samples, they have pictures taken by speed cameras. They have witness testimonies in some cases. So that’s hard evidence. They have arrested a man in Italy who was there on holiday with his family, and he was transferred to Germany and he’s awaiting trial. He’s been charged for having been the leader of the sabotage group, and he’s been charged with several counts, Including war crimes. Now that’s interesting. It’s a very severe charge. Why war crimes? It’s because I think the prosecutors of Germany are trying to preempt the defense, saying this was a military operation, and therefore this individual cannot be tried in a civilian court of law because he has what is known as combatant immunity. The German prosecutor jumps over that argument and says, okay, this was war. It was an illegitimate target. This is a pipeline that was servicing us. It’s not a Russian pipeline. It’s away from the frontline, etc. And therefore, this is a war crime. I don’t think these arguments have ever been tested in a court of law

But what is now interestingly happening is that prosecutors in Ukraine have also opened the case. And this is a very political issue. Nobody quite understands what they want to do with this, but there is a theory that President Zelenskyy would be keen on General Zaluzhnyi being fingered as part of this operation if Zeluzhny becomes a candidate who would challenge him in the presidential elections. So there is a theory that the investigation on the Ukrainian side might be designed to kind of roll up people under Zaluzhnyi and prevent him from running for president. What I do know is when I put this to Zoluzhnyi’s people, they said, ‘Bring it on, let them do it, and if they do it, we’ll put it on billboards before the election, because whoever blew up the pipeline will be a hero to the voters in Ukraine.”

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The Senate confirmed Jay Clayton to be director of National Intelligence on a party-line vote Tuesday evening, a move evidently driven by the twin urgencies of reviving a controversial electronic surveillance law and ridding the agency of Bill Pulte, a Trump sycophant who boasted hours earlier of carrying out a “fifth and final” round of mass firings during his nearly two-months tenure as acting director.

The exact number of DNI employees let go has not been disclosed, but last week The Washington Post reported that the “ODNI had about 2,000 employees at the start of Trump’s second term,” adding, “It is now little more than half that size, according to congressional aides.” Since Pulte took office, ODNI has lost about 200 personnel to firings and reassignments.

“Good News!” Pulte posted on his social media account Tuesday morning, according to Politico. “In addition to the Historic DECLASSIFICATIONS (Transparency!) by the President, we are, this morning, Executing a 5th and Near Final Round of TERMINATIONS, an approximately 30% Staff Reduction from Weeks Ago.” Added Pulte, “The Intelligence Community must protect the American people, NOT the political whims of the bloated and corrupt elite class.”

Democrats initially welcomed the nomination of Clayton, most recently a top federal prosecutor in New York, despite his lack of the “extensive national security expertise” mandated by law, if only because they were alarmed by the tenure of Pulte, who had used his position as head of the obscure Federal Housing Finance Agency to launch spurious investigations of Biden appointees and other Democrats. But they soured on Clayton during his conformation hearing when he refused to state plainly that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, as well as left open the possibility that he might get (improperly) involved in reviewing election ballots like his predecessor Tulsi Gabbard.

"Having known and worked with Jay for years, I was encouraged when he was first nominated for the position of DNI, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a statement Tuesday. “Unfortunately, I came away from his confirmation process with serious reservations about whether he would be willing to stand up to political pressure when it matters most." Warner said he hoped Clayton would prove his concerns “unfounded, because the Intelligence Community deserves steadier leadership than it has received in recent months.”

With the its August recess looming, it’s unlikely the Senate will take up renewal of the electronic surveillance program, known as FISA Section 702, until its return Sept. 11.

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Crunch Time: Any enthusiasm Democrats once had for Jay Clayton to head U.S. intelligence evaporated last week with the nominee’s wishy-washy testimony at his confirmation hearing, where, like other nominees President Trump has sent to Capitol Hill, he not only refused to state plainly that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but left open the possibility that he might (improperly) get involved in vote counting like his predecessor Tulsi Gabbard. “In question after question, Clayton made his loyalty to the president clear. That approach appeared to unnerve Democrats, who predicted that Trump would ask Clayton to help him improperly sway, discredit or steal this fall’s midterm elections,” MS NOW’s David Rohde reported. With the extended absence of the mysteriously ailing Sen. Mitch McConnell, that gives Republicans only a three vote margin to push Clayton over the finish line. Trump didn’t make it easier for them, “delivering a TV speech from the White House “in which he again tried to cast doubts on that election and amplified debunked theories about Biden’s win,” the A.P. reported. “Clayton told senators that he had no involvement with that speech,” which the president amplified again in his crudely partisan remarks at the White House Correspondents Association dinner Friday night. On Monday July 27, The Steady State, an organization of some 400 former national security officials, called on the Senate to reject Clayton’s nomination. “Mr. Clayton has consistently shown an unwillingness to draw clear lines between the interests of the Intelligence Community and the political interests of the President who nominated him, it said in a statement.

Whither Ratcliffe? Trump’s continuing assault on the 2020 election results ostensibly puts CIA Director John Ratcliffe in an awkward position, since he was director of National Intelligence during the 2020 elections and oversaw its classified formal assessment that there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.” Not only that, the IC investigation found that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US”—another finding that Trump vehemently disputes. In his TV speech, Trump also alleged that China manipulated voting to Biden’s advantage—another falsehood not only devoid of evidence but technically impossible, according to countless state and federal election officials, judges and elections experts. China debated getting involved, the U.S. intelligence investigation found, but stayed on the sidelines.

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

Mistake. Sometime afte…

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

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

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

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

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

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Barack Obama was stunned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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