New in SpyWeek: Anchorage Away!

Trump-Putin, Kash-Schiff, Sue Mi Terry, China's spying on campus and yet another security mishap lead the week

Welcome to SpyWeek, our weekly intel news roundup, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations.

Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos, just one of the mysteries around the CIA

Baked Alaska:  Who knows what US intelligence is telling Donald Trump about his aborted summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, but Kremlin officials are crowing about it as a big win.  The general consensus globally was the same: “Putin Got Three Major Wins From Trump in Anchorage,” headlined TIME,“ But the Talks Aren’t Over.” Indeed, the New York Times’ Steven Erlanger reported that Trump told European leaders after his meeting with Putin that “he supported a plan to end the war in Ukraine by ceding unconquered territory to the Russian invaders, rather than try for a cease-fire…”— a move Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly rejected. Trump, nevertheless, was ecstatic. “I think the meeting was a 10 in the sense that we got along great,” he told Fox’s Sean Hannity.

KGB Mind Games: Putin presented Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff with an award to pass along to a senior CIA official whose son was killed in Ukraine while fighting alongside Russian forces, CBS News reported. The Order of Lenin was meant forJuliane Gallina, whose 21-year-old son, Michael Gloss, was killed in 2024. Gallina is currently serving at the CIA as deputy director for digital innovation.

Mind Rot: Three guests at a hotel near Elmendorf Air Force Base, the site of the summit meeting, discovered a sheaf of State Department-marked papers in the business center’s printer that “revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings,” NPR’s Chiara Eisner reported Saturday. ”Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees,” she related. The goof follows repeated instances of Trump national security officials discussing highly sensitive matters over the Signal app, including one when Atlantic Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently included.

Lost and Found: Summit papers (NPR)

Schiff Targeted: The White House is cheering on FBI Director Kash Patel for investigating Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) for alleged criminal acts when he was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee in 2017.  White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt crowed Tuesday that "Kash Patel, last night, declassified a 302 FBI document showing that a whistleblower, who is a Democrat, a career intelligence officer who worked for Democrats on the House Intel Committee for more than a decade, repeatedly warned the FBI in 2017 that then-Rep. Adam Schiff had approved leaking classified information to smear then President Donald Trump over the Russiagate scandal." In the MAGA echo chamber, the documents were leaked to Just The News, founded by John Solomon, a onetime award-winning investigative reporter who has lurched right in recent years and, as his Wikipedia entry noted, “has been accused of magnifying small scandals, creating fake controversy, and advancing conspiracy theories.”

Naturally, Schiff took umbrage at the accusation, which was investigated by the Justice Department back in the day and found wanting. “These baseless smears are based on allegations that were found to be not reliable, not credible, and unsubstantiated from a disgruntled former staffer who was fired by the House Intelligence Committee for cause in early 2017, including for harassment and potentially compromising activity on official travel for the Committee," a spokesperson for Schiff said. "Even Trump’s own Justice Department and an independent inspector general found this individual to not be credible…” (Fox)

Revenge Campaign (cont’d): Don’t miss this week’s exclusive SpyTalk story and podcast on how the Trump-Bondi Justice Department has erased its domestic terrorism unit, featuring an interview with its recently departed senior counsel, Thomas Brzozowski. “I no longer had a functioning job. There was nothing for me to do anymore,” said Brzozowski, who had served as the unit’s senior counsel for the last 10 years. “And so I couldn’t in good conscience continue to hold myself out as counsel for domestic terrorism when it became evidence to me that this was simply not going to be something that I would be permitted to work on.”

The net result, according to Brzozowski: “There has been a clear retreat by the federal government in its fight against violent extremism.”

Seoul Sisters: The mysterious case of Sue Mi Terry, the former CIA analyst charged with working as an unregistered agent of South Korea for a decade, got a deep dive this week from Suki Kim, a celebrated investigative journalist who was born in Seoul and arrived in America in 1983 at age 13.  The arrest last year of Terry, the wife of Washington Post foreign affairs columnist Max Boot, “was met with shock in the rarefied foreign-policy circles in which Terry moved” (including her own), Kim writes in Intelligencer. “Since leaving the CIA in 2011 she has been a private citizen without a security clearance, working for prestigious think tanks, writing for the New York Times and Foreign Affairs, testifying before Congress, and appearing as a commentator on cable television,” she noted. Kim doesn’t dismiss the allegations against Terry, who is said to have been under counterespionage surveillance for years, but she notes expert opinion that many powerful Washington influence peddlers working on behalf of foreign clients go unpunished, and she quotes Peter Bergen, an executive at New America, as saying, “The allegations appear to criminalize the kind of meetings and outreach that are typical and routine with embassy officials of allied nations.” Definitely worth a read.

Sue Mi Terry (NBC News)

Pocket Litter

• The trial of Jinchao “Patrick” Wei, a Chinese-born sailor who became a naturalized U.S. citizen while serving in the Navy, opened this week in San Diego. Wei, 25, is “accused of seven counts of conspiracy, espionage and charges related to unlawfully sending defense information to a foreign government,” the San Diego Union- Tribune reported. “Federal prosecutors also contend that Wei committed naturalization fraud by not disclosing the alleged espionage during a citizenship interview.”

• “The Chinese government now places students at Stanford University to report back on academic research,” two student journalists said this week on a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation. The discussion was led by Stanford Review investigative reporters Elsa Johnson and Garrett Molloy, who back in May reported on their discovery “that Chinese authorities have been strategically putting students at Stanford to gain intel.” (Homeland Security Today)

• The beleaguered Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C. has a new intelligence chief, Acting Captain Nicole Copeland, the MPD press office tells SpyTalk. Her predecessor, Shane Lamond, was sentenced in June to 18 months in prison for lying to authorities about warning then-Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio about his impending arrest for burning a Black Lives Matter banner in D.C. 

• Kryptos, the code-enveloped outdoor sculpture outside CIA headquarters that has beguiled cryptologists for decades, is up for sale.  Washington artist Jim Sanborn, who delivered the piece to the CIA in 1990 and who will turn 80 in November, when the bidding can begin, told Wired, “I wanted to be of sound mind and body when it happened, so I could control it in some way.”  Code sleuths have decrypted three of the four panels of ciphertext on the S-shaped copper artwork, Wired reported, but “the final panel, known as K4, still defies solution.”