New in SpyWeek: CIA & Khamenei, Heat Over Surveillance, NSA Vacancy, More FBI Revenge
Also:: Tulsi stiffs Gang of Eight, former Air Force pilot turns coat, China spied on Alysa Liu and her dad, new Skripal documentary.
Stalking Khamenei: The CIA tracked Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei for months, vacuuming up his locations and movement patterns, “people familiar with the operation,” i.e. Israeli and U.S. officials, told a team of New York Times reporters. “Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place on Saturday morning at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran. Most critically,” Khamenei would be there, they reported. Missile-armed Israeli warplanes took off. Boom. One might wonder why the leadership would chance gathering like that after Israeli agents have proven so skilled at tracking and killing Iranian officials. Then again, they had to be fearful of turning on their phones wherever they were.
Killer Words: The Obama administration paved the legal path for President Trump to attack Iran and assassinate its leaders, SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff noted Sunday. A “secret Justice Department memo” Obama officials sent to Congress, he reported, “argu[ed] that their lethal drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen were fully justified because they did not actually constitute ‘assassinations’ theoretically banned by a decades-old executive order.”
The Right Stuff: “MalwareJake,” a self described “former NSA hacker,” claimed on X that U.S. and Israeli cyberwarriors are “targeting [Iran’s] civilian infrastructure, not government networks with intelligence collection value. That’s because once you deliver an effect (CYBERCOM speak for ‘cyber attack’) in a network, you lose the ability to collect intelligence from that target.” (Jake Williams)
