New in SpyWeek: CIA Vetting, Ukraine Intel, Private Russia Deals, Kash in a Barrel

Welcome to Spy Week, a curated compilation of important news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign relations and military operations.

Loyalty Tests: “Let’s be clear on what the vetting system is and it isn’t,” Samantha Vinograd, a top counterterrorism official in the Obama administration, told Face the Nation on Sunday, in relation to ​​Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the former Afghan CIA asset facing murder and other charges for his Thanksgiving Eve assault on two West Virginia National Guard troopers in Washington, D.C. As President Trump and his minions predictably blamed the Biden administration for the tragedy, Vinograd explained that the vetting of a foreigner employed by the U.S. includes “an individual’s identifiers — their biographic information, iris scans, fingerprints, facial images,” which are “run against data sets of information about individuals with ties to terrorism and criminal history,” all of which would normally have been applied to Lakanwal when he was recruited for the CIA’s Zero Unit anti-Taliban kill teams. Lakanwal, who was evacuated from the chaos in Kabul in 2021, “applied for asylum in 2024,” CNN reported, which was granted by the Trump administration earlier this year. “The vetting system,” Vinograd pointedly added, “is not predicative of whether an individual with no derogatory information is or is not going to become violent.”

“Having a CIA ID would have put him in the ‘vetted’ category,” Jennifer Griffin, Fox News Senior National Security correspondent said on X. “I am told there was nothing in his background when he arrived in the US on Sept 8, 2021 that suggested links to terrorism.”

Except the CIA’s own brand. The Zero Units effectively performed as highly violent death squads, according to their many critics.

“Human Rights Watch said it had documented several instances in which the units were responsible for ‘extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, indiscriminate airstrikes, attacks on medical facilities, and other violations of international humanitarian law,” the New York Times reported. “The C.I.A. has denied such allegations of brutality, saying they were the result of Taliban propaganda.”

“Think about how thorough Lakanwal’s vetting had to be,” Seth Hettena noted in his After Action Report on Substack. “CIA and US special operations personnel regularly accompanied Zero Units on missions. The CIA Ground Branch, Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs had to trust men like Lakanwal with their lives. Biden’s supposed ‘sin,’ then, was evacuating an Afghan partner who had fought in a CIA-backed unit alongside US personnel, only to now be blamed for not foreseeing the consequences of the very system the intelligence agencies built.”

Kremlin Tease: It’s been Moscow’s goal for at least 75 years now to divide the U.S.and its European allies, and by the looks of its active measures strategy on Ukraine, it seems to be succeeding. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies,” a quintet of Wall Street Journal investigative reporters revealed Friday in a truly breathtaking story illuminating the enticements Putin and his oligarchs are quietly negotiating with Trump and his business cronies if the president succeeds in forcing a humiliating capitulation on Ukraine. ”A question for history will be whether Putin entertained this approach in the interest of ending the war, or as a ploy to pacify the U.S. while prolonging a conflict he believes is his place in history to slowly, ineluctably win,” wrote Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove and Joe Parkinson.

Steve Witkoff “coached” Kremlin envoy Yuri Ushakov on how Putin should persuade Trump to embrace Russia’s position on ending the Ukraine war, Bloomberg reported. That’s just the tip of the negotiations iceberg.

US Threatens Ukraine Intel Cutoff: “I am told the Trump administration had threatened to cut intelligence if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky does not agree to a deal,” Sasha Ingber wrote Monday on her HUMINT Substack. “A Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me that it’s unclear whether all intelligence would stop.”

Russian Agents Rolled up: The leaders of a pro-Russia group in France behind a poster campaign declaring “Russia is not my enemy” have been taken into custody and are being held on suspicion of intelligence-gathering for a foreign power, the AP.reported.

Call of Duty: In its latest, unprecedented step into partisan politics, the CIA denounced one of its own, former agency analyst and Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin, for joining the call of five other congressional Democrats urging service members not to obey an “illegal order” (which they’re sworn not to do anyway). “Senator Slotkin’s assertion that CIA officers are receiving illegal orders and should therefore refuse to follow them is now, by her own admission, without basis and recklessly false,” Liz Lyons, the head of the agency’s Office of Public Affairs wrote on X. Thing is, though, Slotkin, who served three tours in Iraq over five years, never claimed CIA officers were getting, much less carrying out, illegal orders. Trouble for the military lies down the road, though, with a bipartisan congressional investigation into whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth committed a war crime by ordering U.S. troops to “kill everybody” who survived a strike on a suspected drug boat.

Elissa Slotkin is demanding information on suspected drug boat strikes (WLNS)

Tour of Duty: FBI Director Kash Patel’s meandering journey from lowly regarded public defender and prosecutor to chaotic, MAGA-incentivized 10 months as FBI director got a colonic profile last week by veteran Washington reporter Marc Fisher in The New Yorker. It opened with Patel’s stogie-smoking appearance on the Joe Rogan Show last June. “What is it like to be the head of the F.B.I.?” Rogan asked at one point. “How weird is that?” “It’s completely effing wild,” Patel said. “I mean, I don’t even know how to describe it.” Neither do scores of fired, forced-out and currently serving bewildered FBI agents.

Epstein-Mossad: Tantalizing stories alleging an operational relationship between Jeffrrey Epstein and Israeli intelligence have been catching fire in recent days, but— sadly, of course—there’s really been no credible evidence yet to support it, fact checking sites all say. Mainstream outlets like the New York Times and FactCheck.org consistently describe the Mossad connection theory as unfounded or a conspiracy narrative. Some independent or activist publications claim hacked emails or leaked materials suggest ties, but these claims have not been corroborated by official investigations. “What is not present in the cited material is a publicly released intelligence memorandum, sworn testimony, or declassified file that explicitly states Epstein was an operational Mossad asset under direction—so assertions that Epstein ‘worked for Mossad’ in the formal sense remain unproven in the sources provided,” the web site Factually reports. But the investigations are not only far from over, they may have yet to peak, and clearly, there is some “intelligence” history between Israel and Epstein, no matter the absence of clinching evidence to date, Factually added. “The DOJ file releases and any authenticated internal Israeli records could change that calculus; until such materials are cited, reporting supports strong interpersonal and transactional ties, not a definitive intelligence‑employment chain.”

Chile’s Murder, Inc: “After many years of investigations and resulting trials, it is now clear that Condor may have backfired on its perpetrators,” writes John Dinges, marking the demonic birth 50 years ago this past week of Operation Condor, the global assassination program run by Chile’s military dictatorship. “It is a kind of historic irony,” noted Dinges, author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents (updated in Spanish in 2021), “that the international crimes of the dictatorships spawned investigations, including one resulting in Pinochet’s arrest in London, that would eventually bring hundreds of the military perpetrators to justice. Moreover,” he added, “because Condor’s most notorious crime was in Washington, D.C., the United States government unleashed the FBI to prosecute DINA and the Chilean regime.” A complete archive on Condor was assembled this week by Dinges (a former NPR News managing editor, professor emeritus at Columbia University and SpyTalk contributing editor) and Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, a private research organization at George Washington University.

Bedtime Spy Story: Christine Kuehn tells the story of learning “the darkest of secrets” in Family of Spies. Spoiler: It’s about German espionage in World War II.