New in SpyWeek: Frog Poison Killed Navalny, More Gabbard-Russia, Havana Syndrome test, Covert Action in Iran

Also: Bondi on domestic terrorism, Russian and Chinese agents jailed, AI in the Maduro raid, more

(US Embassy Georgia, 2023)

Murder They Said: The foreign ministries of the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands announced Saturday in London that an analysis of tissue samples from the body of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny “conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine,” a neurotoxin secreted by dart frogs in South America that “is not found naturally in Russia.” In other words, Vladimir Putin’s agents had manufactured and employed it to murder Navalny. “Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison,” said their joint statement.

Havana Syndrome: Add this wrinkle to the continuing mystery over Anomalous Health Incidents, or AHI, the crippling sensation of “pulsed energy” attacks that have debilitated scores of U.S. diplomats, spies and other government employees: A government scientist in Norway, described as a skeptic of such attacks, “built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy and, in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024 tested it on himself,” The Washington Post’s Warren P. Strobel and Ellen Nakashima exclusively reported Saturday.

“He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of ‘Havana syndrome,’ the unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of U.S. spies and diplomats around the world.” The story goes on to say, “The Norwegian government told the CIA about the results, two of the people said, prompting at least two visits in 2024 to Norway by Pentagon and White House officials.”

Norwegian Defense Ministry headquarters (NATO/Flickr(Creative Commons)

Tulsi Topics: FBI affidavits related to its seizure of 2020 election ballots in Fulton County, Ga. last week made no mention of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s rationalization for her involvement in the probe, SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff reported. Gabbard had claimed in a letter to members of Congress that the Georgia voting was “a national security issue,” and that as the U.S. government’s top intelligence official, she had “robust authority” to oversee matters involving “foreign intelligence and counterintelligence threats.” But in the two FBI affidavits, “there was not a word about any foreign meddling with the Fulton County 2020 ballots,” Isikoff wrote. “Nor was there any mention of ‘malign’ influence by China, Venezuela, Iran, Russia— or any other foreign power that might have explained why the country’s top intelligence official would involve herself in a domestic law enforcement operation.” Related: Gabbard’s 2024 visit to the Vatican, arranged by Pierre Louvrier, a Paris-based, pro-Russia financier, triggered a TSA security alert—not her opposition to Biden-Harris, SpyTalk contributor Christine Gralow reported. Also related: A whistleblower accused Gabbard of sitting on an NSA report of “an unusual phone call between two members of foreign intelligence, who discussed a person close to Donald Trump.”

Don’t miss our discussion of Tulsi Gabbard’s strange political odyssey with former top CIA official Larry Pfeiffer on this week’s SpyTalk podcast, available here or wherever you like to listen.

Bondi Balk: The attorney general refused to answer sharp questions from Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa), about her role in writing National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” signed into law by President Trump on September 25, 2025, which she noted at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee targets “anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-capitalist beliefs as well as, quote ‘hostility to so-called traditional American views on family religion and morality,’ unquote,” while eliminating any reference to right wing extremist groups, which counterterrorist experts have long identified as the principal threats to U.S. security. Bondi responded with a caustic filibuster on “antifa,” about which, in a previous hearing, the FBI’s top national security official couldn’t identify its location or purported leaders.

Bondi to Scanlon: “You don’t know anything about security.” (AP/Tom Brenner)

Intel Stalkers: “A state-sponsored threat group has compromised dozens of networks of government and critical infrastructure entities in 37 countries in global-scale operations dubbed ‘Shadow Campaigns.’” reports BleepingComputer. Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 researchers “confirmed that the attacks successfully compromised at least 70 government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries.” The perps have not been identified, but “there is high confidence that it operates from Asia.”

Covert/Iran: “After Iranian authorities to export smothered mounting unrest in January by killing thousands of protesters and severely cutting internet connectivity, the U.S. smuggled roughly 6,000 of the satellite-internet [Starlink] kits into the country, the first time the U.S. has directly sent Starlink into Iran.” the Wall Street Journal reported. In 2022, SpyTalk’s Jonathan Broder reported that the State Department had cleared the Elon Musk company to export the kits, but “so far, technical and legal hurdles may have prevented the few Iranian activists who have smuggled Starlink receiver kits into the country from establishing links to the company’s constellation of satellites orbiting above Iran.”

Covert/Venezuela: In a partnership with the CIA-linked Palantir data technologies firm, Anthropic’s Claude AI was mobilized for the January 5 raid that captured Nicholås Maduro and his wife, the Wall Street Journal reported. “Anthropic’s concerns about how Claude can be used by the Pentagon have pushed administration officials to consider canceling its contract worth up to $200 million,” the paper previously reported.

Spying on Cancer: The CIA and the Pentagon’s super-secret National Reconnaissance Office helped invent modern mammography, Erik German reported Sunday in Fortune. “The story begins in 1994, when a public health doctor at the Department of Health and Human Services, Susan Blumenthal, went hunting for breast cancer breakthroughs in Washington, D.C. The search was personal for Blumenthal, who’d lost her mother [Tipper Gore] to breast cancer just before becoming a doctor.”

The Americans: Two men in Virginia, Oleg Nayandin, 54, of Fairfax, and Vitaliy Borisenko, 39, of Vienna were sentenced Friday for conspiring to “illegally export goods and technology from the United States to Russia by transshipping them through three countries bordering or near Russia,” the DOJ announced. “Nayandin was sentenced to three years in prison. Borisenko was sentenced to a year in prison.”

Chinese Agent: A California man, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 65, was sentenced to 48 months in federal prison for acting as an illegal agent of China, “including while serving as the campaign advisor for a political candidate who was elected to the city council of a Southern California city,” the DOJ said Tuesday. ““For years, Sun received and executed taskings from Chinese government officials, distorted our public discourse by disseminating Chinese propaganda, and surveilled groups in the United States that China viewed as threatening its interests as part of a campaign of intimidation,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said. Sun’s handler regularly briefed PRC President Xi Jinping, the DOJ said. Bloomberg, meanwhile, explored how China’s Ministry of State Security stole U.S. warplane parts “one piece at a time”