New in SpyWeek: Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Trump Push Claim of Obama Conspiracy on Russian Election Interference Report

Also this week: Big cuts in State's INR, audacious North Korean spies, Iran nuke damage report, death of a legendary CIA mole hunter and more

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

Gabbard’s Gambit: The director of National Intelligence left a room full of reporters stunned last week when she took to the White House press room podium to claim that Obama administration officials "manufactured" intelligence and its reporting on Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election to hurt Hillary Clinton and benefit Donald Trump. Not just that, Gabbard said she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department on Obama and then-high ranking national security officials involved in the investigation. (Trump escalated the issue to “treason.”)

Criminalizing a debate over an official investigation is unprecedented, not to mention ominous. In an exclusive July 16 SpyTalk interview, Susan Miller, who captained the intelligence community’s 2016 election analysis, says there was “no coercion” from anyone in the Obama administration to tilt their findings in a way that besmearched Trump. In a Foreign Affairs piece headlined “Trump is breaking U.S. intelligence,” former CIA Director Michel Hayden and intelligence historian David Gioe compared Trump and Gabbard’s actions to Vladimir Putin’s demands for loyalty over truth telling.

But CIA Director John Ratcliffe praised Gabbard’s selectively curated declasification of documents, according to an agency spokesperson, calling it her “continued commitment to elevating the truth and bringing transparency to the American people…”

“But Gabbard has a problem,” commented Glenn Kessler, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written The Washington Post’s authoritative  “Fact Checker” column since 2011.

“How can she discover new evidence that somehow eluded four previous investigations: a 2019 report released by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III; a 2019 Justice Department inspector general report; a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee issued in 2020 by a GOP-controlled Senate; and a 2023 report released by special counsel John Durham, appointed in Trump’s first term?” And so on and so forth. Read Kessler’s full deconstruction of Gabbard’s mischievous mythmaking here. 

Reminder: Back in February, the Kremlin cheered Gabbard's nomination to be DNI.

Hegseth/Signal (cont’d): The now tiresome scandal that erupted after it was learned that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other Trump national security officials shared operational details about an impending U.S. airstrike on Yemen on the Signal messaging app got a new wrinkle this week when it turned out the information originated in an email classified “SECRET/NORFORN,”  according to the Defense Department Inspector General’s office. “The revelation contradicts the Trump administration’s longstanding claims that no classified information was shared by the defense secretary’s account during the ‘Signalgate’ scandal, The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe and John Hudson scooped.

Shrinking Intel: The 20-something Trump-DOGE slashers recently discovered  the State Department’s small but distinguished Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Deep cuts are coming to the best little intelligence agency you’ve never heard of, according to reports.  “It is INR’s independence that made it the only intelligence agency to assess correctly that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in 2002,” Ellen McCarthy, who led the shop from 2019 to 2021, wrote in The Washington Post, decrying the 20 percent personnel reduction and transfers. ”In the decades since, INR has consistently provided threat assessments that shape and inform some of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of our time, including detailed analysis of Russia’s intents in Ukraine.”  She’s being modest: INR has been clear-eyed on conflicts and challenges from the Vietnam war onward.

Pyongyang Calling: An Arizona woman was sentenced this week to eight years in jail for coordinating an astonishing North Korean op to help “North Korean IT workers secure jobs at 309 American businesses and two international companies, including Fortune 500 corporations,” ,AZ Central reported, quoting the Justice Department. Christina Marie Chapman, 50,  “ran a ‘laptop farm’ from her home, hosting overseas workers' computers so it appeared they were in the U.S.. She is also alleged to have forged and received payroll checks and direct deposits on behalf of the overseas workers.”

“From the outset, something felt off about this candidate,” the cybersecurity firm Kracken reported. But it turned the tables on the applicant and quickly discovered he was fake, a phony concoction of the North Koreans. “What started as a routine hiring process for an engineering role quickly turned into an intelligence gathering operation, as our teams carefully advanced the candidate through our hiring process to learn more about their tactics at every stage of the process.”

The FBI posted Wanted Posters for a team of NK agents in the U.S.  “Using fraudulent names and identification documents, the men allegedly gained employment at two companies as Remote IT Workers. With these roles, these individuals allegedly abused their access at the companies to steal virtual currency. The individuals worked and travelled together as a team.”

Iran Intel (cont’d):  A combination of last month’s U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities and the assassination of its leading weapons scientists have crushed its ability to build a bomb anytime soon, according to The Washington Post’s well connected national security columnist David Ignatius.  “Iran is no longer a threshold nuclear state,” he says “one well-informed Israeli source” told him. “He said that Iran would now require at least one to two years to build a deliverable nuclear weapon, assuming it could somehow hide its activities. Tehran could conceivably try to demonstrate a crude nuclear device more quickly. But Israel would probably see the test coming and could mount a disabling attack, the source said.” Retired former CIA nonproliferation expert James Lawler told SpyTalk’s Jonathan Broder much the same in a June 23 story. 

China Spies: A California man has pleaded guilty to stealing thousands of U.S. missile and warplane secrets from an unidentified Los Angeles-area technology firm, the Justice Department announced last Monday.  Chenguang Gong, 59, of San Jose, a former engineer at a Southern California firm, stole some 3,600 files on secrets to “detect nuclear missile launches, track ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and to allow U.S. fighter planes to detect and evade heat-seeking missiles,” DOJ said. He remains free on $1.75 million bond. 

Norwegian Mole:  A former security guard who used to work at the U.S. embassy in Oslo has been charged with spying for Russia and Iran, Norwegian media reported on Wednesday. “He is said to have passed on a blueprint of the embassy, addresses and other information to Iranian and Russian contacts, according to the indictment. The 27-year-old, who was reportedly arrested in November, recognizes the facts laid out by the charges but denies criminal guilt, his defence lawyer told TV 2,” DPA International relayed.

Mole Hunter Passes: Legendary CIA mole hunter Sandy Grimes has died, a family member announced on Facebook. Grimes, 80, who had been in ill health for some time, was a key member of the CIA-FBI team that uncovered the traitor Aldrich Ames in their midst.  In 2013, Grimes and her mole-hunting agency partner, the late Jeanne Vertefeuille, authored Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed.

Sandy Grimes (Facebook)

“Sandy was among many who pioneered a path for women professionals at CIA. She did it with tenacity and grace,” David E. Hoffman, author of The Billion Dollar Spy, a book about the life and death of Adolf Tolkachev, a CIA asset betrayed by Ames, told SpyTalk in an email.  Hoffman recalled “a story she once told me: She was very pregnant in 1972, working at headquarters, and was called into the division chief’s office. He was reading a paper and for a few minutes didn’t put it down. She waited, and eventually he put the paper down and looked at her.  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘this is yours.’ It was a piece of paper for her promotion. Then he put the newspaper back in front of his face, and continued reading. No congrats, no goodbye. It was the reality of the times, very old-boys school,” Hoffman continued. “But, she added—typical Sandy—’I don’t think any of us minded the old boys. Some of the old boys were our best—they were our promoters.’”

Cold Type: Our friend I.S. Berry has written a lively review of a fascinating account of a little known chapter in Cold War covert ops, the CIA’s program to smuggle the best in Western fiction behind the Iron Curtain. Books by Camus, Orwell, Vonnegut and others “were smuggled on yachts, in diapers and in false-bottom bags,” author Charlie English recounts in The CIA Book Club, Berry reports. “Contraband was hidden in bathroom ceilings on trains, and the car numbers were conveyed via secret code (what we called a ‘commo plan’ at the CIA). Seven hundred pages incriminating the Soviet apparatus were taped to the back and legs of a man en route to Sweden.” Berry, echoing English, says “the end result was arguably the most successful covert action in U.S. intelligence history — or, as one former agency historian put it, the ‘best-kept secret’ of the Cold War.” (In May 2024, Berry recounted her own participation in a different kind of CIA book club here in SpyTalk.)

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