New in SpyWeek: More Tulsi Trouble as Trump Teeters on Edge of Israel-Iran War
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INTEL BE DAMNED: Donald Trump’s blunt rejection of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s assessment that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon—“I don’t care what she said”—sends a chilling message to the U.S. intelligence community: Don’t contradict the president.
The remark, which appears to be driven by Trump’s personal feelings toward his DNI (see below), revives concerns from Trump’s first term, when he famously declared in 2018 that he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of election meddling over his own intelligence community’s findings.
In March, Gabbard told Congress that the U.S. intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
Vice President JD Vance defended Gabbard. “First off, Tulsi's testimony was in March, and a lot has changed since then,” Vance said on X.
What changed? Not much, according to The New York Times. The U.S. intelligence community continues to believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to make a nuclear bomb, although it does have a large stockpile of uranium. Senior intelligence officials believe that an American military attack would likely push Iran to build one, the Times reported.
Trump also appeared to parrot Israel’s hawkish estimate of Iran’s capabilities to build a bomb when he told reporters on Air Force One, “I think they were very close to having one.”
Mossad believes that Iran can achieve a nuclear weapon in 15 days. American spy agencies think that it could take several months, and up to a year.
Edward “Ned” Price, the former Obama national security aide who had a catbird seat in the administration's secret talks with Iran to cap its enrichment program, said much the same in this week’s SpyTalk podcast. The Israelis “have pushed every president in some ways since Bill Clinton to start a preemptive war against Iran…” he told hosts Jeff Stein and Michael isikoff.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe echoed the Israeli line in a White House intel briefing Thursday, telling officials Iran was “very close,” the Times reported. Gen. Michael Kurilla, the head of Central Command, testified earlier this month that Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for up to 10 nuclear weapons in three weeks.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel’s campaign so far has set Iran’s nuclear work back by about five to six months, although the damage could grow if the attacks continue.
The Journal also noted that before launching its attack on Iran last week, Israel provided the United States with intelligence that Tehran was conducting “renewed research useful for a nuclear weapon, including on an explosive triggering system.” U.S. analysts didn’t find it credible, underscoring a view in the IC that Israel’s intel is being shaded to drag America into a war with Iran.
In Trumpworld, however, when the facts don't fit the narrative, the narrative wins.
LICENSE TO LEAD: Blaise Metreweli, who joined the Secret Intelligence Service in 1999 and most recently served as something akin to “Q,” the legendary Bond films’ gadget wizard, is the new chief of MI6—the first female to run the British spy agency. “C,” she’ll be addressed, or maybe, “C, Ms. C.” Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the appointment "historic" at a time "when the work of our intelligence services has never been more vital." (BBC)
TULSI TO THE WOODSHED: OK, enough policy, SpyWeek fans. We know you come here for the gossip too, and there was plenty of that this week involving Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump.
Gabbard, who, as we’ve reported, is trying to save her office (and her team) as Trump openly toys with scrapping ODNI altogether, assured everyone that she and the president are “on the same page.”
Yeah, right.
Just days ago, she released a bizarre video warning that the world was “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” as “warmongers” carelessly fomented fear and tensions between nuclear powers.
The video did not get good reviews in the Oval. Politico scooped that Trump was “incensed” by the “unauthorized” video, telling aides that she had spoken out of turn.
A senior White House advisor told CNN, “Trump viewed the video as a thinly veiled criticism of his consideration to allow Israel to strike Iran.”
Gabbard was declared “off-message”—the Trump White House equivalent of being sent to the Mar-a-Lago kids' table. “Tulsi could do herself a favor by focusing on her job. Right now, she gets a C in the president's eyes," a senior administration official told Axios.
Are we grading on a curve? Trumpwatchers noted that two days before posting her weird nuclear war video, Gabbard missed a Camp David meeting on Israel’s plans to strike Iran. Officials cited National Guard duty, though some said her presence wasn’t needed. Still, she returned to the White House the following Monday, and a meeting was rescheduled to accommodate her.
At the same time, it seems Gabbard has gotten the message. Usually a fixture on Fox News, she’s been staying quiet. . . Well, almost.
Late Friday afternoon, she took to X to proclaim, “The dishonest media is intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division.” Right.
On Wednesday, Axios scooped that Gabbard postponed her scheduled briefing with the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Gabbard “is way over her skis in terms of competence on this.”
Even Trump might agree with Warner’s assessment. The president’s blunt dismissal of Gabbard’s assessment—“I don’t care what she says”—highlights the upside of surrounding yourself with unqualified loyalists. “You can always be like, ‘Do you know how crazy and unqualified she is?’” quipped comedian Jordan Klepper on The Daily Show.
In a lengthy dispatch late Friday afternoon, a New York Times headline summed up the situation delicately: Trump’s Rebuke of Gabbard Signals an Uneasy Moment. After her nuclear war video surfaced, Trump “told Ms. Gabbard that he believed she was using her time working for him to set herself up for higher office,” and that “if she wanted to run for president, she should not be in the administration, one of the people briefed on the meeting said.” Buh-bye.
GO VET THYSELF: The director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, which vets roughly 4,000 Trump‑era political appointees, still hasn’t cleared himself. The New York Post reported that Sergio Gor has reportedly not submitted his SF‑86 — the 100-plus‑page form that all federal job applicants must fill out for a full security clearance — relying instead on an interim clearance. It’s not even clear where Gor is from. He claims Maltese origins, though Malta has no birth record matching his details. (Gor declined to divulge his birthplace to The Post, other than to say it was not Russia.) His path to power runs through Sen. Rand Paul’s office and Winning Team, the publishing outfit he co-founded with Don Jr. Gor recently convinced President Trump to yank an Elon Musk-endorsed nominee for NASA. Something tells us Musk hasn’t forgotten about it.
INTEL TO CHINA: A former Army sergeant who tried to sell U.S. military secrets to China has pleaded guilty to two felonies in federal court. Joseph Schmidt, 31, formerly of Joint Base Lewis-McChord’s 109th Military Intelligence Battalion, admitted to attempting to deliver national defense information and unlawfully retaining classified data. After leaving the Army in 2020, Schmidt emailed Chinese intelligence officials offering “high-level secrets” and flew to Hong Kong to pursue the deal. He even offered a device used to access secure military networks. Sentencing is set for September.
CONSPIRACY THEATER: FBI Director Kash Patel continues to relitigate his boss’s pet conspiracies. This week, he declassified a 2020-era intel report alleging a Chinese plot to swing the election for Biden using fake U.S. driver’s licenses and fraudulent mail-in ballots. The report—never corroborated and pulled back from circulation at the time—was quietly buried by intelligence professionals. But Patel, now using his perch to placate the MAGA faithful, handed the document to Sen. Chuck Grassley and fed it to the right-wing outlet Just the News, which, to its credit, did some reporting that undermined the story. Officials familiar with the matter say the source behind the claim was unvetted and never re-interviewed. You’ll recall that in 2021, a National Intelligence Community Assessment concluded, with high confidence, that China did not try to influence the 2020 election. (See if you can guess which country did.) Patel’s antics reek less of transparency than of performative disinfo cosplay—a cosplay aimed not at truth, but at sustaining the fiction of a stolen 2020 election.
FRIENDS LIKE THESE: Despite a “no-limits” partnership, China has been aggressively hacking Russian military, defense, and aerospace networks since shortly after the Ukraine invasion, according to cyber analysts and a leaked FSB document. The New York Times reports groups linked to Beijing—including “Mustang Panda” and “Slime19”—have hunted for intel on Russia’s drone warfare, satellite systems, and battlefield tactics. Moscow’s spy agency now labels China an “enemy” in internal documents, even as Putin embraces Xi publicly and leans on him for tech and economic lifelines. The quiet cyberwar reveals a deep mistrust behind the public alliance—proof that in the world of espionage, even allies don’t share everything. Or as Yuri Kobaladze, a spokesman for Russia’s foreign spy service in 1994, famously put it: “There are friendly states, but no friendly intelligence services.”
NEDZI AND THE CIA: Former Rep. Lucien Nedzi, who died last week at 96, was once the CIA’s man on Capitol Hill—whether he meant to be or not. Nedzi led House investigations into possible CIA links to the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee in 1972 and the cover-up that led to President Nixon’s resignation two years later. In the mid-1970s, the Michigan Democrat was named chairman of the House subcommittee on American intelligence agencies — the forerunner to a Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
BUT MORE: Rep. Nedzi’s passing led us to run a search for himof him in the CIA’s FOIA library. We turned up an interesting July 1973 memo from then-CIA case officer and lawyer John Maury that detailed a carefully curated briefing given to Nedzi on the agency’s involvement in Watergate—highlighting what it chose to disclose and, more tellingly, what it didn’t. While the memo concedes the CIA’s support for Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt—like with fake IDs and disguises (all reported back in the day)—Maury told Nedzi that “someone in the White House—It was not clear just who” had requested the CIA’s assistance. By presenting a narrow, compartmentalized version of events, the CIA shaped Nedzi’s understanding while minimizing political fallout on itself.
“There are friendly states, but no friendly intelligence services.”
SPOOK BUDGET: The U.S. intelligence community is requesting $81.9 billion for the fiscal 2026 National Intelligence Program (NIP). The NIP funds the CIA and DNI and the “strategic” intelligence activities of the National Security Agency and others. It also covers activities like satellite imagery that serve multiple departments or a service of common concern, such as secure communications.
ROBLOX JIHAD: An 18-year-old Texas man was indicted for allegedly plotting an ISIS-inspired attack via Roblox, an online game that’s popular with preteens. James Burger, using the handle “Crazz3pain,” threatened to kill Shia Muslims and commit martyrdom at a Christian concert, prompting another user to alert the FBI. Agents say Burger’s devices revealed extremist searches and statements like “martyrdom or bust.” He admitted making the comments, telling agents he considers himself a terrorist “by my own definition.”
POCKET LITTER:
Frederick Forsyth, the British author of iconic thrillers like The Day of the Jackal, has died at age 86. In 2015, Forsyth revealed that he had spent 20 years as an unpaid agent for MI-6. While working for various newspapers and magazines reporting on the Nigeria-Biafra conflict, he kept MI-6 “informed of things that could not, for various reasons, emerge in the media”. (The Guardian)
Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, talked about intelligence priorities on SpyCast, the podcast of the International Spy Museum. Topics: “the growing threat of China’s influence in the West, the impact of the new Open Source Intelligence Subcommittee, and the importance of analytic integrity in intelligence,” according to host Sasha Ingber.
Alistair Kitchen may be the first person ever deported from the U.S. for his writings. Kitchen, an Australian, attended Columbia for an MFA program on a student visa. When the student protests began in April of last year, he began publishing “daily missives” to his Substack, “a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read.” (The New Yorker)
Jeff Stein contributed to this story.
Is there something we missed? Or something you would like to see more of? Send your tips, corrections, and thoughts to SpyTalk@protonmail.com.
If I were in US intelligence, I'd look for another job at this point. Why bother doing your job if your work is going to be ignored? Besides, you get paid more in the business world.
Somebody get Tulsi back in the clown car.