New in SpyWeek: More Tulsi Tumult, Secret Trump biz talks with Russia, Havana Syndrome
And more: An IC whistleblower's bomb, Treasury's secret money op against Iran, Wyden's odd letter to CIA boss Ratcliffe, a GRU general whacked, a Benghazi plotter nabbed
Kyiv Intelligence Scoop: Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday that the U.S. and Russia had secretly discussed $12 billion worth of economic deals—some encroaching on Ukraine’s sovereignity—and suggested President Trump would want them in place before the midterm congressional elections. He said “intelligence sources showed him documents that laid out a framework for U.S.-Russian economic cooperation…,” the Washington Post reported. “We are not aware of all their bilateral economic or business agreements, but we are receiving some information on the matter,” Zelenskyy told journalists Friday. Trump’s lead negotiators in the U.S.-Russia talks are real estate operators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who have been given multiple diplomatic roles in the administration. Trump’s hopes that economic inducements will persuade Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire, many observers say, are illusory. He won’t stop until Ukraine is his.
Tehran Takedown: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted last week about what amounted to a U.S. covert op that crashed Iran’s currency and provoked nationwide economic protests. “What we can do at Treasury, and what we have done, is create a dollar shortage in the country,” Bessent said at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. The op had a “grand culmination in December,” he added, “when one of the largest banks in Iran went under, there was a run in the bank, the central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into freefall, inflation exploded and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”
The regime responded brutally to the nationwide protests, killing as many as 6,159 people, according to human rights activists, and shut down the demonstrations. Trump had egged on the protesters, saying. “Help is on the way, keep protesting,” but none came. His deployment of a U.S. armada in the region suggests another air assault on Iran is in the offing.
CIA Mystery Letter: Sen. Ron Wyden D-Ore), the longest-serving member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, went public Wednesday with a blunt, two-sentence letter to CIA Director John Ratcliffe calling his attention to “a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities.” Had Wyden been tipped that a MAGA type in Ratcliffe’s office had intercepted and sat on the first letter? He’s not saying. “People understand I don’t do this all the time,” Wyden told The Oregonian. “I think there are substantial concerns here and that’s what I wanted to do was to make sure that people knew that I was tracking it and we’ll do everything we can to get accountability.”
Gabbard Again: The government’s top spy can’t seem to stay out of the news. There she was Fulton County, Ga., lending a hand in the Trump-FBI’s seizure of 2020 election ballots (which have been counted and cleared three times already), despite the ODNI having no direct role in domestic law enforcement. Next, she was accused of burying an intelligence community whistleblower’s report of serious wrongdoing. “Filed in May by an unidentified U.S. intelligence employee, the allegations could cause ‘grave damage’ to national security if released, according to U.S. officials cited in an explosive Wall Street Journal article published on Monday,” SpyTalk reported in a deep-dive on the flap. “The complaint may involve the White House as well, as well as another federal agency,” the Journal said. On Saturday, Gabbard took to X to deny any wrongdoing.
“I am not now, nor have I ever been, in possession or control of the Whistleblower’s complaint, so I obviously could not have ‘hidden’ it in a safe,” she wrote. “Biden-era IC Inspector General Tamara Johnson was in possession of and responsible for securing the complaint for months.” If that weren’t enough, it was reported by prolific homeland security muckraker Ken Klippenstein on Feb. 1 that Gabbard planned to introduce “a mobile app allowing federal agencies to share intelligence with local law enforcement across the country.” We thought that was the purview of DHS.
Alternative Facts Now: As was widely reported and commented upon this week, the CIA World Fact Book is no more. A reliable resource for generations of researchers in and out of government since 1962, the CIA gave no reasons for deep-sixing the popular annual, saying only (as if to a room full of children): “Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it…in person or virtually.” For more on the book’s demise, see the caustic take of former senior CIA operations officer Margaret Henoch over at The Steady State, an organization of former intelligence folks concerned about the direction of national security policies under President Trump.
Havana Syndrome (still): The malady the government calls Anomalous Health Incidents may have slipped off the radar of mainline news outlets, but that doesn’t mean people have stopped talking about or organizing around it. At a conference last week in Philadelphia, “David Relman, a Stanford University doctor who worked with the intel community and led the National Academies of Science 2020 report on Havana Syndrome,” had a lot to say about dealing with the mysterious medical phenomenon, according to independent intelligence reporter Sasha Ingber. But one particular line caught our eye, if only because of recent reports that the U.S. had obtained a version of an alleged sonic weapon from the Ukrainians. “We were asked not to look at potential adversaries or possible devices,” Relman said, according to Ingber, and that, “as cases increased, it became a real problem for the intel community.” There was, he said, “a deliberate effort to try to tamp this down.”
Check out the latest SpyTalk podcast, “The New Wizards of Espionage,” with former CIA operations officer Aaron Rogers, on how A.I. is revolutionizing the spies’—and spy catchers’—toolkits.
Epstein/Russia: Seems inevitable that the globe-flying pedophile’s name would eventually pop up in connection with the Russians—since KGB alum Vladimir Putin could hardly pass up an opportunity to get in tight with a wealthy pervert who had seduced scores of U.S government, industry, finance, science, technology and academia leaders into relations with him. And so it has. “Epstein built ties to Russians and sought to meet Putin, files show,” headlined The Washington Post. “Justice Department files show Jeffrey Epstein sought help from a Russian official after claiming a woman from Moscow was blackmailing ‘powerful businessmen’ in New York.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Warsaw was making an inquiry into “possible links between Epstein and Russian intelligence services.”
Moscow Mayhem; On Friday somebody tried to assassinate Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, a deputy chief of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service. It failed, authorities said. The general, who had quarterbacked at least one assassination attempt himself against a Kremlin enemy, was conscious after surgery. “Suspicion quickly, and naturally, fell on Ukraine’s special services, which have shown an extraordinary ability to carry out sophisticated assassination and sabotage activities deep inside Russia,” wrote SpyTalk’s Ken Robinson. “But It’s also prudent to acknowledge a possibility that cannot be dismissed in the opaque ecosystem of Russia’s internal power politics: that this attack was state-directed, or at least state-tolerated.”
Update: The FSB. the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said in a statement Sunday that a Russian citizen named Lyubomir Korba was detained in Dubai on suspicion of carrying out the shooting and transported back to Moscow. (Reuters)
Benghazi Justice: Zubayar Al-Bakoush, whom the Justice Department called “an armed coconspirator in the 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans,” was captured and ferried to New York this week to face “multiple terrorism and murder counts,” DoJ announced Friday. Al-Bakoush was “arrested in an undisclosed country and flown to an airfield near Washington, where he arrived just after 3 a.m,” it said.
Giant Falls: Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton, who led a rigorous investigation into the roles of Reagan White House officials in the secret sale of weapons to Iran to illegally finance anti-communist “Contra” rebels in Nicaragua, has died. ”The Enterprise, as the conspirators called their scheme, raked in $48 million from arms sales to Iran,” Hamilton discovered, “had secret Swiss bank accounts, and had its own airplanes, pilots, airfield, secure communications and ship,” according to a New York Times obituary. “The group, he said, had become a hidden arm of the National Security Council, carrying out a contra-aid program that Congress had specifically prohibited.”
First I heard about that 2020 report on Havana syndrome. VERY interesting that they're suppressing the findings. One might think that they're trying to keep the heat off their Russians.
Havana Syndrome (still): ?? I have not been involved in spy work for many years and my education in physics is even older, but I do see another way to understand this problem and it is about smaller and smaller electronic circuits and taking a system that worked and making it new again. There was a device in a USA wall display in our embassy in Moscow that was actually a listening device and it was powered by microwaves from outside the building. Like a tuning fork it vibrated in response to microwaves and sent back intercepted conversations in that room. Now with micro circuits the size of atoms and molecules, If we can make these devices small enough to saturate an embassy from outside its walls, the logical next step is to use a portable microwave source to power them and see what we can hear from our devices. Most will be useless, but a few may collect valuable information. The down side is that the whole foreign embassy needs to be saturated with microwaves. And as a side effect that may cause health problems and physical symptoms in our embassy workers. As an unexpected side effect. Not as "enemy action." Or even both. Likely? I have no idea. But it is something to look for.