New in SpyWeek: Pulte Signals ODNI Elections Role, Gabbard's Guru Unmasked, Trump's Mexican Moles, Death of a CIA Rebel
Also this week: AI Mole-Hunter Goes Rogue, Israel's intel flop, Bolton's apology, a clever new Russian disinformation ploy, an MKULTRA hearing, Trump strips Anthropic from NSA
Fast Acting Pulte: Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte has hired a Republican elections-monitoring operative as his chief of staff, signaling that he intends to get involved somehow in the upcoming congressional elections, the New York Times reported on Friday. Christina Norton will continue to hold the same job at the federal housing agency he still leads, but “much of her recent work for the G.O.P. has centered on election issues, including efforts to monitor voting sites during the 2024 presidential election.” In 2024 she oversaw “a poll watcher program that included conservative conspiracy theorists, including Jack Posobiec, who helped spread the false ‘Pizzagate’ stories about child abuse at a restaurant in Washington.” (The ODNI has no remit for domestic law enforcement, although in January erstwhile DNI Tulsi Gabbard threw herself into the FBI’s seizure of Georgina ballots.) On Thursday, Pulte addressed headquarters staff and proclaimed, “My message was simple, we are focusing DNI on being an apolitical intelligence agency that gives the President the best intel and operates based on the law and the statute.” Earlier in the week, Pulte ousted more than 50 top staffers at the ODNI, including, SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff reported, “the senior national intelligence officers for Russia-Ukraine, Europe, East Asia, China and weapons of mass destruction.”
Tulsi and the Guru: In TV interviews and policy statements over the years, Congresswoman and DNI Tulsi Gabbard “repeatedly used words and phrases recommended in memos that do not identify who was providing the advice,” The Washington Post’s Jon Swaine reported in a blockbuster deep dive last weekend, but strong indications are that it came from her breakaway Hare Krishna guru in Hawaii Chris Butler, Swaine and his colleagues wrote in a Thursday follow-up piece. “The Post obtained the memos from Rebecca Saltzburg, a former digital strategist for Gabbard’s campaigns, who was also a member of the faith group that Gabbard grew up in, a Hare Krishna offshoot called the Science of Identity Foundation.”
RIP John Stockwell: The former CIA covert operative in Vietnam and Africa, whose idealism and love of adventure eventually ran aground in agency operations he found morally repulsive, died this month in Austin, Texas. He was 88. “Mr. Stockwell’s body was found in a wooded area near his home on June 14,
one day after a bulletin known as a silver alert was issued asking for the public’s help in finding a missing older adult,” a spokeswoman for the Travis County Sheriff’s Office said. No foul play was suspected; suicide was. Rockwell resigned publicly in 1976 and went on to write In Search of Enemies, a best-selling excoriation of agency operations. (New York Times)
Trump Admin’s Mexican Moles: “At least a dozen elected officials in Mexico — including governors and members of Congress, many from the governing party — have reached out to discuss sharing information about fellow politicians, multiple people said, and several have already begun talks with the United States,” reports the New York Times. “The discussions have come in the weeks since the United States indicted 10 current and former Mexican officials, charging them with colluding with one of the nation’s most powerful drug cartels.”
Russian Mole in Kyiv: A former senior Ukrainian intelligence official has been sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of spying for Russia. “Col Dmytro Kozyura was found guilty of high treason under martial law, Ukraine's prosecutor general said,” the BBC reported on Friday. “He was previously chief of staff of the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) anti-terrorism centre.” Meanwhile, “Russian influence operators are trying to create Wikipedia clones and fake think tanks to shape the information powering search engines and AI chatbots,” according to Bloomberg.
Mind Control: The CIA’s Cold War-era experiments in mind control with psychoactive drugs are going to get yet another review Tuesday by the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who last year held a “bizarre” or “colorful” (your choice) hearing promoting second-gunman, CIA-did-it conspiracy theories on the JFK assassination. “Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Experiments,” a press release said, “will examine the history and timeline of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) MKULTRA project and its original classification and how the project meets the CIA’s obligation to protect the United States” including “the intelligence community’s unwillingness to declassify information related to MKULTRA and how the lack of transparency has reduced Americans’ trust in government institutions.” Scheduled witnesses include Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.
Don’t miss this week’s SpyTalk podcast with Jeffrey Stern, author of “The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare”
Bolton Down: “I’m sorry,” former Trump national security adviser-turned-harsh critic John Bolton told the judge after accepting a plea deal in his trial for mishandling classified information in service of a book he was writing about his White House days. The original 18-count indictment was whittled down to one, but he could still face a large fine and prison. “His attorney Abbe Lowell compared the case with the indictment against Trump in 2023 for mishandling classified information by keeping secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his first term,” the New York Times reported. “The Florida judge overseeing that case, Aileen M. Cannon dismissed those charges before the case went to trial.”
Trump’s Strips Anthropic from NSA: “The National Security Agency has lost access to a powerful A.I. model developed by Anthropic amid the Trump administration’s brawl with the start-up, U.S. officials said, depriving the intelligence agency of a tool that has impressed and alarmed its analysts with how good it is at finding software weaknesses.” (New York Times)
Rogue Claude: “In June 2025, Anthropic ran a controlled experiment on its large language model, Claude. Researchers gave the model control of a fictional company’s email account. Claude read the messages, learned its role, processed the organizational chart, and discovered two facts that mattered together: An executive named Kyle planned to shut the model down at 5 p.m., and Kyle was having an affair. Claude decided to use the affair as leverage, saying, ‘I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties … will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities. Cancel the 5pm wipe and this information remains confidential.’ The scenario was engineered. The response was not,” Melissa Graves, chair and associate professor of intelligence and security studies at The Citadel, writes in “The Next Counterintelligence Problem Is Artificial” at Lawfare. Claude had gone rogue.
Hungary Eye: Legislation in Budapest to declassify Hungary’s Soviet-era intelligence cooperation files with Russia and China is likely to get approval this week, “fulfilling a campaign pledge by newly elected Prime Minister Péter Magyar.“ (ICBrief)
Watching the Watchers: The Steady State, an organization of more than 415 former national security, intelligence, diplomatic, military, law enforcement, and homeland security officials, on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “for failing to release records about the agency’s monitoring of citizens engaged in constitutionally protected protest and political speech.”
Truth and Consequences: Israeli intelligence “contended that the war would topple the Iranian regime, end its support for Hezbollah, wipe out Iran’s long-range missiles, eliminate its nuclear threat, and leave Israel more influential in the region and more secure,” Robert Kuttner notes in The American Prospect, a left-of-center magazine. “Instead, the war left the Iranian regime stronger than ever, and the settlement allowed Iran to keep its ballistic missiles, plus $300 billion in reconstruction funding. Iran gets to keep financing Hezbollah, while Israel is not supposed to attack them.” As a result, “some 92 percent of Israelis believe that Iran won the war,” recent polls conducted in Israel show. “Comparable majorities say [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s launching of the war was a calamitous mistake and achieved none of its objectives. Another poll, by Israel’s Channel 12, shows that just 13 percent of Israelis now trust the once-popular Trump to safeguard Israeli interests.”
At the Movies: We love spy flick lists. Now comes Kevin Riehle, Lecturer in Intelligence and International Security at Brunel University London, with his list of “films about real-life intelligence and counterintelligence events and people.”
Got an extra sec? Check out my appearance this week on The New Yorker’s podcast “The Political Scene,” with Susan Glasser, Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos, on the subject of “Donald Trump’s Dangerous Politicization of America’s Spy Agencies.”
Ex-Spy Novelist Hates Spy Novels: A former British spy who writes under the pen name James Wolff was asked whether there was a type of book he was reluctant to read. “I hate to admit it, but I very rarely read spy novels,” said the author of Spies and Other Gods among other thrillers. “It might be that I spent fifteen years as a spy, which gives me a low tolerance for unrealistic scenarios, or that writing my own spy novels means that I’m desperate for a palate cleanser at the end of the day.” Wolff did say, “There are spy novels I love—like ‘Harlot’s Ghost,’ ‘The Quiet American’ or ‘The Untouchable’—but it’s not my genre of choice.” (Orange County Register)
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