New in SpyWeek: That Mysterious CIA School and More
Double agents, assassinations, Iranian and Chinese spies also lead the intel news
Welcome to our new weekly newsletter, where we look at the latest news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy and military operations.
Double Agent Deal? Back in June, SpyTalk revealed that the Biden administration had spurned a previously unreported offer by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to release nine jailed Americans, as a well as a fugitive defense contractor and a group of imprisoned opposition figures, all in exchange for one man —Colombian businessman Alex Saab, Maduro’s top financial fixer who was awaiting trial in Miami on money-laundering charges. “This wouldn’t constitute a real, let alone good faith offer, because it includes Saab, whom we had already made very clear is off limits,” a White House source familiar with Maduro’s proposal told us. Well, it turns out that Maduro’s offer wasn’t the nonstarter that the White House had claimed. On Dec. 20, following six months of quiet negotiations mediated by Qatar, President Joe Biden granted clemency to Saab, who returned to Venezuela the same day. It also turns out that Saab was more than Maduro’s fixer. According to court papers, he had worked as a spy for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, providing intelligence about the inner workings of the Maduro regime. Some experts suspect Saab was a double agent who kept Maduro fully informed of his work for the DEA and may have even helped the Venezuelan leader foil a U.S.-backed coup attempt against him in 2019.
In any event, on Dec. 20, ten Americans, six of whom the U.S. State Department had classified as wrongfully detained, were flown back to the United States, and some 20 opposition figures were released from prison in Venezuela. Separately, Venezuela also handed over Leonard Glenn Francis, better known as “Fat Leonard,” the central figure in the U.S. Navy’s largest ever corruption scandal. In 2015, the Malaysian fugitive was convicted here of bribing dozens of uniformed officers of the Navy’s Pacific-based Seventh fleet with cash, prostitutes and other favors in exchange for classified information on fleet movements that helped him win lucrative U.S. Navy service contracts for his Singapore-based ship servicing company. Last year, he fled house arrest in San Diego and made his way via Mexico and Cuba to Venezuela, where he was detained. Biden said he okayed the swap after Maduro agreed to meet U.S. demands for fair elections in Venezuela in 2024.
Israel’s Forever War: Much of the past week’s intelligence news came out of the Middle East, where Christmas brought no let-up to the three-month war between Israel and Hamas. The Biden administration’s fears of a wider regional war prompted intense diplomacy to find moderate Palestinians who will govern Gaza and the West Bank once the fighting ends, presumably with Hamas’ defeat. This got us musing last week about previous efforts in history to find a so-called “third force” and their ultimate failures.
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