New in SpyWeek: Trump & the 'Spy Sheikh,' Noem Protégé's Cyber Breech, MI6 Chief Takes Secret War to Russia, and More

Also new this week: Enemy spy unmasked in Kyiv, a Steele Dossier tidbit, a Chinese espionage wrinkle, and Tulsi in Georgia

Trump last month with “Spy Sheikh” Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan (WH photo)

Spy Sheikh Sleeze: A secret cryptocurrency deal that netted Trump family entities and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff nearly $500 million, almost 40 per cent up front four days before the 2024 election, was engineered by an Abu Dhabi royal known as the “spy sheikh,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Led by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, “brother to the United Arab Emirates’ president, the government’s national security adviser, as well as the leader of the oil-rich country’s largest wealth fund,” the royals had been pushing for access to tightly guarded U.S. A.I. chips, which the Biden administration had rebuffed, fearing they would be shared with China. Last May, six months after the secret deal, in which the royals purchased a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump’s fledgling cryptocurrency venture, the president greenlit the chips sale. “The deal marked something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company,” the Journal said.

Noem Call It Treason: The acting head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a Kristi Noem protégé from her days as governor of South Dakota, set off multiple system alarms last summer when he “uploaded sensitive contracting documents into a public version of ChatGPT,” Politico reported on Tuesday, citing “four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident.” It added: “The apparent misstep from Madhu Gottumukkala was especially noteworthy because [he] had requested special permission from CISA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer to use the popular AI tool soon after arriving at the agency this May, three of the officials said.” None of the documents was classified above the “For Official Use Only” level, Politico reported, but they included CISA contracting documents considered sensitive and not for public release. Last December, Politico also reported that Gottumukkala had requested access to a controlled access program—an act that would require taking a polygraph—in June. Gottumukkala failed the polygraph in the final weeks of July.

In August 2024, then-Gov. Noem had appointed Gottumukkala as South Dakota’s chief technology officer. The following month, she named him as the state’s chief information officer and the commissioner of the South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications. He has been acting CISA head since May 2025.

ICE Barbie and friend Gottumukkala (X screen grab)

Hold My Stout: Back in December we highlighted a speech by MI6’s new chief Blaise Metreweli’s describing Russia as a “menace.” Her unusually blunt remarks continue to reverberate globally, especially in regard to what might be called her action plan to counter Vladimir Putin’s campaign of espionage, assassinations, arson, cyber attacks and election interference across Europe. Invoking the powerful image of the wartime Special Operations Executive, launched by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the darkest days of 1940 to “set [Nazi-occupied] Europe ablaze,” Metreweli vowed that MI6 would no longer restrict itself to recruiting spies to better understand what Putin is up to. “We will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into—if you like—our historical SOE instincts,” she said. In late 2024 her MI6 predecessor, Sir Richard Moore, publicly confirmed that the UK was engaged in covert support operations to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion. Moore’s remarks also drew “historical parallels to the …SOE, emphasizing the continuation of Britain’s legacy of supporting resistance movements.”

Kyiv Spy: Ukraine’s military intelligence and security service said Tuesday they had arrested a Belarussian citizen, Inna Kardash, 35, on charges that she had been a spy for Belarus undercover as a journalist in Kyiv since 2015. “For some time, she worked as a correspondent for Viktor Medvedchuk’s 112 TV channel in the [former Soviet] countries,” according to one report. “In 2020, the Belarusian special services sent her to work in Ukraine.”

Accused Belarus spy Inna Kardash (Ukraine security)

Global Cold War: During the long Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, Berlin was the major hub of intrigue and espionage between the secret services of Moscow and the U.S. Today, the clandestine battlefield has splintered into worldwide gray zones, writes David Bickford, a former head of MI5 and MI6. “Berlin in 1979 was a city divided by walls, ideology and fear. The division was unmistakable. Concrete, wire and watchtowers left little room for interpretation. You knew when you crossed from one system into another, and you understood the consequences of doing so…The world in 2026 is divided just as sharply, but the architecture of that division is harder to recognise.”

Steele Dossier (Again): Remember the infamous “Steele dossier” , a collection of HUMINT and RUMINT gathered by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele on Donald Trump‘s pre-presidential activities in Russia? Of course you do, if only because Trump & Co. have cited it for years as key to “the Russia hoax” concocted by Democrats, particularly Hillary Clinton, to investigate his curious affinity for Moscow. (U.S. intelligence agencies and congressional investigations eventually concluded that Russia did, in fact, conduct a massive election interference operation to hurt Clinton and help Trump.) It’s long been reported that the first stages of the oppo-research on Trump were funded by Republican hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who was backing 2016 presidential candidate Marco Rubio, and The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, who were digging into the personal histories of multiple Republican candidates. After Trump closed in on the nomination, the investigation was picked up by Clinton-linked parties. This weekend, however, a tidbit on the oppo-research efforts surfaced in the latest batch of Jeffrey Epstein documents. “I assume that you already know that the original funder for d=ossierr [sic] was [R]ubio,” Epstein emailed journalist Michael Wolff on Oct. 26, 2017. [N]ot sure why it seems so mysterious.” We haven’t seen any response from Rubio.

Love and the MSS:Chinese intelligence is increasingly using “sham marriages” to get its agents access to U.S. military bases and secrets, says a former CIA officer. A case in point: Jacinth Bailey and Morgan Chambers, both Navy sailors based in Jacksonville, Fla., accused of committing marriage fraud after they allegedly accepted thousands of dollars from Chinese nationals in order to enter sham marriages. “It appears to be a targeted intelligence recruitment and collection operation” targeting the U.S. Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, former CIA officer J. Michael Waller told Fox News. The sham marriages “would entitle the Chinese spouses to get passes to the Naval base.”

Google and the MSS: A federal jury found former Google engineer Linwei Ding guilty of stealing trade secrets for Chinese tech companies. The case marks the first conviction on AI-related economic espionage charges in the U.S., according to the Department of Justice. (CNBC)

Midnight in Georgia: Director of National Intelligence Tusi Gabbard last week bizarrely showed up in Fulton County, Ga., to assist Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. As SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff observed on Thursday, “Although ODNI technically has a broader mission to integrate domestic intelligence with foreign collection and operations, Gabbard’s involvement in the Georgia search was widely seen as highly unusual, if not improper.” Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA director who served as a senior ODNI official in its early years, called the stunt “unbelievable,” telling The Washington Post, “She has no responsibility for that at all.”

Terror Surge: ISIS is on the move beyond Afghanistan and has put A.I. technology to its evil uses, a new U.N. report said. Find out more here at SpyTalk.

ICE Left: Wonder what ICE is spending its new riches on? It’s spy gear, all the better to get protesters in their data banks. “Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency,” The Washington Post revealed in an eye-popping, graphics-laden story this week. “ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.”