New in SpyWeek: War Clouds and Terror (Updated)
Iran threats, assassinations, foreign spy threats, 702 intercepts lead the week
Cash Down: The bullet-riddled body of Hamas’ money man was found in his villa outside Beirut earlier this week. U.S. officials said Mohammed Sarur, 57, was the “middleman” in charge of transferring tens of millions of dollars per year from Iran’s Quds Force to Hamas’ operational arm, the Izz-Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Sarur in 2019. Israel has employed assassinations as a key tool in thwarting its enemies since its founding in 1948, according to Ronen Bergman’s 2018 classic, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.
Spy Threats: The head of American counterintelligence, Mike Casey says the scale of foreign spying operations, cyberattacks, and economic espionage against the United States “is impressive and terrifying." The former staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee told NPR on Friday that, "It's not just the Russians stealing secrets from the State Department anymore. It's everybody trying to steal all sorts of intellectual property, going after critical infrastructure. Just the list goes on and on." But China, he said, has taken lessons from America’s rise from an agrarian nation to international economic and military colossus, especially since World War Two. "And they have a view of national greatness that essentially says, 'If we can supplant the United States in key technology, both military and non-military, and help establish sort of the international regulatory scheme for all that, then we will become the preeminent player in the international area,'" he told NPR’s Ryan Lucas.
Tinder Box: Iran launched drones from its territory toward Israel late Saturday, the Israeli military said, adding that “dozens of combat planes were airborne as part of the state of readiness.” Earlier Saturday near the Strait of Hormuz , IRGC naval forces dispatched a helicopter borne raiding crew to seize the MSC Aries, an Israeli-affiliated ship, and piloted it to Iranian territorial waters.
Everyone had been holding their breath over an expected Iranian retaliatory attack against Israel, but if the past is any guide Tehran’s response won’t match its fiery rhetoric.
Iran has vowed to respond to the April 1 bombing of an Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus that killed three generals and four other military officers. Two U.S. officials told CBS News that the attack could involve more than 100 drones and dozens of missiles aimed at military targets inside the country.
The problem for Iran is that any of those drones or missiles landing in heavily-populated areas could well draw an equivalent or worse response from Israel. Iran has repeatedly indicated it does not want to risk a direct war with Israel or the United States, especially one that obliterates its nuclear sites and leads to more American troops in the region.
When a coalition of groups linked to Iran launched a drone attack that killed three U.S. soldiers at a remote base on Jordan’s border with Syria, the United States responded with dozens of air strikes against targets in Syria and Iraq. Esmail Qaani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, flew to Baghdad and convinced groups aligned with Tehran to back down.
In 2020 Iran fired ballistic missiles at an airbase in Iraq in response to the U.S. assassination of Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani. American forces in the area were informed of the attack ahead of time thanks to early warning systems, a spokesman at the base said. “Officials at first said no one was injured at Al Asad, but more than 100 troops were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries and Purple Hearts were approved for more than two dozen,” according to the Military.com news site.
U.S. officials said Gen. Michael Kurilla, the top American military commander for the Middle East, traveled to Israel Thursday to coordinate a response to possible Iranian retaliation. As of Monday, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group was operating in the Red Sea.
Dial 702: The House voted Friday to extend the controversial warrantless surveillance law known as Section 702, overcoming opposition from some Democrats and hard-right Republicans who earlier blocked consideration of the bill.
It was Speaker Mike Johnson's fourth try after months of wrangling with opponents in the GOP’s Freedom Caucus. Nineteen Republicans had voted with Democrats Wednesday to oppose a routine measure setting the rules for debate on the bill. To get around those hurdles, the House leadership agreed to have Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Act (FISA) expire in two years instead of five.
The FISA reform bill, which now goes to the Senate, would require approval from the deputy director of the FBI for any query of foreign intelligence information involving U.S. government officials or political or media organizations. It also prohibits political appointees from approving FBI queries of the intelligence database and imposes stiff penalties on abuses.
U.S. intelligence officials say Section 702 “saves lives” by thwarting terrorist attacks, often citing the 2022 drone strike that took out al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul. The law allows U.S. counterterrorism agencies to gather communications from U.S.-based tech companies in which a foreigner based overseas is on one end of the conservation. The electronic intercepts also produce a majority of items in the President’s Daily Brief.
Critics say tougher reforms are needed to prevent abuses. A U.S. court found that the FBI improperly conducted 278,000 improper searches of Section 702 intelligence information over several years. The FBI says reforms have eliminated the vast majority of “unintentional” queries made under Section 702.
A coalition of Democrats and Republicans failed on Friday to pass an amendment to the bill by Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. that would have required the FBI to obtain a warrant to see intelligence information from U.S. citizens who are in contact with foreign targets. The Biden administration strongly opposed the Biggs amendment. FBI Director Christopher Wray said such a change in the law would have “real-world consequences” on the bureau’s ability to protect the United States. The amendment failed on a rare tie vote of 212-212.
Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman tweeted Friday there was “VERY intense W.H. lobbying effort on the warrant issue. - Jake Sullivan/Merrick Garland made calls - NSC attorney Josh Geltzer and Deputy homeland security adviser Jen Daskal were right outside the floor with representatives from DOJ/CIA to talk to members.”
A social media post by Donald Trump spurred Wednesday’s chaos in the House.: “KILL FISA,” Trump wrote. “ IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Trump’s incoherent claim refers to the FBI’s improper surveillance of his 2016 campaign adviser, Carter Page, which had nothing to do with Section 702.
Trump and his allies in the House have also prevented a bill on a $60 billion military aid package for Ukraine from coming to a vote in the House.
Border Holes (cont’d): An Afghan migrant on the terror watchlist spent nearly a year living freely inside the United States after being apprehended and released by Border Patrol agents.
NBC News reported that Mohammad Kharwin was released after he was apprehended near San Diego in March 2023 after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Border Patrol officials suspected he was on the U.S. terror watchlist, but couldn’t confirm it and failed to notify the FBI.
The FBI’s terror watchlist database identifies Kharwin as a member of Hezb-e-Islami, or HIG, a political and paramilitary organization that the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization. Founded by Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, HIG is a “virulently anti-Western insurgent group” that conducted attacks in Afghanistan that killed at least nine American soldiers, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Kharwin was re-arrested last month and then released again by an immigration judge who was not told he was a national security threat. Karwin is free on bond until his immigration hearing in Texas, scheduled for 2025.
Axis of Evil Update: The deepening alliance between Russia and China is one of the most important strategic outcomes of Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. China helps keep the Russian war machine chugging along in every way short of lethal aid.
Bloomberg reported this week that the United States has warned its allies that China is stepping up its support for Russia. Beijing is providing Russia with satellite imagery for military purposes, as well as desperately needed microelectronics, optics, machine tools for tanks, and rocket propellant. In a phone call earlier this month, President Biden raised concerns about China’s efforts to help Russia rebuild its defense industrial base.
The U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, released last month, reported that China’s exports to Russia of goods with potential military uses rose more than threefold since 2022. In return, China imported energy commodities worth $129 billion. Trade between Russia and China reached more than $220 billion in 2023, about the level of U.S. trade with Germany.
Twenty days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin and Xi described ties between their two countries as a “partnership without limits.”
Fortunately, there still are some limits. CIA Director Bill Burns told CBS a year ago that China was considering providing lethal aid to Russia for its war in Ukraine. This seemed like a warning calculated to get Chinese leaders to think twice. Except for a few small shipments of gunpowder, it seems to have worked.
Still, there are also signs of growing military cooperation aimed at the United States. A combined Russian and Chinese naval force patrolled near the coast of Alaska last year in what experts told the Wall Street Journal was a historic first.
“The West should be prepared for an extended period of simultaneous confrontation with two immense nuclear-armed powers,” Foreign Policy observed.
Moscow Calling: It’s not every day that the Republican chair of the House intelligence committee says Russian propaganda has so thoroughly infected his party that it’s being heard in Congress.
“We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio said April 7 on CNN's State of the Union. “I mean, there are members of Congress today who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which, of course, it is not.”
It only took two days for Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., to prove Turner’s point. Tuberville went on Newsmax this week to say that money for Ukraine was a “waste” because Ukrainian leaders have “beach houses all over the world.” This is a rumor that’s been fueled by the D.C. Weekly, a website founded by a former U.S. Marine who now lives in Russia, BBC News reported. As we’ve noted, D.C. Weekly, along with its publishing cousins the Miami Chronicle, the New York News Daily, The Boston Times, and the Chicago Chronicle, is a Russian creation designed to mimic actual news organizations and push Kremlin propaganda with a mix of local news stories.
Russian Stunt of the Week: Disinformation researchers had a field day with a post from the Russian Embassy in South Africa that linked to a Boston Times story about foreign “mercenary” fighters in Ukraine. One researcher found the image accompanying the story of a dirt-covered, war battered child was taken from a 2015 Russian music video. The Boston Times says it has won Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting, feature writing, and photography since its founding in 1972. (It’s not true: The Boston Times is a fake Russian-created blog that was registered in January.) Another researcher took a close look at the Boston Times’ logo, with such gibberish as "THE JUBINLDRESS OF JECELOLATCYE" and "TRUTH AND UBOUTELICY" Some articles used images with the file name in Russian. What about a Pulitzer for fake news?
SpyTalk Comment of the Week: Howard Walther, a Naval engineer, wrote this in response to news reports that said a Russian acoustic weapon may be responsible for the mysterious symptoms that have affected more than 1,000 U.S. intelligence and diplomatic personnel known as “Havana Syndrome”
“I worked at a defense contractor designing and producing sonar systems. We obtained early research papers from the Russians on acoustics and translated them. The Russians did a lot of the first research in acoustics and have the capability to produce an acoustic weapon. You have these types of injuries from our people in service then you have to consider the fact that Russia or another country will exploit it.”
Pocket Litter:
The Senate intelligence committee wants more information about “Havana Syndrome” in the wake of reports by 60 Minutes, The Insider, and Der Spiegel. (Miami Herald)
America’s special operations forces are preparing for conflict with Russia and China in the resource-rich Arctic. (The Washington Post)
President Biden is considering a request from Australia to drop the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Australia’s parliament recently passed a measure, backed by the country’s prime minister, calling for Assange’s return. (BBC)
The New York Times paid a visit to a former secret CIA detention and torture center in The village of Antaviliai, Lithuania, one of three so-called black sites that the agency set up in Eastern Europe after 9/11. In January, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Lithuania had violated the European Convention on Human Rights “because of its complicity in the C.I.A. secret detainee program.” (NYT)
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will soon release guidelines to help the U.S. intelligence community navigate the thorny ethical considerations of purchasing commercially available data that can include sensitive information about Americans. (The Record)
Apple has informed its users in 92 countries that they could be possible victims of a “mercenary spyware” attack attempt. (The Economic Times)
The U.S. intelligence community now has a chief artificial intelligence officer. John Beieler assumed the newly created post at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (Federal News Network)
Russian spies were found to have been working in NATO’s headquarters in Brussels “for years,” the organization’s general secretary Jens Stoltenberg has said. (Evening Standard).
Meanwhile, a spy scandal is rocking Vienna, where foreign espionage services are as common as strudel. “Allegations and evidence have been mounting that Austrian former Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek orchestrated Russian spying activities in his home country and ran double agents in its domestic intelligence service,” Reuters reported. In late March former domestic intelligence agent Egisto Ott was arrested on suspicion of working for Moscow, as were five Bulgarians said to be acting as Russian agents.
Is there something we missed? Or something you would like to see more of? Send your tips, corrections, and thoughts to SpyTalk@protonmail.com.
110 Service Personnel were treated for traumatic brain injury after Iran’s 2020 ballistic missile response/strikes on Al-Assad, al-Anbar, & another by Erbil US military outposts in Iraq. It was the largest ballistic missile attack against the USA.
I'm still having a problem with the notion of Israel retaliating when they started the fight.