Slippery Slopes

I confess I was temporarily disabled by the latest outrageous events in Minneapolis.

For about a year now, I have been imploring a longtime good friend and fellow scribbler not to let the cascading horrors of the Trump administration weigh him down. Let the work be the cure, I’d say. Shut out the noise. Fingers on the keyboard.

Elbows up, to coin a fine Canadian phrase.

Well, I confess I hit my own wall the past few days. The hair raising events in Minneapolis, a nagging medical issue, and the wicked freezing snow storm that trapped me inside for two days, just shut me down.

I had zero energy to write a word. I side-eyed my laptop like a resentful husband. I turned on the TV, had a few drinks and binged three seasons of Blue Lights, a fine BritBox crime thriller.

Did I forget to mention the Greenland nightmare, the Davos clown show and the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group arriving in the Middle East, signaling another performative military action by the cosplaying Patton wannabe?

Worst of all, personally speaking, I missed a deadline. For the first time since December 2023, I failed to publish an edition of SpyWeek, the popular weekly roundup of intelligence-related news. I’m sorry. Write me if you want a refund.

Slowly, though, I’m coming back. A broadening disgust for the Minneapolis murders—even in some Republican quarters—have re-lit the tiny flame of hope in me that Trump & his goons have finally stumbled into their Waterloo. It’s way too soon to say a path back to normality has opened—or even if that’s going to be possible in the years to come—but it’s a start.

We’ll see.

In the meantime, there’s one startling development in our intelligence world that was overshadowed by Minneapolis and everything else that really deserves attention: China’s most senior military official, Gen. Zhang Youxia, has been accused “of leaking information about the country’s nuclear-weapons program to the U.S.,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Zhang a CIA mole? Not likely, say experts, who calculate that it’s Xi Jinping’s way of disguising the facts of what his longtime closest ally may actually have been up to: organizing a coup. Astounding. We’ll track the latest developments there in the next SpyWeek, inshallah.

If you’re pretty much cooped up at home from the storm, meanwhile, you could do worse than laying back and dropping in on last week’s SpyTalk podcast. Our featured guest was former senior Danish intelligence officer Jacob Kaarsbo, taking about—what else?—his nation’s determined resistance to a Trumpian invasion.

Take care, my friends.