SpyWeek: Accused Trump Assassin Roamed at Will with Guns, Mocked Hotel Security
Also: Tulsi's absence, Patel's capers, alarm over Iranian & Chinese hacks of US infrastructure amid cyber defense cuts, Bill Burns tutors Trump on Iran, a new film on "the Jewish James Bond" and more
Shooter Roamed: White House Correspondents’ Association dinner gunman Cole Allen marvelled at how easy it was for him to walk about the Hilton Hotel fully armed. “Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat,” he wrote in a note obtained by the New York Post. Cole had booked a room in the hotel and smuggled in a shotgun, handgun and knives, reports said. On Saturday, he wrote, “The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.” He continued, “Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again,” adding: “Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit,” invoking a nickname for the M2 Browning .50-caliber machine gun. “Actually insane.” The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported Sunday that the Trump administration “provided a lower level of security for the White House correspondents’ dinner than it has for other gatherings of high-ranking officials, even though the president and many Cabinet members were in attendance.” That was a decision by DHS secretary Markwayne Mullins, in accord with past practice for the annual event, but will no doubt undergo a critical review. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democrats and some members of the news media for the violence, which she attributed to a “left-wing cult of hatred against the president and all of those who support him and work for him.” Critical social media denizens quickly responded with quotes and videos of Trump encouraging or celebrating political violence.
Where is Tulsi? It’s a question long asked by many a close observer of the Trump administration’s national security apparatus, such as it is, with real estate operators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’ s son-in-law, leading diplomatic talks with Russia and Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doing double duty as national security adviser, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe at the Situation Room table for the mid-February planning season for the war on Iran, not the nominal head of U.S. intelligence.
“When the war began, the White House put out a picture of Gabbard and (JD) Vance meeting with a few Cabinet officials in the Situation Room, looking like they’d been sent to the kids’ table at a wedding,” Atlantic magazine fireballer Tom Nichols wrote on Saturday. “Since then, Gabbard has made herself scarce: She was, after all, once an anti-war Democrat who sold T-shirts opposing a conflict with Iran. Trump is also irritated with her because of her closeness to Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center; Kent was her chief of staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and he was her pick to run the NCTC.”
Nichols, a Russia specialist and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, adds: “After less than eight months on the job, Kent resigned to protest the war and has since gone public with blistering criticisms of the administration. (Trump reportedly believes that Gabbard was shielding Kent from the White House.) But Gabbard was apparently in poor standing with the administration even before the war began: In early February, she opposed renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; Trump ignored her advice and is pushing Republicans to extend the law.”
Then there’s her disturbing record falling for Russian and Syrian disinformation. So despite her clumsy efforts to remain in Trump’s favor by enlisting in his retaliation campaign against Obama “Russiagate” officials, she’s been effectively benched for the Iran war.
Which is fine with Nichols. “Does the United States even need a director of national intelligence?” he asks (and is hardly the first to do so). “Gabbard’s appointment was full of risk from the start because of her background, but her inconsequential impact on actual matters of policy might be one more reason to downsize the bloated national-security infrastructure put in place during the panic that gripped America after 9/11.”
Manchurian Candidate revisited: The CIA has long been said to have begun its psychedelic drug testing on unsuspecting Americans because the North Koreans and Chinese were using them on American POW’s. That was a plotline in Richard Condon’s 1959 thriller, whose 1962 movie version turned the imagined conspiracy (based on rumors Condon had picked up) into a widely believed ”fact.” In reality, it was somewhat the reverse: the CIA tested LSD, etc. on North Korean POW’s, a fact first reported in 1979 by State Department intelligence officer-turned-journalist John Marks in his groundbreaking book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. Now comes freelance writer Garrett Kim, who reviewed documents released to the private National Security Archive in 2024-2025 and says, “Notably absent from these declassified documents is any proof that similar experiments were undertaken by enemies of the U.S.” A fascinating read, in The Intercept.
More Kash Capers: The FBI director was arrested twice in his youth for alcohol-related incidents that he said were “not representative of my usual conduct,” Trevor Aaronson reports in The Intercept, drawing on Patel statements in his 2005 Florida Bar application. One arrest was for pissing in public on the way home from a night of drinking—not unheard of for a 20-something man. But “(t)two decades later, as Patel pushes back against allegations that drinking is impairing his leadership of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, these arrests show how Patel’s alcohol use has been subjected to scrutiny before in his professional life.”
Kash Caper II: The FBI began secretly investigating a veteran New York Times journalist last month after she reported that Patel was using bureau personnel to provide his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins with government security and transportation. “Agents interviewed the girlfriend, queried databases for information on the reporter, Elizabeth Williamson, and recommended moving forward to determine whether Ms. Williamson broke federal stalking laws,” a source told the Times. Justice Department officials decided there was no grounds for the FBI to charge the reporter.
Ex-CIA Director’s Iran advice: “I have learned many lessons over many years about dealing with Iran, often the hard way,” former CIA Director and life-long diplomat William J. Burns wrote in a New York Times Op-ed piece Friday, offering some tips for President Trump on how to get out of a war he started but cannot control. “We didn’t have to dig the hole this deep,” said Burns, who in the Obama administration led the secret nuclear talks that culminated in the deal that capped Iran’s centrifuges and uranium enrichment for 15 years and put IAEA inspectors inside its nuclear facilities. “Fortunately, there’s still time to put our shovel down, learn some hard lessons and apply them with a little more humility,” added Burns, who served as CIA director under Joe Biden. “Humility” is obviously a stretch for Trump, but Iran’s chokehold on Hormuz and surviving missile and drone arsenals would seem to narrow his options to those that eventually worked with Iran, albeit only after years of struggle, Burns wrote: diplomacy and patience. “[F)orce alone—without patient, painstaking diplomacy, backed up by good intelligence taken seriously by policymakers—rarely delivers,” he added. “Nor are negotiations dictation. They almost always involve a complicated, drawn-out process of give and take, in which expertise matters and many different points of pressure are applied.” The odds of replacing the regime with its internal opponents, meanwhile, remains “farcicle,” as CIA Director John Ratcliffe advised Trump it would be back in a Feb. 12 Situation Room meeting. “In other words, it’s bullshit,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
Iran in Our Pants: Iranian hackers have been infiltrating U.S. utilities, particularly the computers that control municipal energy, water, and wastewater agencies, The New Yorker’s Sue Halpern reported Thursday. Not only that, but “threat hunter researchers” … have reported that “the [Iran backed] hacking group Seedworm had infiltrated the networks of an American airport, a bank, and a U.S. software company that does business in Israel as a defense and aerospace contractor.” It hardly needs saying that the group was in “a potentially dangerous position to launch attacks,” as Helpern put it.
Meanwhile, Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal “sheds around $707 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” NextGov/FCW reported early this month. Axios cited a government official saying “[r]oughly 1,000 people have already left the nation’s top cybersecurity agency during the second Trump administration…cutting the agency’s total workforce by nearly a third.” And just days before the U.S. strikes on Iran in February, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents and staff members from a counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats from Iran, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN, because “[e]ach was involved in the investigation of President Donald Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.” This week Trump’s pick to lead CISA, Sean Plankey, withdrew his nomination after the GOP Senate majority was unable to achieve the unanimity needed to advance his nomination after months of wrangling, “largely due to resistance from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) over a contested Coast Guard shipbuilding project.”
Chinese Cyberspies: The White House has accused China of undertaking “industrial-scale theft” of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property, the (paywall protected) Financial Times reported, according to Reuters. “The accusation marks the latest escalation in tensions around Chinese groups allegedly raiding advanced American AI research amid an arms race to lead in the technology. It comes just weeks before President Donald Trump will meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing.”
Domestic Terror: “The sophisticated theft of 15 crop-spraying drones last month in New Jersey has the FBI worried as experts warn of ‘ridiculously bad’ consequences and ‘a potential nightmare scenario’ if terrorists get their hands on the machines, Jack Murphy and Sean D. Naylor reported this week in The High Side, their Substack newsletter. “The unsolved theft has revived fears rampant in the post-9/11 years that terrorists might use crop dusters to disperse biological or chemical weapons with the aim of inflicting mass casualties inside the United States. The difference now is that the potential threat consists not of one pilot flying a small propellor-driven plane, but more than a dozen remotely piloted vehicles. Heightening the concern even further is the fact that the crime occurred against the backdrop of the United States’ war against Iran.”
Israel-Iran spy wars: Two Israel Air Force technicians who worked on F-15 fighter jets, have been charged with acting as agents for Iran after allegedly handing over “documentation of the engine diagrams, as well as photographs showing the face of a flight instructor,” according to the Jerusalem Post. “They were also asked to gather information about former IDF chief Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Herzi Halevi and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” the Israeli TV station KAN reported. Iran, meanwhile, executed regime critic and protester Erfan Kiani “in a horrific public hanging after being accused of spying for Israel,” the U.S. Sun reported.
Don’t miss SpyTalk Contributing Writer Yossi Melman’s profile of Gen. Roman Gofman, the Russian-born, rules breaking ex-IDF tank commander whom Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed to run the Mossad. Also this week, on the SpyTalk podcast: Former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani deciphers the Iran war talks.
Spy Mystery Who really was Benjamin Jamil, founder of the once ubiquitous Counter Spy Shops, which “sold anti-bugging equipment, bulletproof clothing and night-vision goggles to jealous spouses and paranoid businessmen,” making him “the outfitter to the suspicious”—and deeply involved with an espionage underworld’s cast of characters. Fascinating investigation by Jeff Maysh in the FT.
Vatican Rag: “US spies on Vatican: Trump’s war on Pope Leo includes cloak and dagger,” the national security journalist Ken Klippenstein headlined Friday. We don’t know about that (except that any espionage service worth its name spies on everyone they can as a matter of course). But this detail caught our eye: “Even the U.S. military has a Vatican-specific language code on its books as a distinct linguistic capability,” Klippenstein wrote. “‘QLE’ designates Ecclesiastical Latin—the Vatican’s preferred liturgical register—as distinct from classical Latin (”LAT”), which is used primarily for historical and legal documents. It’s a small detail, but an illustrative one: the national security state is thorough, and it has been thorough about the Vatican for a long time.”
A Waste of Spies: There’s a new documentary film out on the late CIA operations maestro Peter Sichel—the “Jewish James Bond,” whom the Guardia’s Philip Oltermann recounts was a “refugee from Nazi Germany whose gratitude to his American hosts was such that he volunteered to join the U.S. Army and became the CIA’s first station chief in Berlin as a mere twentysomething, filing early warnings about Soviet activity that have been credited with ringing in the Cold War.” In the film, Sichel, who died in 2025, bemoans the CIA’s 1950s-era coups against “democratically elected leaders in Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo and especially Iran,” which cost “a lot of lives.” The Last Spy is not yet available for streaming in the U.S.
Superb reporting. Keep it coming.
Everything all at once. No wonder everyone is worn out.