SpyWeek Halloween Edition: Where’s the East Wing Bunker? Plus, Venezuela and a Kash & Tulsi Clash
Also: Maduro spooked, FBI agents spooked, Warner spooked by war clouds, Trump spooked by new Russian nuke
Welcome to Spy Week, our curated compilation of important events at the intersection of intelligence, foreign relations and military operations.
East Wing Mystery: What happened to the White House bunker when President Trump impetuously tore down the East Wing? SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff was curious about the fate of the officially named Presidential Emergency Operations Center, which was first built for FDR during World War II and used at least twice since, by Vice President Dick Cheney, First Lady Laura Bush and others during the 9/11 attacks, and then in 2020 by Trump, who retreated there during the George Floyd protests. Did Trump’s mechanized excavators pulverize the underground PEOC, too? If so, where is it now? If not, where would you get the elevator?
Everybody Isikoff queried was tight-lipped, but former CIA senior official and onetime Situation Room Senior Director Larry Pfeiffer did say that, while he couldn’t ”go into any detail about the PEOC or [continuity of government] activities given their classification and sensitivity. I would only offer that I am confident that the White House Military Office (WHMO), which is responsible for those activities, would have mitigated the impact, if there was any, of the destruction of the East Wing on those activities.” He added, “They are amazing professionals who take those responsibilities very seriously. Thank god.”
Maduro Calls Moscow: Faced with a U.S. naval buildup and Trump’s declared “covert war” against him, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro reportedly dialed 9/11 for Russia, China and Iran to come to his aid with “defensive radars, aircraft repairs and potentially missiles,“ according to “internal U.S. government documents” obtained by The Washington Post. The Post said the Kremlin declined to comment on Maduro’s letter “but on Friday evening, the Foreign Ministry said Moscow supports Venezuela ‘in defending its national sovereignty’ and stands ‘ready to respond appropriately to the requests of our partners in light of emerging threats.’” The key wiggle room word here is “appropriately.” The Miami Herald, meanwhile, reports that the Trump Administration has already “made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment,” according to “sources with knowledge of the situation.”
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the long serving top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, complained loudly Thursday that he and his counterparts there and on other relevant committees had been shut out of oversight briefings on what the administration was up to in regard to Venezuela, including “the legal justification for ongoing military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats.” SecDef Pete Hegseth and other Pentagon officials have ignored Democratic requests for info, he said.
Steven R. Weissman, author of a chapter on “Congressional Oversight of Covert Action” in The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, noted growing centrist Republican irritation over Trump’s erratic Ukraine pronouncements, adding that GOP softening, “plus emerging Democratic opposition to the covert program—within the committees and Congress—could strengthen an important faction within the Trump administration that has favored negotiations with Maduro.” (Just Security)
About that Russian nuclear missile: ‘There’s not a single credible sign of a successful test,” former Danish intelligence officer Jacob Kaarsbro opined this week. “It’s unlikely that the missile is anywhere close to being operational. It’s likely a staged photo op with the purpose of sowing fear amongst western publics.” Vladimir Putin’s boasts about the Burevestnik (“Storm petrel”) apparently goaded Trump into announcing he was restarting nuclear bomb testing. A 2024 Defense Intelligence Agency report just surfacing, meanwhile, points out the obvious: ”The threats from more advanced cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, and other novel delivery systems, coupled with growing nuclear arsenals, are threatening U.S. military advantages.”
More Kash Chaos: Senior Justice Department and FBI officials are very annoyed that FBI Director Kash Patel jumped the gun on a sketchy counterterrorism case in Michigan, “with the apparent goal of seeking some credit for the FBI, but in a way that could interfere with the investigation,” MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig (the Pulitzer winner recently arrived from The Washington Post) reported Friday. “The alleged plot involved a group of young people, some of whom are minors, who had been engaging online with Islamic extremist content. But the sources said the investigation was in its early stages, with no criminal charges prepared and no clear understanding of what exactly the suspects planned to do and where.” Dilanian added on X: “These were young people radicalized online, we are told. Just how capable they were or how imminent this was remains to be seen.”
Patel’s latest misstep no doubt delighted Tulsi Gabbard, whose congressional allies have been advancing a House bill that would shift primary responsibility for counterintelligence—hunting down spies, traitors and terrorists—from the FBI to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The FBI was apoplectic, according to an account by The New York Times, which obtained “a pointed and unusual letter” from the bureau to Congress objecting to the provision in the Intelligence Authorization Bill bill that would “cause serious and long-lasting damage to the U.S. national security.” The Times did not mention whether the FBI’s stated concerns included Gabbard’s record of parroting Russian and Syrian propaganda, but it surely was on the minds of career FBI officials and agents not yet canned in Patel’s MAGA retribution drive.
“The F.B.I. letter was the latest example of tensions between Ms. Gabbard and her counterparts at other intelligence agencies, including… Patel,” The Times added. “A bid by Joe Kent, a top Gabbard ally who leads the National Counterterrorism Center, to investigate the circumstances of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing had already raised alarms at the F.B.I., after Mr. Kent went so far as to examine the bureau’s files.”
Stiff Upper Lips: “MI5 and MI6 fail to co-operate, redacted Home Office report found”—headline in The Times of London. So, too, GCHQ, their intercepts agency, with all three “failing to keep pace” with threats to national security, the report said. “The report drafted by Nick Timothy, a former Downing Street chief of staff who is now a Conservative MP, criticised the domestic security agency MI5, its foreign counterpart MI6 and GCHQ, the government’s communications agency, for demonstrating ‘little co-ordination’ and having ‘fragmented’ lines of accountability.”
Ooh-la-la: “The first history of France’s present-day foreign intelligence service to be published in English” is on the way from Georgetown University Press. The DGSE: A Concise History of France’s Foreign Intelligence Service, is authored by Damien Van Puyvelde, Head of the Intelligence & Security Research Group at Leiden University.
And Finally: Two legendary CIA brothers who specialized in Bond-like dirty tricks during the Cold War put on a spectacular Halloween show at their homes in Alexandria, Va., reports Aram Roston, who recently moved from Reuters to the Guardian. “For six weeks, no matter what was going on in the world, the Park brothers would take leave from the agency – using vacation, sick days and anything else they could think of – and construct an elaborate front-yard Halloween display, often using CIA-inspired technology.” Outside their two adjacent homes this week “there was an absolute mess of black tents and graveyards, dotted with skeletons, robots, pirates and gory monsters. Lines overhead guide the flying witch and giant spider.” They’d welcome your visit!
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