Plus this week: Trump as easy eavesdrop target, Dutch on Israeli infowar, CISA on Iran infil of U.S. water, CIA station chief goes crypto, "Hunt for Saddam" TV series
Moscow Mule? FBI Director Kash Patel’s scheduled Moscow sojourn only weeks before the U.S. midterm elections has generated lots of questions, but none so provocative as one from prominent Kremlin commentator Vladimir Vasiliev, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who suggested the FSB may offer Patel dirt on Democrats. “It is assumed that Russia has some kind of kompromat on the Democrats, and it could be provided by us, in one form or another, to the American side,” Vasiliev told Moskovsky Komsomolets, known as MK, “a Russian outlet with a long history of publishing information and propaganda from the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service,” according to Kremlin watcher Olga Lautman. Vasiliev added that “Moscow might naturally ask, ‘What will we get in return?’” There’s much more on this worth your time at Lautman’s “Unmasking Russia” newsletter. Patel also took an underreported trip to Beijing late last month to forge FBI ties with Chinese law enforcement.
Russia, Russia: Germany has expelled 400 Russians since 2022, including 80 suspected intelligence agents under diplomatic cover, according to the tabloid Bild. Meanwhile, an explosive drone discovered near Ukrainian planes at a German airport has been linked to Russia, U.S. intelligence officials told the Wall Street Journal. They also say “Putin could try to test NATO’s resolve with a limited assault on an allied country in the next few years. The assessments envision scenarios ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion.”
Ears for Trump: The president has made it incredibly easy for adversary intelligence services to eavesdrop on his conversations, writes Calder Walton, a historian at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and author of SPIES: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. “One can only imagine how many foreign spies are also listening in to his phone conversations,” Walton wrote at the U.K.’s iPaper. “Any foreign intelligence service worth its name will have recruited agents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where security is known to be pathetic. At the end of his first term, Trump had classified documents lying around in one of his bathrooms.”
Follow the Money: “Inside the War on Hezbollah’s Finances” unveils how “Israel and the United States aren’t just targeting the Lebanese militant group’s weapons. They’re going after its money.” (New York Times)
Tehran Security Shuffle: “The appointment of Mohsen Rezaei as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council suggests that Iran’s old guard is consolidating power,” reports The New York Times. Rezaei, “who led Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s…is replacing Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who stepped into the role when the council’s previous secretary, Ali Larijani, was killed in an Israeli strike during the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran earlier this year.”
Iran’s Swimmer Bots: CISA, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is close to proving that it’s Iran that’s been slithering into water control systems across the upper Midwest. “The hackers were ‘targeting water entities of all sizes’ and it recommended “facilities unplug vulnerable controllers from the internet,” it said. (New York Times)
China’s Hitchhiker Spies: “Royal Navy spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces secretly sent data to China,” blares The Telegraph, a reliable vehicle for U.K. defense leaks. “The cameras on the K3 Scout surveillance drones had components made in China which were secretly transmitting information to a device in the country.”
Netherlands Blacklists Israel: The Dutch internal security agency NCTV now ranks Israel as a threat alongside Iran and Russia. “Placing Israel in the same threat category as Iran and Russia gives Dutch security services institutional cover to treat routine Israeli diaspora outreach as a counterintelligence concern, setting a template other European governments may follow,” said The Jerusalem Post. “The National Coordinator for Terrorism and Security (NCTV) report, released on July 17, lists Israel as one of the countries that aims to ‘control public opinion and political decision making.’”
Ukraine Infowars: Coming this week, The Propaganda Manual of the Ukraine War: Information Warfare by Russia, Ukraine, and Western Nations: Lessons Learned for Future Conflicts, from Thomas Kent, a disinformation expert, from the American Foreign Policy Council. “The book represents two years of research. It describes Russian, Ukrainian, and what have passed for Western information operations in the course of the war,” writes the author. “It attempts to judge what tactics were the most and least successful for each side. The book also assesses an array of ‘resilience’ tactics to protect civilian populations from foreign propaganda efforts.”
Target Havana: The CIA’s buffed-up task force on Cuba is looking for a few good puppets to replace the regime’s communist leaders, a la Delcy Rodrîguez in Venezuela, reports the New York Times. This comes on top of the Trump administration’s financial and economic strangulation of the island.
Former CIA Station Chief Goes Crypto: A former CIA station chief in Caracas, Enrique “Rick” de la Torre “registered on Monday as a lobbyist for a Cayman-based crypto firm previously fined $45 million, including regarding sanctions policy,” reported Jack Poulson on his All Source Intelligence news site. De la Torre was Venezuela station chief “during a period that overlapped with high-profile U.S. intelligence and political operations in the country, including the 2024–2025 capture of former President Nicolás Maduro,” reported Türkiye Today, a center-right news outlet associated with the Recep Erdoğan regime.
FBI Agent Goes Crypto, Badly: An FBI counterintelligence agent has been arrested on charges of “taking about $1 million worth of cryptocurrency from the digital accounts of an overseas suspect in a U.S. criminal investigation, according to court documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Patrick Yaroch, an FBI supervisory agent in Washington, D.C., “came forward late last week to confess, telling a Justice Department employee that it was ‘eating him up inside,’ and he wanted to ‘get it off his chest.’” (MSN)
Don’t miss this week’s SpyTalk podcast featuring former senior FBI executive Lauren C. Anderson on chaos in the Bureau under MAGA warrior Kash Patel.
RIP Sam Faddis: Charles S. Faddis, an ex-CIA officer who won praise years ago as an insightful critic of the agency but later morphed into an election-conspiracies activist, died late last month in Philadelphia from “Covid-related lung disease and pneumonia,” the New York Times reported Friday. (Back in 2013, one of his former CIA colleagues volunteered to me that Faddis was “the best boss I ever had, by far.”)
Fishy Colombians: Ukraine has expelled Colombians suspected of ties to the nation’s drug cartels and rebel groups who’ve been soaking up Kyiv’s vaunted expertise in lethal low cost drones. (Financial Times)
True Spy Yarn: “The BBC went looking for Hussam Luka, the former head of Syria’s most powerful civilian intelligence agency,” the BBC headlined on Friday. “They started with his phone book.” Eventually, the reporters located him in Russia. “Known as ‘The Spider,’ Luka was one of Assad’s top henchmen, accused of orchestrating atrocities and systematic torture, and sanctioned by the UK, US and European Union.” A riveting read about yet another sadist leader sheltered by Moscow over the decades.
On the Screen: High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam, debuts Sept. 13 onTNT. The multipart docudrama is the story of John Nixon, “the first CIA officer to interrogate Saddam Hussein,” reports Deadline. (See the trailer here.) Back in May, Nixon’s CIA colleague William (Jerry) Watson described the agency’s criminally bad intelligence-gathering on, and fruitless hunt for, Iraqi WMD on the SpyTalk podcast.
Great read and very informative. Yes it is hair rising and yet it appears Putin still has trump's support...