Conversation
-
New in SpyWeek: Terror Threat Triggers Emergency B-1 Evacuation from UK Base
source
B-1 Lancer in UK. (Photo Copyright © Chris Lofting PlaneSpotters.net)Red Alert: The U.S. scrambled to withdraw all 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from a U.K. base “after commanders received new threats about an Iran-backed plot against the installation,” two U.S. officials told The New York Times Sunday evening. “The need to move the bombers out of the base, R.A.F. Fairford was deemed so urgent that some of the planes and their flight crews left while aerial refueling aircraft were still being scrambled to support their flights to the United States,” the Times added. “The withdrawal was highly unusual: Such moves are rarely made so quickly from an allied air base in a peacetime country thousands of miles from a combat zone.” Over the weekend a sixth dual Iranian-British suspect who had been arrested in connection with an alleged plot to bomb the base, which has been used by American bombers in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, was released on bail. Five other men were released on bail on Monday, a day after the authorities found no explosives in vans intercepted near the base. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said this week that the British government believes Iran played a part in planning the events that unfolded on Sunday. Iran has denied the accusations.
Pilot Error: Israeli intelligence is taking another beating, this time over its failure to catch would-be FlyDubai hijacker Hamam al-Hammami’s Islamist radicalization, which became clear from photos found on his LinkedIn page, including one showing an El Al aircraft and a photograph of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former ideological leader of al-Qaeda. Not only was Al-Hammami’s prior grounding as an Oman Air pilot missed, his “social media activity, and the radicalization he underwent, also escaped the notice of those who should have detected it,” said Israel Hyom, the country’s large circulation rightwing tabloid. “The Emiratis will undoubtedly draw their own lessons, but Israelis should be concerned that here, officials are busy celebrating rather than worrying, and that those responsible for the failure are, as usual, avoiding the answers demanded by the disturbing gaps that have now been exposed.” Al-Hammami is undergoing interrogation in the UAE, where Saudi Arabia sent him after the near catastrophic incident.
Walk in the Woods: CIA Director John Ratcliffe was among top Trump national security officials who met secretly Friday at Camp David to discuss options on Iran and Yemen.
Vice President J.D. Vance chaired the unannounced meeting, which included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, White House envoy Steve Witkoff, Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, reported Axios’s Trump channeler Barak Ravid. ”The last time a similar meeting took place was in June 2025, just days before Israel went to war against Iran,” he noted. Absent: FBI Director Kash Patel.
Super AI Czar: President Trump announced Sunday that he has picked Jay Clayton, his director of National Intelligence, to lead the White House’s new “Super Intelligence Force,” a group that will “ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence” (what he insists on calling AI). Clayton, who has no observable experience in the field, underwent a gauntlet of tough questions in his July confirmation hearing over his scant background in intelligence, among other issues. Before surviving that clash, he was the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
FBI Hacks: “Incompetence” allowed the ShinyHunters criminal hacker gang to steal the personnel files of every FBI employee (and applicant), including those noting the assignments of many agents to ultra-sensitive counterespionage, counterintelligence and drug cartel investigations, an agent alleged to MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig. “This was a vulnerability that supposedly they thought they patched, but managed to miss one of the ways to patch it,” the agent said in a text message to the reporters, adding that the cause was “definitely incompetence.” The stolen information “should never have been tied to the Internet, either,” the agent added. “It belonged on our internal system and some dumbass moved it all” to an internet-facing system. The incident comes more than 10 years after China’s cybertheft of more than 20 million records from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), an event “considered so catastrophic.” noted The New York Times, “that officials and lawmakers vowed to never let something like it happen again.”
FBI Helps Bust GRU Cyber: The FBI partnered with Ukraine’s SBU internal security agency and European counterparts to bust “a large-scale cyber espionage operation” conducted by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, authorities in Kyiv announced. “According to the SBU,Russian operatives compromised office and home Wi-Fi routers in Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States to collect sensitive data,” reported The Kyiv Post. “The attackers targeted routers with outdated security protocols and redirected internet traffic through a network of controlled DNS servers.” Estonia, meanwhile, accused Russian agents of setting a fire in August at a plant in Tallinn that manufactures and supplies unmanned vehicles for Ukraine. “The fire at Milrem was consistent with other attacks carried out in Europe on behalf of Russia, Margo Palloson, the director general of Estonia’s national security agency, said in the statement on Tuesday, though he did not provide specific evidence,” The New York Times reported. “Defense companies, especially those that produce and supply drone technology to Ukraine, are a common target, he noted.”
Buh-Bye: FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey announced Monday on X that he was resigning to spend more time with his family in Missouri, where he’d been the state’s attorney general. “According to two people familiar with his departure, Bailey had also been annoyed by the recent demotions of two senior counterterrorism agents in the FBI Washington field office,” MS NOW reported. The two veteran supervisors “were removed from their jobs because FBI leadership was dissatisfied with their handling of a threat assessment involving harassing phone calls made to the wife of White House official Stephen Miller,” added reporters Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig. “The two people told MS NOW that Bailey was also frustrated at not being named FBI director, a proposal once floated to him after Kash Patel had made numerous missteps and generated headlines that were unfavorable to the administration.” According to a team of New York Times natsec reporters, Patel had “a rocky arrangement” with his two deputy directors, Bailey and Christopher Raia, “a longtime FBI agent and manager.” Patel and Bailey “did not get along, and often went long stretches without speaking to each other, according to multiple people familiar with their interactions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.”Over at The Atlantic, Sarah Fitzpatrick asked: “Is There Anything Kash Patel Won’t Do for Trump Before the Midterms?” “In recent months,” she reported, Patel has pinged FBI officials “in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and beyond” on the progress of their “election integrity” investigations, “many times with the instruction that ‘this is a big deal for the president’ or “this is a push from 47.’”
Another 9/11 Case Flop: A military judge at Guantanamo threw out the confessions of yet another prisoner accused of helping the hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks.. “The 51-page ruling was not immediately released. But lawyers who read it said Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, the judge, suppressed the interrogations of Mustafa al-Hawsawi at Guantánamo Bay in 2007,” reported the New York Times’ Carol Rosenberg. Last month, she noted, the judge also threw out the confessions of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, “the man accused of being the mastermind of the plot that killed nearly 3,000 people.” The confessions of three of the four men charged in the death penalty case now have been thrown out due to torture and other issues. “A detainee who is shackled, transported to a former C.I.A. black site, and intentionally kept ignorant of both his right to remain silent and the inadmissibility of his prior coerced confessions, cannot be said to be making an ‘essentially free and unconstrained choice,’” Judge Schrama wrote of Hawsawi.
SEAL Fall Guy: Newly declassified summaries of the CIA Inspector General’s 2005 report on the death of Manadel al-Jamadi in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 finally absolve a former Navy SEAL, Dan Cerrillo, “who went to his grave insisting he’d taken the fall for a killing the CIA committed,” writes SpyTalk Contributing Editor Seth Hettena in his After-Action Report substack. The documents “line up with what Dan always suspected: the CIA killed Jamadi, covered it up, and then allowed Dan and his teammates in SEAL Team Seven’s Foxtrot Platoon to take the blame … but they arrived too late for him to read them. Dan died of a heart attack at age 50 in 2023.”
Get Smart: The Pentagon is partnering with the CIA’s In-Q-Tel to “scout” for advanced technology breakthroughs. “IQT’s primary mission has been fostering companies to serve the tech needs of the Intelligence Community, with the military as a secondary emphasis,” reports Breaking Defense. “But the new partnership has IQT performing ‘technology scouting and technical due diligence’ for the Defense Department and serving as a feeder into Pentagon development and production pipelines.” In-Q-Tel has helped finance startups like Anduril and Palantir.
UFO Preppers: Washington “has a preparedness plan in place should the existence of nonhuman intelligence” in those pesky unidentified flying objects “be confirmed,” Jennice Vilhauer, a clinical psychologist and member of an official advisory board recently revealed in her Substack column. Panic can be expected. But government agencies, especially the CIA, are withholding vital files that would help further understanding the physics of “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” or UAP, which has replaced the much denigrated UFO moniker—scientists told Ilan Greenberg for a fascinating piece in the latest edition of told Politico Magazine, “Trump Promised the Truth About UFOs. These Scientists Are Waiting.”
Come to Jesus: British spy chiefs are not scrutinised enough, a former top lawyer for the counterintelligence agency MI5 says. David Bickford called for parliament to launch televised hearings along the lines of the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee, which conducted investigations into U.S. intelligence abuses in the 1970s. (Telegraph)
NatSec news these days seems more frightening than ever. Take AI alone: Some insiders say it could destroy all of humanity by the end of the decade. (Sharon Weinberger throws cold water on that.) In any event, we’re determined to get to the bottom of its use and misuse by US intelligence. You can help by taking out a no-obligation, 7-day free trial. Reporting is really a team sport. Thanks!
