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New in SpyWeek: Starlink Chaos, Ukraine Spy Coup, Trump’s Agents in Pro-Russia Balkans
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Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a onetime head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is now a registered agent of the pro-Russia Republika Srpska in Washington. He’s just the latest political operative from Trump’s inner circle to do so. (2016 White House photo)Ukraine Espionage Triumph: The Wall Street Journal this week published an extraordinarily detailed account of the defection of a young Russian army lieutenant who became disillusioned with the war in Ukraine, volunteered to spy in place for Kyiv and supplied it for months in 2024 with the locations and battle plans of Russian units he was assigned to, and which were subsequently obliterated by Ukrainian forces. “The Defector“ will surely be required reading at U.S. military spy schools for years. But meanwhile, questions will fly over whether Ukraine’s decision to publicize the case is a psychological warfare op in itself, designed to freak out Russian security services.
Lifeline: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says U.S. intelligence-sharing has resumed. It had been interrupted but later “de-blocked,” he said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “We are very thankful for this. Now it works.” Trump administration officials and Space X boss Elon Musk spent the week dodging responsibility for the decision to slow down the Starshield satellite system Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operations. The decision came from “inside the White House, according to two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter,” Reuters reported. Meanwhile, Robert B. Murrett, the former director of the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, said in an interview Wednesday that he doubted that the U.S. intelligence community would pull its support from Ukraine. “The current leadership of the United States intelligence community and our allies is very anti-Russian,” he told The New York Times. “That’s not to say the White House couldn’t overrule them. But the principal leadership of the U.S. intelligence community does not have a warm place in their hearts for Putin and his leadership in the Kremlin.”
To Russia with Love: Add former U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a onetime head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and briefly President Trump’s first-term national security adviser, to the ranks of former and current close Trump advisers on the payroll of Vladimir Putin’s proxy in the Balkans, Republika Srpska. Flynn has registered as a $100,000-a-month agent for the semi‑autonomous Bosnian Serb entity led by pro‑Russian leader Milorad Dodik, according to documents filed under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, to provide “strategic advice and analysis” and “work to improve political relations between Republika Srpska and the U.S.,” according to the independent Balkan Insight.
He’s not alone: Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, is a partner in Continental Strategy, a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm that registered as an agent for Republika Srpska in early 2026. A photo image recently surfaced showing Katie Wiles holding a rifle alongside Željko Budimir, Republika Srpska’s interior minister. On her Instagram page, she captioned the photo “mostly work + some serious fun!” On Wednesday, The New York Times revealed that “at least six current and former Trump political operatives traveled to Srpska this month to assist the government around its elections.” Among them, it said, “were Alex Garcia, a partner at Continental who served on Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign and recommended James Blair and Chris LaCivita — two of Mr. Trump’s top political advisers — to the government of Srpska, and Andrew H. Smith, a Trump lawyer who worked with the pair on election-related matters.” Dodik’s pro-Russian party, which portrays itself as a bastion of Christian nationalism, won easily.
Sue Mi Terry Walks: The ex-CIA analyst was accused of working secretly for the South Korean government in exchange for luxury gifts. As part of a deal reached with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, Terry, who was a senior fellow for Korea studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, will not face jail time. “The deal, which amounts to the government walking away from a high-profile case involving foreign influence, is an unexpected development. It comes mere weeks before Ms. Terry was set to go on trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan on charges of working as an unregistered foreign agent of South Korea.” (New York Times)
Sue Mi Terry (ROK Ministry of Foreign Affairs photo 2024) FBI Busts North Korean Laptop “Farms” in US: Working with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, the FBI dismantled “more than 40 so-called laptop farms across Texas and the seizure of nearly 200 computer devices, the officials said, marking one of the largest efforts to date by U.S. authorities to block a key revenue stream that has helped North Korea evade harsh international sanctions and generate billions in cash in recent years.” (New York Times)
Starlink Towers Sabotage: Lithuania and Bulgaria both reported sabotage attacks this week on Space X’s Starlink antennas and blamed them on Moscow, which has recently escalated its hybrid war campaign across Europe with aggressive drone incursions. Bulgarian authorities said masked individuals set fire to several Starlink antennas in the country on Oct. 10. Last month, a fire at a Starlink facility in Poland in damaged its power system and backup generator. “They are part of Russian attempts to disrupt Starlink and influence the success of Ukrainian operations,” said Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Center. “Ukraine is the target.” (Reuters)
NATO “Ready to Fight”: Taking note of European worries that Russia could well escalate its sabotage and cyber attacks or even launch a limited military incursion on them, NATO’s Supreme Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, said Monday the alliance is “ready to fight tonight” if it is attacked. “My theory of victory is simple,” he told officials at a Warsaw security conference. “We will block the initial attack. If the attack persists, we will blunt it and prevent any enemy advance. And if required, we will break the enemy’s forces and the operational war-fighting system arrayed against us.” (Reuters)
U.K. Terror Threats: Britain has made “more than 50 arrests” during the past 12 months in “Iran-linked operations,” MI5 boss Ken McCallum said. At least seven suspects have been arrested in recent weeks in connection with a suspected Iranian plot against an RAF base that hosts U.S. B-1 bombers. (Washington Post)
Islamist Plot on Mall of America: An apparently self-radicalized Minnesota teen was arrested Tuesday after expressing enthusiasm for attacking non-Muslims at the Mall of America and accepting a weapon and bullets to do it from an FBI employee posing as an Islamic State agent. (DOJ)
Loose Dots: “A newly declassified State Department audit found that more than 200 programs to counter Iran-backed groups were scattered across the agency, with no clear leadership or a coordinated strategy,” reported Bloomberg’s FOIA commando Jason Leopold.
They’re Back: “An online influence operation backed by the Russian government has been stepping up its attempts to sow division in the United States and inflame tensions around Israel as a political wedge issue, according to a new study by an independent company that tracks digital threats and foreign propaganda campaigns,” The New York Times reported. “The influence operation known as Doppelgänger has created a flood of social media posts pushing themes of how bipartisan support for Israel is collapsing, according to Alethea, the threat intelligence company.”
Fired FBI Agents Sue: Nine FBI employees who were fired earlier this year for having worked on investigations of candidate and President Donald Trump sued the administration on Thursday, saying Kash Patel, the bureau’s director, “praised some of them privately before terminating them,” reported The New York Times. “Most of the employees, who include agents, analysts and operations staff members, had significant experience in counterintelligence work related to Iran. Some played major roles in the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and estate in Florida. One agent signed the affidavit for the search of the estate. Another conducted interviews with witnesses in that case.” SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff also dug deep into the case with details from Brian Driscoll, the FBI’s acting director at the start of Trump’s second term.
Don’t miss the latest SpyTalk podcast featuring an interview with former senior FBI executive Brian Driscoll, who has become a hero among the bureau’s rank-and-file for refusing to betray agents who’d worked on cases against Trump.
FBI Role at the Polls? Many in the bureau’s rank-and-file and across Washington are worried the FBI “has fundamentally changed its core mission into essentially acting in many cases on behalf of the president and pursuing things that are in the White House’s interest, not in their traditional role around elections,” The Atlantic’s Kash chronicler Sarah Fitzpatrick said on a company podcast. “They found it incredibly alarming to the point that I think there was a real level of apprehension and terror that I had not sensed, even in my prior reporting. This was something new, and this was a real concern that there was a lack of information about what would happen on Election Day. And a real concern that they were gonna be asked to do things that may be counter to what they had long been instructed to do as agents of the FBI, specifically around elections.” In April Patel filed a $250 million defamation suit against The Atlantic and Fitzpatrick for its article portraying him as frequently “M.I.A.” from work due to heavy drinking. The magazine has filed for a dismissal, calling the suit “meritless.”
Silicon Spies: The FBI arrest of Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi engineer at OpenAI, on charges of planting a surveillance device in a company meeting room, has revived fears that U.S. tech companies are unwittingly hiring foreign spies. “Palmer Luckey, CEO of weapons maker Anduril, and venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital took to X on Wednesday to revisit arguments that the industry should focus on hiring U.S. citizens,The Washington Post reported. “Silicon Valley has operated with maximum openness and maximum naivete toward foreign tradecraft,” Maguire wrote.
Abdulrahman Alfozan (L) and the FBI’s photo of him checking his eavesdropping device behind a TV in an OpenAI conference roomSon of a Gun: The fruit don’t fall far from the tree. Pavel Prigozhin, son of the notorious Wagner Group’s late founder Yevgeny, has “not only salvaged but expanded operations in Wagner’s African stronghold, the Central African Republic, according to former Wagner associates, government officials, business people and researchers in Bangui, the capital city,” Nicholas Bariyo reports in a jaw dropping profile in the Wall Street Journal. “From a base in Bangui, Pavel Prigozhin and 500 or so mercenaries under his command have seized control of gold mines, according to the Global Initiative. They provide personal security to the president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, and battle insurgent groups, making Prigozhin and his men indispensable.”
Novel Wars: Don’t expect to learn how spy services really work by reading John LeCarré, an ex-director of Britain’s eavesdropping, code-breaking GCHQ, told a book festival audience. Sir David Omand, who also held senior intelligence posts in the Cabinet Office and the Home Office, maintained: “The level of mistrust that le Carré portrays; no intelligence service could survive if there is insider conflict.” Back on this side of the pond, a New York Times writer called up-and-coming, ex-CIA spy novelist David McCloskey “America’s Answer to John le Carré.” His latest, London Station, wrote Sarah Lyall, “imagines a provocative scenario: What would happen if the relationship between the C.I.A. and its British counterpart got so bad that the two agencies started actively working against each other? The idea is not entirely far-fetched,” she added, “how the current administration treats its allies, though McCloskey has carefully set his book in a nebulous post-Trump future.”
R.I.P. Frances Stonor Saunders: The British author of Who Paid the Piper?, the 1999 book that documented “years of covert efforts by the CIA to manipulate public opinion in Western Europe against communism,” has died from brain cancer at age 60. The New York Times’ Richard Sandomir wrote a lovely obit of Stoner Saunders, who “worked as a stringer for The Associated Press in Rome and as a freelance writer before she began making documentaries for Channel 4 in Britain in the 1990s. Her “Hidden Hands: A Different History of Modernism,” a four-part series that aired in 1995 and described “how the CIA promoted Abstract Expressionists as cultural propaganda,” was a precursor to Who Paid the Piper?
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