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New in SpyWeek: Kash Heads to Kremlin Amid Trump ‘Deal’ with Putin, Attack on Zelenskyy, NATO Alarms Over Russian Aggression
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Among FBI Director Kash Patel’s many extracurricular pleasures, he plays hockey in a DC-area beer league. His security team tags along. (João Fazenda for The New Yorker) Strange Trip: Both present and former FBI and DOJ officials are troubled over FBI Director Kash Patel’s reported plans this week to visit Russia as a likely guest of the FSB, Moscow’s murderous domestic repression and foreign assassinations service— especially now with President Trump making nice with Vladimir Putin and urging regime change in Ukraine. After a recent ”quiet campaign” by senior FBI officials to dissuade Patel went unanswered, they reached out to the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, Jim Himes (CT) and Jamie Raskin (MD), who sent a letter to Patel asking him “to reconsider” and “call off this trip,” Sarah Fitzpatrick reported in The Atlantic, He hasn’t responded. (Maybe he was too busy playing beer-league hockey.) “Christopher O’Leary, a former senior executive in the FBI’s counterterrorism division [said] he and others found the timing of the trip bizarre, especially given the pressure that FBI leadership is putting on agents to substantiate election conspiracy theories at home that Russian intelligence services continuously amplify,” Fitzpatrick added. “If there was real concern about interference in our elections,” O’Leary said, “then the FBI director should be in the United States leading the effort around the clock,” not going to Moscow. SpyTalk’s Dolia Estévez reported Friday on a suspected Russian intelligence service plot to use Mexican hitmen to take out Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent exile based in Washington, D.C.
KGB Dump: Some 20 Finnish lawmakers suspect it’s Russian agents who’ve been breaking into their homes and leaving their legendary calling cards: a dump in their toilets. CIA officers in Russia have long found such fecal gifts awaiting them at home. Kash’s security team can expect the same.
Former German Spy Chief Arrested: A former head of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, who played a key role in the George W. Bush administration’s mistaken case for WMD in Iraq, has been arrested and charged with “treasonous espionage,” along with a former aide who’s been arrested for “aiding and abetting” the scheme. August Hanning, 80, led the BND 1998 to 2005 under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, followed by a term as state secretary in the Interior Ministry in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet until 2009, after which, according to Der Spiegel, he built up a roster of controversial clients, including Russian businessmen and bankers, and allegedly “prepared an analysis for the Azerbaijani intelligence service.” His former chief of staff (identified only as Manfred D. following German privacy rules) stayed on at the BND and was paid to supply him with a stream of classified information over a 12-year period until 2022, German prosecutors said. In 2002, according to reports, ”Hanning played a big role in the Curveball affair, the unnamed source for moveable WMD labs in Iraq, which Colin Powell mentioned in his speech to the UN making the case for war. It turned out to be false.” In his 2007 memoir, At the Center of the Storm, then-CIA Director George Tenet bitterly described how he was played by Hanning and his own aides. More schuhes to drop on this one.
Rush to Judgment: The CIA and Justice Department have settled on a plea deal to avoid a public trial of former senior CIA exec David Rush, who, beyond his admitted grand larceny, reportedly confessed that in late 2025 he had disclosed “certain descriptive information of a U.S. government clandestine human source” that could “endanger the safety and life of the human source and the U.S. government officers working with the source,” as well as jeopardize America’s “ability to recruit human sources, who rely on the U.S. government’s assurance of absolute secrecy,” as NBC put it.
Rush, while a senior exec in the Science and Technology Directorate, created a strictly compartmented, above-top secret, but phony program to siphon off $194 million in government funds, including roughly 600 pounds of gold bars he stashed in his basement, to facilitate his “maximum self-enrichment at the expense of the United States.” He faces up to 20 years in prison come sentencing in January.
Another U.S.-U.K. Base Plot: The Two Latvian men who were arrested early Thursday inside the perimeter of a British air force base that houses U.S. and NATO intelligence personnel have been released on bail, U.K. counterterrorism police said Friday. The base, RAF Molesworth, 70 miles north of London, houses U.S. warplanes but is also “home to the NATO Intelligence Fusion Center, as well as intelligence personnel from the U.S. Africa Command,” reported the A.P.. The incident follows last month’s arrest of five men on suspicion of targeting RAF Fairford, home to U.S. B-1 bombers used in some strikes against Iran. The bombers were evacuated in a rush last weekend over fears of a mutli-facted, Iran-sponsored attack with drones and hit squads. Defenses at other U.K air bases remain dangerously weak, an analysis by the iPaper found. “One joint RAF-US Air Force base that lays bare the security crisis is RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk. The Americans keep air tankers and support aircraft for Special Operations Command here but as at Fairford, they sit in the open with no hardened shelters, making them easy drone targets. If President Trump is serious about the Iran-backed drone threat, they will have to be moved.”
Red October: A U.K. sailor has been charged with spying for Russia. Teddy Young, 24, was “accused of trying to make contact with Russian authorities over the dark web, including drafting a message written in Russian containing classified information,” the British iPaper reported. Although only an Able Seaman, the lowest enlisted rank, Young worked in naval intelligence, with a “high level security clearance and intelligence-system access.” He was “first arrested on 21 May 2025, before being rearrested and charged this week. The alleged offences took place between 26 November 2024 and 21 May last year.” Russia has put the U.K. under increasing military pressure. More than 170 Russian “shadow fleet” vessels passed near or through U.K. waters this summer, with a Russian presence in the Channel almost every day, analysis by the i Paper found.
Burnham Fingers Russia: Prime Minister Andy Burnham revealed he launched his own investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit vote as soon as he entered 10 Downing in July and found that the Kremlin indeed secretly pushed Britain to leave the European Union. There’s been a lot of “misinformation and disinformation” emanating from Russia, he said on Britain’s The Rest is Politics show. “I don’t think we knew back then the extent to which there was state-sponsored interference in the British democratic process…and the clear answer is yes, there was, and these things are important now to put clearly on the record and to help voters in Germany and France understand that some of this politics is instigated by our enemies, namely Russia.”
Denmark Fingers Russia: Copenhagen accused Moscow of conducting sabotage attacks against its defense firms. “The shift reflects a significant escalation in Moscow’s hybrid warfare campaign, Josefine Christensen, lead analyst at the Danish national security and intelligence service (PET), told a homeland security conference in Copenhagen.” (Reuters)
Don’t miss the latest SpyTalk podcast, this one featuring CNBC’s Eamon Javers on a Chinese espionage plot that should serve as a cautionary tale for US officials.
FlyDubai Update: The political shift of rogue Omani pilot Hammam al-Hammami towards extremism and terrorism began a decade ago during his two years as a student at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, according to Dr. Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, attorney general of the UAE, where the would-be Islamic suicide aviator has been under interrogation. The A.G.’s statement, first reported by the state-run Emirati news agency, known as WAM, said al-Hammami told prosecutors “he…drew inspiration from the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001,” and practiced targeting Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv on previous flights to Israel for FlyDubai. What role UAE authorities might have played in clearing al-Hammami to fly after he was grounded by Omani Air for his extremist views remains an open question. Like 9/11, there was an obvious intelligence failure by both UAE and Israeli security officials.
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. The 18-year-old, Somali-born U.S. citizen “had been on the FBI’s radar since December 2024, when he began trading messages with a confidential informant,” reported the A.P. “A criminal complaint says he initially expressed an interest in traveling to Somalia to fight for al-Shabab militants. As his plans to instead attack the mall solidified, the complaint says, agents sold him the gun and ammunition on Tuesday and arrested him on the spot.”
Heart of Darkness: The reputation of Eric Prince has taken a hit in the Congo over his mercenaries’ flailing efforts to put down a Rwanda-backed rebellion and help Kinshasa regain control of its mining sector. “Among mercenaries, especially in Africa, Prince is derided because he has zero successful missions,” Sean McFate, a former private military contractor who is currently a fellow at The Atlantic Council, told the New York Times’ Declan Walsh.
Havana Syndrome: A new book by 60 Minutes producers Michael Rey and Oriana Zill de Granados takes another, deeper look at the phenomenon that has felled scores of U.S. intelligence, diplomatic and other personnel and “the U.S. government’s effort to downplay and deny them.” The Guardian’s Shaun Walker, who got an advance look at The Havana Syndrome, highlights previously unreported, fascinating incidents of the suspected Russian microwave attacks, but notes: “Even people who have seen the intelligence on Havana syndrome can disagree on what it suggests.” Two sources that Walker consulted offered him “radically different interpretations of what the classified data shows on possible Russian involvement,” he writes. “One highlighted the lack of a ‘smoking gun’—a piece of human intelligence or an intercept that showed Russian operatives discussing a programme to use directed energy against Americans,” which would have been picked up because, the source said, “how strong our collection capabilities on Russia are”—like the one that picked up Putin’s war plans for Ukraine before his February 2022 invasion. “If this was really a large-scale Russian program, we would have expected to see something in some of these channels, but we didn’t,” the source said. Another former intelligence official disagreed: “If you’re waiting for an intercept of someone saying: ‘My name is Igor and I’m going to press the button on my secret laser’ before you have confidence [that it’s true], that’s probably never going to happen. But for any reasonable person who has access to the intelligence and knows how to read it, the Russian fingerprints are clear.” Then there’s this: In 2017, after then-CIA director Gina Haspel was briefed on various London incidents, “she allegedly complained it was not solid enough to take to the president, given how sensitive he was on Russia-related matters,” Rey and Zill report. “The meeting abruptly ended after Haspel shouted that if she took reports like this to President Trump, she would be fired as director.” Wow.
Over at the New York Times, however, reviewer Nicolas Niarchos faults the authors for not getting to the bottom of “one of the biggest questions at the heart of their story: Why, as the authors allege, were U.S. officials so keen to cover up the attacks?” Fingering Moscow could trigger a dangerous confrontation with Putin, they suggest. But Niarchos suggests something darker: “Could a highly placed enemy agent or agents be sowing confusion and stymying the investigation?”
I spend most of every weekend catching up with and curating all the truly alarming news on the intelligence front these days. I hope you find it useful, and if you haven’t done it already, you can show your support by taking out a no-obligation, 7-day free trial. Thanks!
