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Legal proceedings in the 40-year-old bombing have new wrinkle.Pam Am 103, Still: The trial of a former Libyan intelligence official charged in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland has been delayed because of “the discovery of new evidence that defense attorneys want to examine,” reported the A.P. Monday. “Jury selection was scheduled to begin Wednesday for the federal trial of Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi in Washington, D.C. His trial will be the first in the U.S. for the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing.” U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich’s order “didn’t specify the nature of the newly discovered evidence…Al-Marimi’s lawyers say prosecutors disclosed the new evidence to them on Saturday.”
Unsolved Mystery: The identity for the gunman (or gunmen) responsible for the Apr. 16, 2013 attack on PG&E’s Metcalf electrical substation,15 miles southeast of San Jose, remains a mystery—and foreshadows what could too easily happen should the U.S. face a well trained spec ops adversary, writes Christopher Cox in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Chilling: “[I]n the past decade, dozens of facilities — in Arkansas and Oregon, Florida and Washington — have been targeted, often using the same tactic as the one seen in 2013: puncturing the cooling system and letting the oil drain out,” Cox reports. Security at most stations remains lame. If saboteurs knocked out “nine total substations among” the three main U.S. power grids, they could “black out the entire United States.”
Gangs of New Russia: The Kremlin is “recruiting local gang members” to sabotage defence manufacturers across Europe “to test NATO’s resolve,” reports The Telegraph. “This week, Latvia detained three of its own nationals on suspicion of an arson attack against a drone manufacturer in neighbouring Estonia,” it said. “The attacks appear carefully calculated to fall just short of triggering Article 5, NATO’s mutual defence clause, intelligence officials believe.” Attacks have been reported in Poland. Russia has also been deploying so-called “hybrid warfare” to destabilize pro-E.U. Moldova.
GRU’s Arctic Offensive: The Kremlin “continues to send GRU officers to Norway under diplomatic cover,” reports The Barents Observer, which ripped away a number of the military intelligence agency operatives’ names and faces.
Kyiv’s Comely Assassin: Margarita—Margarita Reutt’s the name. According to the Guardian, Russian authorities have charged the otherwise “ordinary” 32-year-old woman with the Aug. 13 bombing assassination of a senior Russian submarine commander in Crimea. They say Reutt, a resident of Sochi, the Russian resort city about 300 miles across the Black Sea from Crimean Sevastopol, “confessed to the attack and said that a handler linked to Ukrainian intelligence had promised her a large payment in cryptocurrency and documents that would allow her to leave Russia afterwards…The FSB also said “Reutt showed no remorse.”
The reportedly proud anti-Russia assassin Reutt frequently posed to aid her businesses. (Vkontakte photo).Iran Escalation: “Arab intelligence” has detected a “strategic shift inside the country’s hard-line leadership to get their forces ready to widen the war and raise the costs for the U.S., reports the Wall Street Journal). Kuwait and Gulf states are bracing for hits. The Trump administration, meanwhile, levied new sanctions on Iran as well as on 10 alleged “Hezbollah couriers” who have moved “hundreds of millions of dollars between Lebanon, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Iran.” (New York Times)
ISIS Wannabe: An American female convert to jihadism has been charged with involvement in a “ISIS-inspired terror plot” against the New York State Capitol in Albany, the feds announced. Jessica Bowie “converted to Islam about five years ago, adopted the name ‘Aisha Saif,’ maintained numerous social media accounts promoting extremist views and spent weeks conducting reconnaissance around the Capitol,” the feds said, according to Newsweek. They deployed an FBI informant to draw her out online—which might’ve been all too easy, it turns out: She has “a history of mental illness,” reported the Albany Times-Union.
Get Smart: DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations gets a forehead-slapping takedown in independent reporter Ken Klippenstein’s “The Most Dangerous Feds You’ve Never Heard Of.” Exhibit One: “An undercover agent spying on a church gym when her concealed surveillance wire fell out — which she only realized later.” That was in Minneapolis, where HSI spied on “several left-leaning political organizations—labor unions, a climate change group, socialist collectives — that investigators believed had provided help and money to what they described as the ‘violent opportunists and agitators’ on the street,” said documents obtained by The New York Times.
ICE-Iran Deal: Internal ICE emails “indicate immigration agents complied with an Iranian request to hand over specific nationals” in the U.S., but not only that, “accidentally sent the wrong person to Iran.” ICE “agents appear to have worked directly with government officials in Iran to deport over 100 Iranian nationals … just months or weeks before” the start of the war in late February, reported The Intercept. One unnamed ICE official wrote in late August 2025, a month before the first deportation flight, “Per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases,” according to the A.P. “Just over a week later, someone with the same job title moved to make another, unspecified change to the deportation list after they said they met with the ‘Director at the Iranian Embassy.’”
Swalwell: FBI agents seized former Rep. Eric Swalwell‘s cell phone and laptop after he landed in San Francisco with his wife last Saturday, Aug. 15, after a flight from Washington, the Daily Mail scooped, as part of an ongoing investigation into his reported sexual misconduct. They also searched the D.C. home of the former outspoken Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee. Two days later newly declassified records were released about his escapades with the Chinese spy known as “Fang Fang,” the Mail said. Swalwell denies any improper behavior with women. But Marcy Wheeler, the influential blogger known as “Emptywheel,” made a case last week that the White House declassified the FBI’s Swalwell file back in March to derail his bid to be governor of California. Of note: The files reveal that the FBI “started testing whether Fang would make a worthwhile informant about the Chinese intelligence ties her family had in March 2013.” Wheeler wrote. There’s much more.
Selective Secrets: “Even as the White House claims to be focused on transparency, it has ignored a congressional requirement to disclose a report on foreign meddling in the 2024 election,” reported The New York Times.
CIA Exit Lines: “The spy agency is swamped by what it calls an ‘unprecedented number’ of retirements as the Trump administration aims to shrink its workforce,” reports Warren P. Strobel at The Washington Post, quoting a “recent note to alumni.”
“A historic wave of departures at the CIA and deep cutbacks at the Office of Personnel Management are swamping the spy agency’s retirement system, leaving former spies with months-long waits to get their first pension check, according to former intelligence officials and internal agency messages.”
FBI Stymied: A U.S. judge last Monday blocked plans to move the FBI’s headquarters to a federal office building in Washington, “finding that President Donald Trump’s administration illegally tossed out a previously approved plan to build a new facility nearby in Maryland.” The judge said Trump’s insistence was “not in accordance with the law.” (A.P.)
CIA’s Bite of the Apple: “Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the ’80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple—and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code,” according to Sharon Weinberger’s fascinating tale in the Wall Street Journal.
U.S. Citizen Held as Spy in China: A Burma-born U.S. scholar, Min Zin, who was working in Myanmar and leading a think tank focused on democratization there, has been detained in China on suspicion of espionage. “A student activist in 1988 during Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement,” Min “traveled to Yunnan province in China, which borders Myanmar, for an academic conference” in June at the invitation of the Chinese government. The Trump administration calls him innocent of the charges and “wrongfully detained.” (Notus)
Min Zin, from his Facebook page. AIPAC in the News: “Allies” of Michigan Republican Senate candidate (and former House Intelligence Committee chairman) Mike Rogers “have asked AIPAC not to advertise on his behalf, triggering a rupture with the powerful but polarizing pro-Israel group,” Axios reported Saturday. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast, meanwhile, is “backed by the Israeli government, according to Connor Echols at the libertarian Responsible Statecraft think tank.
Real to Reel: High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam premieres Sept.13 on TNT, two days after the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It’s based on ex-CIA officer John Nixon’s book Debriefing the President, about his time as the first agency officer to interrogate Saddam Hussein after his 2003 capture. Nixon spent 13 years at the CIA as a senior leadership analyst, “briefing the most senior levels in the US government, did multiple tours in Iraq, and later taught at the Agency’s in-house training school, the Sherman Kent School,” says the announcement. Here’s the trailer.
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