Welcome to SpyWeek, our weekly newsletter, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees for SecDef, DNI and CIA lead this week’s roundup.
HEGSETH HEDGE? Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary might consider washing off his Crusader tattoo before he meets with Arab heads of state should he ge the job, but then again, Pete Hegseth thinks germs aren’t real.
“Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them. Therefore, they’re not real,” the former Fox News weekend yakker said on TV in 2019. He said he hadn’t washed his hands “in 10 years.”
That’s not likely to go down well with Trump, a famous germaphobe.
In any event, Trump’s team may be considering washing their hands of him. They were said to be rethinking their Hegseth pick Friday after a report surfaced “about a woman’s claim that Hegseth assaulted her in a hotel in Monterey, California, after a Republican conference,” according to The Washington Post.
“The woman who drafted the complaint said the alleged victim was a friend who later signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hegseth,” the paper said. “The transition team was caught by surprise by the detailed allegations and now fears more negative revelations about Hegseth, said the person familiar with the complaint. “There’s a lot of frustration around this,” the person told The Post’s Michael Kranish, Josh Dawsey, Dan Lamothe, Hannah Knowles, Jonathan O’Connell, and John Hudson. “He hadn’t been properly vetted.”
Defense officials were already alarmed that Trump nominated a man with virtually no experience to run an organization with a $852.2 billion budget, 1.3 million active-duty troops in uniform, and more than 750,000 civilians. Middle Eastern leaders may be alarmed that they have to deal with a man with a Jerusalem Cross on his chest and “Deus Vult” (God Wills It) battle cry from the First Crusade on his bicep.
But that’s just the start of it.
After graduating from Princeton, Hegseth worked on Wall Street while serving as an officer in the National Guard. He deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq and earned two Bronze Stars. However, his military experience was limited, and he didn’t see much combat.
He told the Princeton Alumni Weekly that his year at Guantanamo Bay doing security patrols was so boring that he thought he’d never want to wear his uniform again. In Iraq, he was plucked out of his infantry unit for what he told the PAW was an “office” job— working on reconstruction projects with local leaders in the predominantly Sunni city of Samarra. In Afghanistan, he taught counterinsurgency classes for Afghan officers and left the deployment early to run unsuccessfully for Senate from Minnesota.
After his failed Senate bid, Hegseth joined Fox News. He first came to Trump’s attention in 2018, defending Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, whose battlefield behavior was so abhorrent that his teammates turned him in as a war criminal. Gallagher was charged with first-degree murder of a captive ISIS fighter and attempted murder of unarmed civilians in Iraq. He was acquitted at trial of all charges except for posing in a rules-breaking photo with the dead captive. That caught Trump’s eye: he intervened to ensure Gallagher kept his SEAL Trident pin.
Then there are those tattoos. In 2021, Hegseth was called to Washington, D.C., to help guard Joe Biden during his post-Jan. 6 riot inauguration, but his orders were revoked. According to The Associated Press, 12 Guard members were found to have ties with right-wing militia groups or posted extremist views online.
“I was deemed an extremist because of a tattoo by my National Guard unit in Washington D.C., and my orders were revoked to guard the Biden inauguration,” Hegseth maintained in a recent appearance on the Shawn Ryan Show.
Hegseth said the offending tattoo was the Jerusalem Cross tattoo on his chest.
A National Guard email obtained by The Associated Press showed that the offending tattoo was the “Deus Vult” on his bicep.
“Disseminated in the form of hashtags and Internet memes, Deus Vult has enjoyed popularity with members of the al-right because of its perceived representation of the clash of civilizations between the Christian West and the Islamic world,” the email states.
It is often used as shorthand for killing Muslims.
HINDU SUPERSTAR FOR DNI: Can Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence get a security clearance? Tulsi Gabbard’s background raises serious concerns.
For starters, Gabbard grew up in a group many consider a cult. The first Hindu elected to Congress, Gabbard grew up in Hawaii, where her parents were members of a Hare Krishna splinter group called the Science of Identity Foundation, or SIV. According to a 2017 profile in The New Yorker, Gabbard called the group’s founder, Chris Bulter, her “guru dev,” which means, roughly, “spiritual master.”
Some former members have described the SIV as an abusive cult, which they said made them lie prostrate when Butler entered the room and added bits of his nail clippings to their food.
Butler has long had political ambitions. In the late 1970s, an opaque group in Hawaii called Independents for Godly Government was exposed as Butler’s creation. A Butler discipline challenged Hawaii’s Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye in 1992.
Gabbard’s aunt, Dr. Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard, has alleged that the 43-year-old’s 2020 presidential bid was the result of Butler’s pursuit of political influence.
“In Gabbard, Butler’s movement finally seems to have produced a widely appealing politician with a national profile,” The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh wrote.
There are also lingering questions over her odd 2017 meeting with Syria’s bloody dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus.
Gabbard, then a Democratic congresswoman, initially refused to say who paid for the trip, citing “security reasons.” She eventually revealed that the nearly $9,000 cost was paid for by two Lebanese-American brothers, one of whom was close to Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha. The brothers were also officials in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), the second-largest political party in the pro-Assad National Progressive Front
Critics of the SSNP have long labeled it fascist; the party’s symbol is a modified swastika. The group rejects that characterization, but the SSNP did draw inspiration from European fascism upon its founding in 1932. Members of the SSNP assassinated Lebanon’s president-elect in 1982 and bombed a TWA jetliner in 1986. According to a National Counterterrorism Center fact sheet, the first female suicide bomber may have been a member of the SSNP who detonated a car bomb in 1985 in Lebanon, killing two Israeli soldiers and injuring two others.
After meeting Assad, Gabbard started spouting bizarre claims that chemical weapons attacks in Syria “may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.” According to Bellingcat, Gabbard’s “evidence” rests on “fake intelligence, dodgy dossiers, and lies.” (Gabbard’s positions on Syria mysteriously vanished when she was shortlisted for Trump’s VP this summer.)
Trump’s would-be DNI has also echoed Russian propaganda by blaming NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and warning about the dangers of U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine.
A reserve lieutenant colonel in the National Guard, Gabbard has almost no intelligence experience. “I thought it was the worst cabinet-level appointment in history until we then heard about the Matt Gaetz appointment,” former Trump national security adviser-turned-critic John Bolton told the Wall Street Journal.
Gabbard’s red flags may not matter much in the end. According to CNN, the Trump transition team is skipping the usual FBI background investigation for some cabinet picks.
Dan Meyer, a national security attorney, said the incoming Trump team members “don’t want the FBI to coordinate a norm; they want to hammer the norm.”
GO-BAG READY: At least one of the 51 former senior intelligence officials who signed a much-criticized letter in 2020 warning of Russia’s covert influence efforts in the U.S. presidential is making plans to flee the country.
The former U.S. official is seeking a passport from a European country in case Trump and his “deep state” warriors decide to make good on his promises to come for them.
“You don’t want to have to scramble,” the anonymous official told The Washington Post.
The letter claimed that the arrival of emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop weeks before the 2020 election “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” although it held out the possibility that emails might be genuine. The laptop, however, and many of the emails turned out to be real. Some of the contents became evidence in Hunter Biden’s trial and conviction on charges that he lied on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use.
In 2022, Trump reposted a New York Post cover story on his social media site, Truth Social, dubbing the signatories “Spies who lie,” and another message that asked: “When are the intelligence Officers That signed the ‘Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation’ letter going to JAIL?”
The Post reported that many are watching whether intelligence gadfly Kash Patel, a top former many things in the first Trump term, lands a senior role at the FBI or some other three-letter agency. During 2017-2021, Patel was a White House National Security Council counterterrorism official; a house-cleaning aide to Acting DNI Ric Grenell; Trump’s choice to be a top CIA executive until Langley’s boss Gina Haspel threatened to quit; and finally, chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller during the closing stage of the Trump administration.
In his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy., Patel appended a “deep state” list of officials for neutralization.
“I’m actually not as concerned about Trump and his administration abusing laws than I am about actually using laws that already exist,” Washington lawyer Mark Zaid, a leading specialist in national security whistleblower cases, told Michael Isikoff on the SpyTalk podcast this week. On NPR, Zaid said some Trump targets should consider leaving the country on inauguration day.
THREE TIMES THE CHARM? In comparison to all the above, Trump’s pick to run the CIA, former Texas congressman John Ratcliffe, looks positively anodyne.
Trump was stymied in his first try to make Ratcliffe director of National Intelligence in his first term, after “bipartisan questions about his qualifications for the office and concern over whether he had exaggerated his résumé,” SpyTalk Editor Jeff Stein recounted on Wednesday. “Critics, Republicans and Democrats alike, said he had embellished his credentials as a former federal prosecutor in East Texas, in particular boasting of having deep experience putting terrorists in prison and shaping the George W. Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy.” He did not, it turned out.
In a second push months later, Trump got the Senate to confirm him. Ratcliffe further won the now president-elect’s admiration when, as DNI, he embraced the “Russia hoax” and “deep state” conspiracy theories. Senate Republicans, weighed down with far more controversial nominees, may well want to unburden themselves swiftly with Ratcliffe and send him off to Langley.
KREMLIN CALLS: Strange things are happening in Russia in the wake of Trump’s election.
A close aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin told the press that the president-elect has debts he needs to repay.
“To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them,” said Nikolai Patrushev, a former head of the FSB who was a colleague of Putin in the Soviet KGB.
Another oddity was the official Kremlin denial of a Trump-Putin phone call. The Washington Post, citing five people familiar with the matter, reported that Trump advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe. The message apparently wasn’t very warmly received in Moscow.
And then there were the nude photos of Melania Trump that aired on state media channel Russia 1 during a segment last week on Trump’s election victory. That was no accident—the photos wouldn’t have run without prior Kremlin approval. Does Russia feel that Trump is not living up to his end of some sort of deal?
PUTIN’S HIT PARADE: Last Sunday, 60 Minutes took another whack at the ever-lengthening string of foreign assassinations thought to have been ordered by Vladimir Putin or his associates.
Correspondent Cecilia Vega focused on the murder of former Russian helicopter pilot Maxim Kuzminov, who defected in his MI-8 gunship to Ukraine in August 2023. The 28-year-old was given a $500,000 reward and new identity and advised to lay low, considering the Kremlin’s track record on rubbing out its opponents, but in beachside Spain, he did anything but, even reportedly bragging about his defection to barstool mates, according to 60 Minutes.
Last February, assassins caught up to Kuzminov in the parking garage of his condo, gunned him down and ran over him as they raced away in their car. It was the Russians, Spanish authorities said.
“It was a clear message,” a senior official from Guardia Civil, the Spanish police force overseeing the investigation into the killing, told The New York Times. “I will find you, I will kill you, I will run you over and humiliate you.”
DISCORD LEAKS: That 22-year-old Massachusetts airman who shared highly classified Defense Department documents with his online pals was sentenced this week to 15 years in prison in what prosecutors called “one of the most significant and consequential violations of the Espionage Act in American history.” Jack Teixeira transcribed and printed hundreds of classified documents and posted them to Discord, a social media platform.
Teixeira was admonished on three occasions to stop viewing classified information unrelated to his duties, but he was undeterred. Prosecutors say he did it “to feed his own ego and impress his anonymous friends.”
Teixeira was arrested in April 2023. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information relating to the national defense.
Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of 200 months. “Especially in an era of social media where the Government’s secrets can be shared around the world with the click of a mouse, the Court’s sentence must send a message that reinforces the importance of faithfully honoring promises to safeguard the secrets of our nation,” prosecutors wrote.
ANOTHER CIA TURNCOAT? A CIA officer accused of leaking top-secret classified documents that revealed information last month about Israel’s plans for a military strike against Iran had plans to travel when he was arrested, prosecutors said.
Asif William Rahman was arrested Tuesday in Cambodia and transported to a federal court in Guam, where he was charged with unlawfully transmitting two highly sensitive classified documents last month. A federal judge in Guam approved Rahman’s transfer to the Eastern District of Virginia, where he was indicted by a grand jury.
Two leaked classified reports from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes imagery gathered by U.S. reconnaissance satellites, appeared last month on Telegram and X. The files were circulated by a pro-Iran account, Middle East Spectator, which says it received them from an anonymous source.
Court documents said Rahman worked for the U.S. government. The Wall Street Journal reported that he worked overseas for the CIA in Cambodia and elsewhere.
Rahman’s motives weren’t clear, but Brett Reynolds of the U.S. Justice Department’s National Security Division told the court in Guam that Rahman was a flight risk. “Because of what he is being accused of, foreign adversaries would likely provide him refuge,” Reynolds told the court, according to The Pacific Daily News.
DoJ NAILS PIRATES: Two former Somali government officials were sentenced to 30 years in a U.S. prison in connection with an American journalist held hostage by pirates for nearly three years.
Prosecutors say Abdi Hassan and Mohamed Mohamed abused their positions in Somalia’s government by keeping a U.S. citizen captive “to satisfy their own greed.”
Journalist Michael Scott Moore was investigating piracy when he was taken hostage in January 2012 and held by Somali pirates. He was beaten, chained to the floor, and threatened with assault rifles and machine guns. Moore was released In September 2014, following the payment of a ransom. Moore has said his family raised $1.6 million for his release.
Prosecutors say Hassan, of Minneapolis, and Mohamed, of Mogadishu, were key players in that hostage-taking. Hassan, a naturalized U.S. citizen and Minister of the Interior served as an overall leader of the pirates and headed their efforts to extort a massive ransom from Moore’s aging mother. Mohamed, a Somali army officer, served as the pirates’ head of security and armorer.
WAR ON TERROR: While Washington is all aflutter over the incoming Trump administration, the U.S. military is smashing terrorist targets overseas.
U.S. forces in the Middle East have killed 163 Islamic State group militants and captured another 33 in dozens of operations in Iraq and Syria since late August, U.S. Central Command said earlier this month. On Monday and Tuesday, U.S. forces struck multiple targets associated with Iranian groups in Syria in response to several attacks on U.S. personnel in Syria.
Pocket Litter:
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Iranian sources say Tehran is suspending its planned response to Israel in light of Trump’s election. Iran’s planned operation – dubbed “Operation True Promise 3” – has been put on hold pending potential negotiations with Trump, following diplomatic messages conveyed through Iraqi channels. (Israel Hayom) On Monday, Trump’s free-floating pal Elon Musk had an unannounced meeting with Tehran’s U.N. ambassador to discuss “how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States,” according to the New York Times.
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The Israeli attack on Iran in late October destroyed an active top secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, according to three U.S. officials, one current and one former Israeli official. (Axios)
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China’s new stealth fighter jet, the J-35A, is strikingly similar to the American F-35. Chinese hackers have targeted F-35 data in their cyber intrusions, but it’s not clear they succeeded. (The Print)
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Famed Union spy, underground railroad operator and abolitionist Harriet Tubman was posthumously promoted to a one-star general in the Maryland National Guard. (WTOP)
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Ten spy films “Recommended by Real CIA Agents,” according to MovieWeb. Top of the list: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Jeff Stein contributed to this story.
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