HOW INTELLIGENT WAS THAT? Just before President Trump yanked the Acting Director of National Intelligence gig from Mar-a-Lago member Bill Pulte this week amid a Congressional uproar (from both sides) over his appointment (because he has no intelligence experience), Axios published a scandalous accusation that Pulte called outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday to tell her that her last day was "today." Sources told Axios that Gabbard pushed back, telling Pulte she'd need to hear something like that from President Trump or the White House. As the rumor goes, after reaching Trump directly, Gabbard got a very different message. Turns out that the intelligence that Tuesday was her last day - wasn’t so good.
OLIGARCH LOOKING FOR WORK: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has now publicly acknowledged that sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich slipped into Kyiv earlier this spring in a pitch to be a Kremlin go between with Moscow. Abramovich, a former Kremlin insider and also past owner of the Chelsea Football Club, reportedly carried messages between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding a potential peace deal. Reportedly one of the conditions of the go between offer was that it remain “silent without any kind of public messages.” So much for that. The Moscow Times is also reporting more details on public statements made by Russian President Vladimir Putin on exchanges with a ‘representative from our business circle.’
NOT THE FAN CLUB YOU ARE LOOKING FOR: British officials got an unexpected lesson in counterintelligence recently when a hidden camera turned up inside a Whitehall government building that houses officials involved in approving China's controversial new London embassy. According to the Times of London, the device was reportedly tucked above a ceiling panel in a communal area, prompting investigators to ask the classic spy-thriller questions: Who put it there? How long was it monitoring and was someone binge-watching bureaucrats fill out planning paperwork? To be clear, nobody has publicly linked the camera to China, Russia, Iran but the discovery is interesting, particularly because where it was planted. The episode serves as a reminder that despite all the talk about AI, quantum computing, and cyber warfare, sometimes espionage still comes down to hiding a camera above a drop ceiling and hoping nobody looks up.
BLIND SPOT: According to the Financial Times, Russia's security services briefly shut down the special surveillance network protecting Vladimir Putin after the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei demonstrated what Israeli intelligence can do with an adversary's own traffic cameras. Engineers reportedly scrubbed the system and walled it off from the internet before turning it back on. FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, speaking on Russian state media, warned regional security chiefs last month that the 300,000 cameras Russia installed to watch its own citizens had become a vulnerability its enemies could exploit. An independent Ukrainian hacker told the Financial Times that Kremlin-area cameras are "still working and regularly hacked." He declined to say whether Ukraine has the capacity to analyze the feeds at scale which, under the circumstances, is exactly what someone with that capacity would say.
IS THAT A GIANT ZEBRA? Russia appears to be taking camouflage cues from World War I in an effort to hide some of the military equipment its using in Ukraine. Images circulating from the occupied Ukrainian territory show Russian KamAZ logistic vehicles covered with black-and-white camo stripes. They look like a giant zebra but experts say the paint schemes could alter the vehicle’s visual signature, making it more difficult to identify by automated systems. The camouflage was originally designed in the First World War to distort a naval vessel’s outline. Russia has used similar tactics before by placing tires on aircraft to try and tell automated systems there’s ‘nothing to see here’. There’s one big problem with Moscow’s plan though. Humans can still pretty easily spot and target these vehicles.
FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS: Do friends spy on friends? Depends on who you ask, apparently. NBC News broke (and the New York Times the next day confirmed) that the Defense Intelligence Agency quietly raised Israel's counterintelligence threat level to the U.S. from "high" to "critical," the top of the scale and, per the Times, higher than that of any other U.S. ally and even some adversarial states. The worry, sources say, is that Israel has taken an unusually keen interest in what the Trump administration is saying behind closed doors about Iran. The Times named Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby among those of particular interest to the Israelis, and one senior official called the collection effort against U.S. officials "unhinged." Both Israel and the White House say it's nonsense. A White House official, quoted in the Times of Israel, dismissed the story as "false and sourced to someone who doesn't have any knowledge of what's going on." Israel's embassy in Washington called the reports "completely false," insisting Israel does not gather intelligence on American entities or government officials…which will be news to Jonathan Pollard, the Navy analyst who did 30 years for handing Israel suitcases of classified U.S documents.
GOLD STANDARD OF MANIPULATION OR JUST A MISUNDERSTANDING? A little more is leaking out about David Rush, the former senior CIA officer found in May with 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash, and a Rolex collection stashed in his house. The Washington Post reports that Rush allegedly built a fake "special access program" ( SAP), the blackest of the government's secret programs - sealed off from oversight even by most personnel with the highest clearances. Prosecutors believe that Rush dressed up the program as a continuity-of-government operation for keeping Washington running through a nuclear attack. He then "read in" two colleagues, allegedly persuading one to route millions to the program through a fraudulent contract and to buy the gold. The Justice Department calls Rush a "master manipulator" who "cannot be trusted," and a judge ordered that he remain in custody as a flight risk. Rush has not yet entered a plea of guilty or not guilty.
RAINED OUT — Last Saturday’s Yankees vs. Red Sox game was rescheduled for August 29, thanks to a lot of ill-timed rain over the weekend. The Cipher Brief is bummed because one of their experts was scheduled to throw out the opening pitch. We'll check in with the covert ops pitcher and let you know if he's still able to find out whether his special ops experience transfers to the pitching mound in August.
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