SpyWeek Update: Terror Threat at UK Airbase, Putin Messing with US Elections, Hybrid War Against NATO as Trump Entertains Xi, Hackers Ransack FBI Files

Terror at UK Airbase: British police say they arrested five men Sunday on suspicion that they were trying to carry out of terrorist attack with explosives at an air base that the U.S. Air Force had been using to facilitate strikes on Iran. Several homes near the RAF Fairford base, which is about 90 minutes outside London, were evacuated. After “extensive interviews and inquiries,” the five men, “all from London and in their early to mid-20s,” were released on bail, authorities said. Odd. Much yet to be learned. CIA Truth and Dare: “A new, previously suppressed book by a former CIA officer paints a satirical and slashing portrait of the agency’s deep-cover spying program as riven by systematic dysfunction,” veteran intelligence reporter Zach Dorfman, a recent hire by The Washington Post, scooped on Sunday. “‘The Pickle Factory,’ written by an ex-CIA nonofficial cover officer, under the pen name Sam R. Oyken, is billed as a work of fiction,” writes Dorfman. “Though often fantastical, it contains thinly veiled true-life details about the inner workings of the agency’s spying operations, according to former CIA officials.” It’s not a pretty picture. CIA-KGB War on Screen: Filming has been completed on The Billion Dollar Spy, an adaptation of former Washington Post foreign correspondent and editor David E. Hoffman’s celebrated 2015 book of the same name. The film stars Russell Crowe as Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer in a Russian military design bureau whose hatred for Soviet communism drove him to volunteer to spy for the United States, and whose disclosures weakened Soviet air defenses and saved the U.S. an estimated billion dollars in R&D costs. Interesting sidelight: An online Russian magazine recently published a version of the Tolkachev case by Vladimir Zaitsev, the late KGB agent who caught him. More details on that over at Deeper Look, a Substack by former CIA officer Michael Sellers, who—get this—was also arrested in Moscow by Zaitsev. Luckily, he lived to tell the story. Tolkachev was executed. Mossad’s Revenge: Israeli Prime MInister Benjamin Netanyahu has long scapegoated his former intelligence chiefs and military leaders for a failure to predict and prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 massacre and kidnappings of some 1,200 Israeli concert goers and residents in communities surrounding Gaza. Apparently they’ve had enough. Within hours of each other on Friday, The New York Times and The Atlantic published detailed stories that appeared to obliterate Netanyahu’s postering.