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SpyTalk
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Intelligence for Thinking People
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The U.S., Iran and China: Where is it Going?
Mar 6Tap to summarizeDavid Shedd, who held top level positions across U.S. intelligence during a roughly 40 year government career, says there’s a “50-50” chance of Xi Jinping moving on Taiwan in 2027.“I think that Xi has made it part of his permanent legacy to bring Taiwan into the fold,” Shedd said on the SpyTalk podcast. “It may take on different dimensions in terms of initially cording it off in terms of access to the outside world and that sort of thing, in hopes that it doesn’t require an invasion. But I think an invasion is likely, certainly by the end of the decade.”But it won’t be easy for China, he told SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff and Karen Greenberg. “I think that in the end, Taiwan will fight back very, very hard. It’s nationalistic in its own right,” he added, stemming from its own revolutionary history. In the 1920s Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists split from Mao Zedong’s communists, fought a losing civil war and fled to Taiwan in 1949 as the communists rode to victory in Peking (as it was then called). Chinese leaders since then have vowed to one day seize Taiwan, which they routinely refer to as a “renegade” or “breakaway” province.Xi Jinping has been “a keen observer of both what has been…the capabilities of Iran to respond to” U.S. and Israeli air attacks, said Shedd, whose final government post in 2014-2015 was as acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He also served in senior positions at the White House National Security Council, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA, where he was chief of Congressional Liaison.“So I think it’s a 50-50 in terms of 2027 in going forward on” Xi invading Taiwan, Shedd said. “I would have to have inside information as to what lessons he’s actually taking away” from the Iran war, “but he is a keen observer of [U.S. military action].”Iran GambleAs for Trump’s attack on Iran, Shedd called it “a high wire act in terms of going in on Saturday and decapitating the leadership, including Ayatollah Khamenei and the rest of the leadership. It’s historically proven that there is no war that’s ever been won from the air…The idea that somehow it will bring about regime change is very much in question, in my view, after [observing] 47 years of the Iranian revolution…”The regime’s security organs “will not go down without a fight no matter what takes place because it’s really the preservation of an ideological, religious-driven motivation in terms of holding on to power,” he added.###Do listen to the entire, fascinating interview with Shedd, as well as Isikoff’s and Greenberg’s lively discussion of other burning issues on the national security front. You can listen free here, on REDCIRCLE, or whatever your preferred listening platform.War is hell. So is independent journalism in times like these. SpyTalk is a wholly reader-supported publication—no ads, no foundation grants, no corporate sponsors. Yet we’re continuing to grow and punch above our weight, thanks to people like you. So how about upping to paid or taking out a free trial right here and now?Share
Transcribe →Iran’s Mighty Missile Threat Falls Flat
Mar 6Tap to summarizeLast year reports surfaced that Iran had ordered ballistic missile components from China—“enough to fuel hundreds of explosives.” (New York Post art)For months, the Iranians had warned that if the United States and Israel launched major attacks that sought to bring down the Islamic Republic, they would unleash their arsenal of 3,000 missiles and countless drones, striking U.S. military bases across the Middle East and plunging the entire oil-rich region into a war that would devastate the global economy..But the threat of Iranian missiles not only failed to deter the joint U.S.-Israeli attack, but once the war began last Saturday, their counter strikes also have failed so far to knock out any U.S. bases. (In the war’s early hours, two unmanned Iranian drones did manage to strike a command center in the Port Shuaiba U.S. military base in Kuwait, killing six U.S. soldiers and wounding nine others, the only American casualties so far in the fighting. A drone also hit the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain but caused little damage.)Indeed, so far the vast majority of Iran’s missiles and drones, including those that were heading toward major oil and gas installations in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar, have been destroyed in mid-air, intercepted by American, Israeli and allied Arab air defenses. Other missiles or drones that have evaded the interceptors in the Gulf monarchies have struck civilian targets, including airports, seaports, hotels and data centers, turning would-be neutral neighbors like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman against them.But others argue that Iran’s strategy of missile and drone attacks, including those by proxies in Iraq and Lebanon, on more than a dozen countries stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean shows that President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanahu have started a war that is spinning out of control. Read more
Transcribe →A Bitter Voice from Inside an Israeli Bomb Shelter
Mar 2Tap to summarizeFrom inside a bomb shelter in downtown Tel Aviv this weekend, I was hearing the warning sirens and the explosions of the Iron Dome’s missile and drone interceptors overhead, all the while listening to Israeli TV pundits describing what sounded like an entirely different universe.This is not one of the Israeli media’s finest hours. As during most of my country’s battles since the surprise Hamas slaughter of civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, the far majority of our news media and commentators, especially on TV, have struck a jingoistic pose as uniformly as a Roman legion. Hardly any voices have been heard questioning the righteousness of this latest decision to go to war.Was this truly a war of no choice, of unavoidable necessity? Was Israel facing an imminent existential threat? My answer is no. Read more
Transcribe →New in SpyWeek: CIA & Khamenei, Heat Over Surveillance, NSA Vacancy, More FBI Revenge
Mar 2Tap to summarizeAlysa Liu, triumphant in Milan, faltered in 2022 Olympics after Chinese agents in the U.S. began harassing and spying on her family. See below. (NBC) Stalking Khamenei: The CIA tracked Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei for months, vacuuming up his locations and movement patterns, “people familiar with the operation,” i.e. Israeli and U.S. officials, told a team of New York Times reporters. “Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place on Saturday morning at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran. Most critically,” Khamenei would be there, they reported. Missile-armed Israeli warplanes took off. Boom. One might wonder why the leadership would chance gathering like that after Israeli agents have proven so skilled at tracking and killing Iranian officials. Then again, they had to be fearful of turning on their phones wherever they were.Killer Words: The Obama administration paved the legal path for President Trump to attack Iran and assassinate its leaders, SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff noted Sunday. A “secret Justice Department memo” Obama officials sent to Congress, he reported, “argu[ed] that their lethal drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen were fully justified because they did not actually constitute ‘assassinations’ theoretically banned by a decades-old executive order.” The Right Stuff: “MalwareJake,” a self described “former NSA hacker,” claimed on X that U.S. and Israeli cyberwarriors are “targeting [Iran’s] civilian infrastructure, not government networks with intelligence collection value. That’s because once you deliver an effect (CYBERCOM speak for ‘cyber attack’) in a network, you lose the ability to collect intelligence from that target.” (Jake Williams) Read more
Transcribe →An 'Imminent' Iranian Threat? Really?
Mar 1Tap to summarizeAn Obama legal memo wildly stretched the definition of “imminent” to justify the drone attack that killed U.S. citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki and Samir Khan (AP)A little more than 13 years ago, I got my hands on a confidential Obama administration legal memo that, in retrospect, may have given President Trump all the cover he needed to launch his military attack on Iran this weekend.At the time, the issue on the table for Obama and his lawyers seemed far removed from the decision Trump just made: to start a war that, in its opening moments, decapitated the leader of a foreign country.Instead, the question for the Obama crew was a more limited one: What was their basis for launching drone strikes to kill suspected Al Qaeda operatives— even if, as in one notorious case, the operative, Anwar Al-Awlaki, happened to be an American citizen who was born in New Mexico?The Obama officials’ response was forceful and unapologetic: In a secret Justice Department legal memo— summarized and sent to Congress as a confidential (non-public) “white paper”— they held nothing back, arguing that their lethal drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen were fully justified because they did not actually constitute “assassinations” theoretically banned by a decades-old executive order.“A lawful killing in self-defense is not an assassination,” the Obama white paper read. “In the Department’s view, a lethal operation conducted against a U.S. citizen whose conduct poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States would be a legitimate act of national self-defense that would not violate the assassination ban.”Strong language, to be sure. But it was how the administration defined its terms that caused the outrage when I published the previously secret white paper on the NBC News website. In particular, there was that magic word, “imminent.” In common parlance, imminent has a clear meaning.”Ready to take place: happening soon,” is the way Merriam-Webster defines it.But the Obama era memo rewrote the definition of imminent to wrench it far beyond anything the dictionary had to say about it. Instead, it refers to what it delicately, if not disingenuously, calls a “broader concept of imminence.”“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.In other words, imminent does not mean there is a plot underway or even that there is intelligence that one is “happening soon.”Instead, it says, an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.”The memo did not define “recently” or “activities” much less explain whether they too should be injected with a new “broader concept” of meaning.1984My publication of this Orwellian rewrite caused a splash. “This is a chilling document,” Jameel Jaffer, then deputy legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union told me at the time. “It redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning.”The New York Times, chasing the story in a front page account the next day, also noted it “adopts an elastic definition of an ‘imminent threat’” while calling the memo “the most detailed analysis yet to come into public view regarding the Obama legal team’s views about the lawfulness of killing, without a trial, an American citizen.”Over time, the controversy over the Obama administration’s drone strikes—and its slippery legal arguments to justify them— faded. As criticism of the strikes intensified, especially after reports of civilian casualties, the administration gradually began to reduce them and impose new restrictions on how they were carried out.But their legal rationale for them—and in particular, their word games over how to define &...
Transcribe →Iran Is Not Venezuela, Regime-Change Skeptics Warn
Feb 28Tap to summarizeSmoke rises over Tehran’s presidential compound. The airstrikes apparently killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Uncredited photo from AP)UPDATED As U.S. and Israeli forces launched their joint offensive against Iran early Saturday, President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the country’s Islamic regime. “Take over your government,” he exhorted them. “America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny . . . This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”That moment may be now, especially since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is dead, killed in air strikes that devastated the presidential complex in Tehran, Trump declared on his Truth Social account. Iran has not confirmed the deaths of Khamenei and the other senior officials, and a spokesperson for the prime minister’s office issued a statement warning the public to be aware of “psychological warfare” waged by the United States and Israel.An Israeli military spokesperson said the dead also included Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohammed Pakpour; Iranian Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh; Ali Shamkhani, senior advisor to Khamenei; and Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces.Sources tell SpyTalk that the Trump administration’s intent resembles what happened in Venezuela in January—to lop off Iran’s unpopular clerical leadership and invite the next level of officials to cooperate with Washington, however repressive it may remain. Regime change, in other words, would not include opposition figures who’ve led the huge protests that have roiled the country for months. Any IRGC officials who lay down their arms would be offered “immunity,” Trump said when announcing the start of “Operation Epic Fury,” hinting that U.S. intelligence already has made such overtures to that effect. “So lay down your arms, you will be treated fairly with total immunity, or you will face certain death,” he said. In any event, the regime’s opponents inside Iran appear cowed after government forces killed as many as 30,000 demonstrators in the past few months. And with the Iranian opposition abroad deeply divided, the prospect of any popular uprising toppling the remainder of Iran’s clerical leadership looks dim, according to veteran Iran- watchers both in and out of the government.“In terms of really getting rid of this entire ruling class, lock, stock and barrel, without having any sort of really well-organized opposition with roots in the country is low,” Jon Alterman, the long-time director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the SpyTalk podcast on Thursday. Alterman was also a key State Department expert on the Middle East in the Clinton administration and says he has met with the Iranians many times over the past 30 years.But some others, like Mark A. Fowler, a 22-year CIA veteran who rose to the number two position on Iran within the agency, say this is the moment for the Trump administration to do whatever it can to empower a popular opposition. In addition to its air campaign, he urges the administration to facilitate communication between Iran’s opposition groups.“Iran’s youth are highly technically literate—when motivated to fight back, they are certain to find their own way to break through the regime’s constraints.,” Fowler said in a recent commentary that ran in The Washington Post. Once the recent demonstrations began in December, the Trump administration flooded Iran with Starlink satellite systems to facilitate communication among regime opponents.But that’s a heavy lift, experts caution. Last month, Khamenei ordered his security forces, along with imported Shia militias from Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan, to fire on country-wide anti-government street demonstrations, which began in protest against Iran’s crumbling economy but soon morphed into calls for the government’s ouster. While the Iranian government placed the death toll at the end of January at 3,117, The Guardian, citing shared data from a network of more than ...
Transcribe →Trump and Iran at a Potential World-Changing Crossroads
Feb 28Tap to summarizeThe aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is poised to attack Iran. (US Navy photo)IT MAY HAVE BEEN AMONG THE SCARIER MOMENTS in the run up to the war in Iraq—and one that has taken on eerie new relevance in light of today’s looming military confrontation with Iran.In September, 2002, the British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair—seeking to help President George W. Bush bolster his case for an invasion—released a white paper making the alarming claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a ballistic missile attack with chemical or biological weapons against the United Kingdom within 45 minutes.Predictably, the British tabloids went crazy. “He’s got him…Let’s get him,” screamed the headline in The Sun. “45 Minutes from Attack,” declared The Evening Standard over a picture of long-range ballistic missiles.It was all a fraud, of course: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction—no nuclear bombs, no mobile biological labs, as Bush and his officials claimed—much less ballistic missiles that it could unleash on British or American citizens. In the U.K.’s political folklore, Blair’s white paper came to be known as “the dodgy dossier,” and one of the top intelligence officials who worked on it, David Kelly, conceded to the BBC the document had been “sexed up.” Kelly later took a long walk in the woods and committed suicide, slashing his left wrist with a knife.Nothing quite so dramatic followed President Donald Trump’s State of the Union this week when he outlined reasons for threatening the Iranian government with a full blown military attack. But at least one of his claims evoked Blair’s famously fallacious white paper.“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” Trump said about Iran’s ballistic missile program.In fact, there has been no intelligence reporting suggesting that Iran is close to having an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S. homeland. A Defense Intelligence Agency report last year concluded that Iran wouldn’t have a “militarily viable ICBM” until 2035“So I’ve been hearing the Iranians are a year away from being able to strike the United States for 25 years,” Jon Alterman, the longtime director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a prominent national security think tank, said on the SpyTalk podcast. “At some point that may be true. I don’t have any evidence that it’s true now.” He also threw cold water on Trump envoy Steve Witkoff’s claim that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”<img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4Ok8!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2...
Transcribe →Where AI Thinks the US-Iran Conflict is Going
Feb 24Tap to summarize(Fox News)This is an analytic forecast based on publicly reported information through mid-February. It’s probabilistic, not predictive—meant to map plausible paths, not declare certainties, Bing Copilot cautions. And it does not take into account Monday’s report by The Washington Post saying Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine had warned the White House that “a lack of munitions and support from allies could mean greater danger for U.S. troops.” Current contextPost‑strike environment: Iran is still absorbing the impact of major U.S.–Israeli strikes on its nuclear infrastructure in 2025, which set back key facilities but did not eliminate nuclear know‑how.High tension, active diplomacy: A second round of U.S.–Iran talks is underway amid warnings that a U.S.–Iran war could be “imminent” and last weeks, even as both sides publicly claim to seek a deal.Iran’s red lines: Tehran shows little willingness to concede on missiles, regional proxies, or the core of its nuclear program—pillars of its defense strategy.Against that backdrop, the next 12 months likely fall into a few main scenarios.Scenario A: Coercive diplomacy short of warApproximate likelihood: Medium‑highCore idea: Intense military pressure and sanctions continue, but both sides stop short of full‑scale war while pursuing a fragile, stop‑start negotiation track.Key features:Talks continue in fits and starts: The Muscat/Geneva channel remains open, with intermittent walk‑outs and “deadlines” that keep being extended.Incremental nuclear steps: Iran rebuilds parts of its program, reduces cooperation with the IAEA, and keeps edging toward shorter breakout times without openly crossing the line into weaponization.Managed military signaling:Iran and Russia hold more joint drills and naval maneuvers in the Sea of Oman and beyond.The U.S. sustains a heightened regional posture (carriers, air assets, missile defense) but avoids direct strikes unless there is a clear trigger.Proxy friction, not open war: Attacks by Iran‑aligned groups in Iraq, Syria, or the Gulf flare periodically, but are contained through back‑channel messages and limited retaliation.Implications:Risk of miscalculation stays high, but both sides still see more to lose than gain from all‑out conflict.Iran’s nuclear latency and missile program remain largely intact, keeping the core strategic dilemma unresolved.Subscribe nowScenario B – Limited war, rapid escalation riskApproximate likelihood: MediumCore idea: A trigger—proxy attack, misread signal, or failed deadline—sparks a U.S.–Iran confrontation that begins as “limited” but is intense and could last weeks.Potential triggers:A high‑casualty strike on U.S. forces or shipping attributed to Iran or its proxies.Collapse of talks after a hard deadline set by Washington, followed by new Iranian nuclear moves (e.g., higher enrichment, new facility revelations).Likely dynamics:U.S. campaign:Air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear, missile, and IRGC targets, framed as time‑limited and focused on “restoring deterrence.”Iranian response:Missile and drone attacks on U.S. bases and regional partners; attempts to disrupt shipping in the Gulf and Red Sea; intensified proxy activity.Regional involvement:Israel may conduct parallel or opportunistic strikes; Gulf states brace for spillover and may quietly support U.S. operations.Implications:Further physical degradation of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but also stronger domestic calls in Iran for overt nuclear deterrence.High risk that “limited” war proves ha...
Transcribe →Update: Pakistan in “Open War” with Taliban, Launches Airstrikes on Kabul and More
Feb 24Tap to summarize(Pakistan defense ministry via wires)Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif declared an “open war” with the Afghan Taliban on Friday and said his air force had carried out airstrikes in Kabul and two other Afghan provinces in retaliation for Afghanistan’s “cross-border attack on Pakistan.”For its part, the Afghan ministry reportedly claimed responsibility for killing 55 Pakistani soldiers in retaliatory operations carried out along the Durand Line on Thursday. Meanwhile, Pakistan said it killed over 130 Taliban fighters in its retaliatory operation. Tensions continued to escalate at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as China, Russia and Iran urged calm and offered to mediate the dispute.Pakistan’s information ministry said Afghan Taliban opened “unprovoked firing” on multiple locations along the border in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Chitral, Khyber, Mohmand, Kurram and Bajaur sectors on Thursday evening.In the last three weeks Afghan-based suicide bombers have attacked a Shia mosque in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, killing 31 worshippers; a military outpost, killing 11 security personnel; and a police station, killing two.The Taliban’s recent alignment with Pakistan’s arch enemy India escalates the situation.Islamabad claims that India provides financial backing and training to anti-Pakistan organizations such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which have found refuge in Afghanistan. Recently, New Delhi has deepened its ties with Afghanistan’s Taliban government. In October last year, the Taliban’s foreign minister visited New Delhi, following which India upgraded its embassy in Kabul. However, India has yet to officially recognize the Afghan government diplomatically. So far, Russia remains the only nation to have granted formal recognition.War is a constant risk in South Asia, where longstanding enemies India and Pakistan both possess nuclear weapons.Subscribe nowElevated TensionsIn May last year the two neighbors fought a brief war that ended after four days with Pakistan claiming victory after downing five Indian fighter jets, a claim Washington later corroborated.The latest round of escalating attacks by Afghan-based militants and the Taliban government’s closer ties with India has further elevated tensions in a region, where a multitude of militant groups operate with seeming impunity.Growing instability has expanded the areas where governmental authority in Pakistan and Afghanistan is minimal or nonexistent. This situation has benefited numerous militant organizations, who are now intensifying their recruitment efforts, coordinating more sophisticated attacks, and securing increased financial resources and backing.A look at the region’s complex militant landscape shows a pattern of escalating violence and constant change.<img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dYga!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media...
Transcribe →New in SpyWeek: Trump Weighs Killing Iran Leader & Son, New Greenland Move as CIA Flunks Analysts
Feb 23Tap to summarizeMarked for assassination? Mojtaba (left) and Ali Khamenei (News24).Iran Decapitation? Among the Iran options presented to President Trump is the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his son Mojtaba, a “Trump adviser” told Axios’s Barak Ravid and Marc Caputo. ”A second source confirmed a plan to kill Khamenei and his son was floated to Trump several weeks ago,” they added. “What the president chooses no one knows. I don’t think he knows,” the adviser said. We’ve not seen corroboration of the widespread report elsewhere.Crazy Is: Worries about Trump’s plans for Iran are mounting, meanwhile, following his announced intent to send “a great hospital boat” to Greenland, which it neither needs nor wants, once more spurring chatter that the president has dementia. Trump’s ex-White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews last month condemned his obsession with annexing Greenland, calling it “the most mentally ill, deranged thing” Trump has sought since regaining office. His hospital ship announcement on Truth Social caused “befuddlement on both sides of the Atlantic,” The Washington Post reported. Read more
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