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.

Trum’s transition team is reportedly reconsidering its pick of Crusader enthusiast Peter Hegseth as SecDef.

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.

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