Shane Harris

Whenever Donald Trump has contemplated confrontation with Iran, his decisions have been guided less by the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community than by his own calculation of risk and reward. At times he has pulled the trigger. At times he has backed down. All the while, the U.S. assessment of Iranian nuclear intentions has stayed remarkably consistent.
Now, Trump has gone all in. His decision this week to drop more than a dozen of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S.

President Donald Trump’s firing of the country’s most senior military officer on Friday night rattled the foundations of the armed forces. It also intensified an already-furious game of “who’s next” among senior lawmakers and Washington officials, who have been trading information about the commander-in-chief’s likely targets.  
Trump fired Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., known as CQ, who was only the second African American to serve as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Having the best spies, the best collection systems, and the best analysts will not help an intelligence service if it leaks like a sieve,” the former CIA speechwriter Charles E. Lathrop remarked in The Literary Spy, a book of quotations about espionage that he compiled. Lathrop, who wrote under a pseudonym, was making a point about counterintelligence—the flushing out of enemy spies and leakers who might compromise a spy agency’s precious secrets.

This afternoon, FBI personnel braced for a retaliatory purge of the nation’s premiere law-enforcement agency, as President Donald Trump appeared ready to fire potentially hundreds of agents and officials who’d participated in investigations that led to criminal charges against him.
A team that investigated Trump’s mishandling of classified documents was expected to be fired, four people familiar with the matter said.

Shortly after taking the oath of office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order revoking the security clearances of about four dozen former national-security officials. Their offense was that in 2020, they had signed an open letter suggesting that the publication of emails found on a laptop purportedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter might be the result of a Russian-government operation designed to “influence how Americans vote in this election.

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Bill Burns has spent much of his nearly four-decade career in government arguing about words. As he was packing up his office this week at CIA headquarters, the language of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which he had toiled over for the past 15 months, was at the top of his mind.

Two years ago, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded, in unusually emphatic language, that a mysterious and debilitating ailment known as “Havana syndrome” was not the handiwork of a foreign adversary wielding some kind of energy weapon. That long-awaited finding shattered an alternative theory embraced by American diplomats and intelligence officers, who said they had been victims of a deliberate, clandestine campaign by a U.S.

The panic set in just before midnight last Tuesday. “She’s in trouble,” one U.S. intelligence officer fretted as Kamala Harris’s blue wall looked ready to crumble, all but ensuring that Donald Trump would head back to the White House. “This is a disaster,” said another, who is retired but served during the first Trump administration and bears the scars.
Neither of these men who contacted me on Election Night is a partisan.

In what turned out to be the last few months of Yahya Sinwar’s life, U.S. and Israeli officials worried that the architect of the October 7 attacks might never free the hostages they believed he had hidden in the twisting tunnels of Gaza. Sinwar had essentially abandoned negotiations over a durable cease-fire and the accompanying release of the 100-plus captives, as well as fresh aid for Palestinians and the chance to rebuild their obliterated territory with international help.