A NEW FOCUS FOR SEB? Sebastian Gorka is rumored to be making a quiet play for one of the most powerful counterterrorism jobs in Washington and it’s happening at a moment when that machinery is already under strain. Four people who requested anonymity told The Washington Post that Gorka, a loyalist and hardliner inside the Trump orbit, wants to take over the National Counterterrorism Center - a role that would put him at the center of how the U.S. defines and fights terrorism. No official nomination yet, but the interest alone is raising eyebrows. Gorka’s record suggests a very different approach from that of former director Joe Kent who resigned quote publicly, over the Iran war. Gorka has in the past, pushed to widen the aperture on what counts as terrorism, including efforts to label far-left movements as threats. Gorka isn’t talking. And in the meantime, acting director Joe Weirsky - a former Marine with special operations credentials - is holding the seat.
OWL BE DARNED — CUBA'S 40-YEAR ASSET FINALLY SPILLS HIS SECRETS: The FBI's "Inside the FBI" podcast dropped a new episode this week marking the two-year anniversary of former U.S. Ambassador Víctor Manuel Rocha's sentencing, and the details are as rich as his handler's access to Havana's best cigars. Rocha, who spent four decades spying for Cuba under the codename BÚHO (Spanish for "owl") turns out to have chosen the State Department as his institutional home for a very practical reason: it didn't use polygraphs. Wise old bird. Recruited in Chile in 1973 by a Cuban DGI officer who'd just rotated back from the Angolan war, Rocha went on to serve at the National Security Council, as U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, and as a senior adviser at Southern Command, all while funneling everything he deemed valuable to Havana. Agents said Cuban intelligence deliberately acted on only some of his tips to avoid burning their source.
FORMER BRAZILIAN SPY CHIEF ON ICE IN ORLANDO: Alexandre Ramagem spent years running Brazil's intelligence service. Then he ran from Brazilian justice. But it’s a small world (as they say at Disney) and he was caught by ICE agents in Orlando, Florida on April 14. Ramagem had been sentenced to 16 years for his role in Jair Bolsonaro's failed 2023 coup attempt, but he fled to Brazil before he was due to report to prison. Brazil's supreme court charged that he'd turned the national intelligence agency into a private surveillance operation, using spy software to track the geolocation of Supreme Court justices, journalists, senators, and public officials, essentially turning the tools of state secrecy against the state itself. The man who built a career watching others apparently didn’t see this one coming.
NCIS: ENOUGH ALREADY. CBS ORDERS 6TH FRANCHISE: CBS has ordered NCIS: New York, the sixth series in the franchise that at this point has more branches than the Navy Federal Credit Union. LL Cool J will reprise his NCIS: Los Angeles role as Agent Sam Hanna, last seen when that show wrapped its 14-season which aired in 2023. Hanna has now relocated to the Big Apple alongside Hawaii Five-0 veteran Scott Caan. The show will air Tuesdays at 9 p.m. this fall, sandwiched between the original NCIS and NCIS: Origins, with NCIS: Sydney returning at midseason. By our count that's the original, L.A., New Orleans, Hawaii, Sydney, and now New York, which means fictional NCIS agents have now claimed investigative jurisdiction over roughly 40% of the world's major port cities.
TOUGH SPELL FOR THE PENTAGON: On Friday, the Pentagon’s “Rapid Response” social media shop posted a slick highlight sizzle reel to tout what the Department accomplished during the week. Eagle-eyed viewers noticed the chyron identifying the Assistant Press Secretary Riley Podleski rendered her title as "SECRATARY." When last we checked, it hadn’t been fixed – but hey, there’s a war on, you know? Maybe they got rid of their spell-checker when they banned Anthropic.
SECRET DIS-SERVICE: It has been alleged that a Secret Service agent-in-training for some reason decided to hone his surveillance skills by hiding a spy camera in a phone charger to watch his roommate, also a Secret Service trainee, at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. ABC News reports the trainee ran a weeks-long anonymous harassment campaign via text, suggesting a mysterious stranger was watching his suitemate's every move. The “why” is unclear. The suspect was arrested April 8, charged with felony eavesdropping, and posted bond of $8,458. The Secret Service - whose literal job is watching over other people, in a nod to the obvious, noted the charges raised "significant concerns about the individual's character and fitness to serve." ABC reached out to the suspect for comment but didn’t get a response.
WE’LL SPY FOR OURSELVES, EH? Canada's spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), may be amping up its foreign human intelligence game. A leaked internal memo obtained by Canadian Press via “Access to Information” (the Canadian equivalent of FOIA) reveals the agency has been war-gaming on whether to build a CIA/MI6-style overseas collection capability. The memo acknowledges that Canada has historically relied on allied partnerships for foreign intelligence reporting, a polite way of saying Washington and some of the other “Five-Eyes” did most of the heavy lifting. A former Canadian national security official was quoted as saying that Canada "can't rely on" the U.S. right now and that "some would even suggest we have a hostile state actor to the south." Although it gets complicated, CSIS is currently authorized to gather foreign intelligence only within Canada, not overseas.
SEVEN OH TOO HARD: Section 702 – the surveillance authority that lets the NSA and FBI hoover up emails and phone calls made by foreign targets overseas (and, awkwardly, sometimes Americans they're chatting with) without a warrant, expires on April 20. And the scary part is that Congress still can't agree on how to renew it. The Trump administration wants a clean 18-month extension but reformers in both parties want warrant requirements for searches of Americans' data. A court ruling last week found that the querying process has "deficiencies" and has given the White House until April 16 to appeal or fix it. Two telecom companies privately warned they’d stop complying at midnight on April 20 if the law lapses, just as they did in 2024. The IC calls a potential lapse "a self-inflicted national security calamity."Got news to share? Drop us a note: Editor@thecipherbrief.comRead more expert-driven national security insights exclusively in www.thecipherbrief.com.
