RUMOR HAS IT — According to an Axios report, President Trump was ready to fire Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard over her failure to fully endorse the Iran war during recent congressional testimony — that is, until longtime Trump friend and adviser Roger Stone reportedly stepped in and saved her job. Axios cites sources saying the troubles began with the resignation of former counterterrorism director Joe Kent, after which Trump reportedly “scolded” Gabbard in a private meeting and questioned her loyalty given her closeness with Kent. Trump then reportedly polled his Cabinet on whether he should replace Gabbard, but after the members of his Cabinet backed her and Stone intervened to convince Trump that firing Gabbard could make her a martyr for MAGA’s anti-interventionist wing, the president backed down.
WINNING THE MEME WAR: A group of self-described young Iranian activists called Explosive Media has released more than a dozen slick AI-generated, LEGO Movie-inspired videos mocking President Trump since the war began in February, Among them: a video depicting a blocky plastic president huddled with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Satan, reviewing the Epstein files, before pressing a big red button labeled "back to the stone age." One video showed the LEGO version of the president sobbing over Iran's ceasefire terms, clutching a white flag and eating a taco - a nod to the acronym for "Trump Always Chickens Out." Another video surfacing on Thursday was even more offensive in a rap telling Americans: “Your government is run by pedophiles.” The videos seem to be a direct response to the White House's own war content strategy, which spliced real airstrike footage with clips from the movies Gladiator, Top Gun, and video games like Grand Theft Auto, and Mortal Kombat - earning a cease-and-desist demand from actor Ben Stiller and a "war is not a video game" rebuke from a combat-wounded senator. Some analysts are now saying that Iran is winning the meme war. Explosive Media claims to be totally independent but as WIRED notes, in a country where the regime has cut off internet access for virtually everyone else, staying online suggests you might be playing for the home team.
TAVAJJOH, TAVAJJOH – IS THIS THING ON? The Cold War called. It wanted its tradecraft back. It seems that some twelve hours after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran on February 28, a male voice appeared on shortwave frequency 7910 kHz, reading strings of random numbers in Farsi, punctuated by tavajjoh – "attention" – repeated three times. The broadcast - catalogued as V32 by the hobbyist monitoring group ENIGMA2000 on April 4, is believed to be the first newly identified voice numbers station in nearly a decade. Priyom.org, another radio monitoring enthusiast group, says they have pinpointed the signal origin to a U.S. military base near Stuttgart, Germany. The leading theory, per Priyom: the CIA may have been activating assets inside Iran which had been under an internet blackout for weeks. It also seems that we’re not exposing any secrets here as Iran already noticed. Since March 4, Tehran has been blasting V32's frequency with a bubble jammer - which is the same electronic screech it aims at BBC Farsi that forces the station to hop frequencies. If you have nothing better to do and want to listen to apparently random numbers being read on the radio in Farsi there are plenty of clips on YouTube.
CLOUD COVER: Iran has been targeting American tech companies in the Gulf with drone and missile strikes since the war began. Oracle was on the list — the IRGC cited the company's cloud and AI contracts with the Pentagon and founder Larry Ellison's ties to the Israeli government as a reason for targeting them. When debris from an intercepted Iranian drone hit the facade of an Oracle building in Dubai Internet City, authorities confirmed they responded to a "minor incident" — no injuries reported. Amazon Web Services later confirmed that two of its data centers in the UAE were directly struck, and a third in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby drone strike. President Trump has threatened to bomb Iran back to the stone age. Apparently, they are trying to bomb the US and its allies back to the dial-up age.
AMERICAN SCIENTISTS VANISHING IN THE SOUTHWEST. ONE EX-FED HAS A THEORY: Over the past ten months, four people with ties to U.S. nuclear and aerospace programs have vanished without a trace in the American Southwest — among them a retired Air Force general and a NASA materials scientist. A former senior FBI official thinks foreign spies are behind it. Law enforcement, so far, does not appear to agree. Chris Swecker, former assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division, told the Daily Mail the disappearances look "extremely suspicious" and may represent a coordinated foreign intelligence operation targeting people with access to sensitive U.S. secrets. China is his top suspect. He'd also like to keep an eye on "some of our friends" — Pakistan and India among them. Worth noting: several researchers in related fields have also died during this period, but police have attributed two of those deaths to suspects acting alone with no established espionage motive, and a third shows no evidence of foul play. The deaths and the disappearances may have nothing to do with each other — and Swecker, now a private citizen, is drawing connections across cases he has no official access to. He may be right. He may also be pattern-matching. As far as we know, the FBI hasn't said a word either way.
"FOURTH WORLD NATION" SPY CHIEF MEETS WITH CIA AND FBI: According to a Somali newspaper, the head of Somalia's National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), Mahad Mohamed Salaad, was in Washington recently for high-level meetings with the CIA and FBI to strengthen intelligence cooperation and combat Al-Shabaab and ISIS. He also visited Fort Bragg, where he met with a senior U.S. Special Forces advisor who had previously served in Somalia. The timing was interesting. Just weeks earlier, President Trump described Somalia as "a third-world, maybe a fourth-world nation — one of the worst, one of the most dangerous." Intelligence relationships tend to outlast presidential rhetoric. But it's worth noting when the spy chief of a country the President has publicly written off is warmly received at Langley, the Hoover Building, and Fort Bragg in the same week. The professionals, apparently, have a different calculus.Got news to share? Drop us a note: Editor@thecipherbrief.comRead more expert-driven national security insights exclusively in www.thecipherbrief.com.
