A “SPECIAL (OPS)” OPENING PITCH — We have it on good authority that Saturday’s opening pitch at the Yankees vs. Red Sox game is being thrown by a Cipher Brief Expert with a lot of “special (ops)” experience. Spies tell us that this covert pitcher has been brushing up on his skills with some training sessions this week at an undisclosed location. Those same spies also tell us that the Yankees will be welcoming guests from the Special Operations Warrior Foundation to the game. SOWF provides education and other opportunities to the families of the fallen. In a covert debrief this week, we asked this pitcher-to-be who he’ll be cheering for at the game. “The Yankees, of course!”
OPEN HOUSE AT ODNI: President Trump has named Bill Pulte, homebuilding expert and Federal Housing Finance Agency chief (and the man who built a process for checking the work of President Trump’s political enemies’ by scrutinizing their mortgage paperwork) as acting Director of National Intelligence. Pulte, who will keep running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the side, brings no known intelligence experience to the job. The "acting" label spares him the Senate confirmation he'd otherwise need to oversee all of the U.S.’ 18 spy agencies.
OPEN QUESTIONS: Lots of questions have arisen since President Trump named Pulte as Acting DNI. For example, nothing in Pulte’s resume suggests any reason (or opportunity) for him to have obtained a security clearance in the past. Does he automatically get one now that he is the nominal head of the Intelligence Community? Does he have to take and pass a polygraph first? We're just wondering.
YOU'VE BEEN WARNED: Job offers straight from your LinkedIn DMs, sound too good to be true? That’s because they probably are. The U.S. and its Five Eyes partners recently issued a rare joint warning that China is using fake profiles and job offers on platforms like LinkedIn to target military, intelligence, and government personnel for sensitive information, not just here in the U.S., but in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well. Agencies said operatives are posing as recruiters, relying on professional-looking job postings and financial incentives to lure people in. Now, this isn’t exactly a new tactic, there have been reports from the U.S. Government that this has been happening for years. But the warning from the Five Eyes partners highlights the growing concern over Beijing’s ability to use technology to scale its espionage efforts.
NO PRESS IN THE PRESS OFFICE: It’s not really a secret that this Pentagon doesn’t find much use for members of the press, even though the Secretary of Defense used to be one of them. In an exclusive, the Washington Post now reports that the Pentagon is barring members of the press from the press office. (We had to read that twice, too.) Traditionally, reporters have dropped by the office to ask questions - but not anymore. The official reason for the ban: speechwriters have moved into the space, and they access classified material, so no one without a security clearance can be there. So the message we’re taking away if, “If you want answers: go somewhere else”.
THE BUTCHER’S BILL: In her first public speech, delivered May 27 at Bletchley Park, GCHQ's new director Anne Keast-Butler assigned a number to Russia's war dead: nearly 500,000 of its soldiers killed since 2022. That figure is hard to confirm but BBC News says their organization has verified more than 223,000 names. Given that both sides closely guard their own casualty counts there are undoubtedly many more, perhaps as many as GCHQ cites. To put that stunning half million number into perspective, the United States has 2.4 times Russia's population. So, it would be like the U.S. losing 1.2 million military personnel over the same period. That is roughly equivalent to America's combined losses in the Civil War, the Second World War, and Vietnam. There are currently only 1.35 million personnel on active duty in the U.S. military. Keast-Butler's verdict on the man running up this tab: "Putin is going backwards on the battlefield."
WHY SPY IF YOU CAN JUST BUY? It’s no doubt a much faster (albeit less sexy) answer to the age of 007: why invest in training and deploying spies when you can just buy the information you need? According to a report in WIRED (has a paywall but totally worth it), CENTCOM says it has seen multiple reports that adversaries are exploiting commercial location data to surveil- or potentially target - U.S. personnel in theater. Seriously. While the reporting indicates that there has not been confirmation of successful strikes against U.S. troops that are tied to the data that’s for sale, it is the first time a combatant command has publicly acknowledged the threat exists in those terms, which is kind of a big deal because it’s been talked about – and pointed out as a vulnerability – for close to a decade. And it turns out, the data itself was never even all that hard to get. Researchers, reporters, and basically anyone with a halfway decent cover story have been able to buy sensitive information about service members including their locations, movements, even personal details, for what would feel like pocket change to the CIA or MI6. The fix? Not exactly brain surgery: turn off location sharing, limit trackers, stop sharing data on everyday apps. How’s that for starters?
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