DID WE MISS IT? The New York Post reported on June 14th that Kushal Kumar, an Indian astrologer who has been called the “New Nostratdamus,” was predicting that World War III would likely start four days hence. The good news (unless we missed it) is that those days have passed. In fairness to Kumar…he didn’t guarantee World War III…he just said this past Tuesday, had “the strongest planetary stimulus to trigger WW3.” If you have FOMA (Fear of Missing Armageddon) not to worry - Kumar covered his bets by adding that if global war didn’t break out on June 17th – then June 29th was another propitious possible date with doom.
TALL STORIES? It is well known that former President Trump has long been concerned by reports of aliens invading the United States. We thought he was talking about the immigrant kind without U.S. citizenship. Now, we hear from Salon that Trump recently did an interview with podcaster Logan Paul where the subject of UFOs (or UAPs – meaning unidentified aerial phenomena - as the Pentagon likes to call them these days) came up. The former president was asked what he learned about UFOs while in office. Trump told the podcaster: “I met with pilots, like beautiful Tom Cruise but taller. Handsome, perfect people,” he said. And these pilots said: “Sir, there was something there that was round in form and going, like, four times faster than my super jet fighter plane.” Trump said that personally, he didn’t particularly believe in UFO stories based on what he heard but said that perhaps “the deep state” was hiding stuff from him.
INTELLIGENCE BARGAIN: The United States and its allies spend billions of dollars trying to collect intelligence on potential adversaries like China. The South China Morning Post recently reported on one way to obtain secrets on the cheap. The Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) revealed that a man went to a recycling station and bought four books – which turned out to contain classified information. The volumes were apparently sold by military personnel who ignored classification rules. The buyer, a man named Zhang, bought the four books for six yuan (about $0.63.) He said he noticed that portions of the books were labeled “confidential” and “secret,” so he turned them over to authorities. The MSS later learned that two members of a military unit had “sold more than 200 classified items weighing over 30kg (66lbs) for about 20 yuan.”
NCI-EXCESS: As we have kvetched about before, we have given up trying to keep track of how many television series are part of the NCIS franchise now. The original debuted in 2003 and is scheduled to launch season 22 this fall. And there was/is also NCIS: Los Angeles, NCIS: New Orleans, NCIS: Hawaii and NCIS: Sydney. We understand if you add up all the various episodes – the number would reach 1,000. Really. We are confident that the TV series solved more crimes than the actual Naval Criminal Investigative Service. And now we hear there are two additional clone series in the works – because you can’t have too many NCIS shows, right? One new show NCIS: Origins, will go back in time to 1991, and focus on younger versions of some of the characters in the other series. In fact – it goes back so far that the nautical crime busters weren’t even called NCIS…but rather “NIS.” The C (for Criminal) wasn’t added in the real organization’s name until 1992. The other new entry is NCIS: Tony & Ziva. Apparently the NCIS production machine has run out of geographic locations to mention in the titles.
JUST IN, FROM TUSTIN: One debating point in the ongoing presidential election is whether crime is out of control in the U.S. Well, here’s a data point. A U.S. Secret Service member who apparently had been working to help protect Presidents Biden and Obama at a Hollywood fundraiser last weekend was returning to Tustin, California when he was robbed at gunpoint. Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesperson, said that the perps stole the Secret Service member’s bag (unclear if it was his luggage or something else) and that the service member “discharged their service weapon during the incident” but it was unclear if the suspect was hit. Tustin police later recovered some of the Secret Service person’s belongings but there are no reports, at the moment, about capturing the thief or thieves. Note: the USSS was kind of fuzzy about what their employee was doing there – and we see that they referred to them as “a member” not an “agent” so we adopted similarly fuzzy language in recounting the incident. If the victim was a member of the USSS uniformed division (rather than an “agent” the armed robbers may have been especially brazen (or dumb.) The crime has not been solved yet. Hey, here’s an idea: maybe they should get NCIS Tustin on the case.
IMITATION – NOT ALWAYS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: On June 10, Harvard professor Graham Allison and former CIA acting director Michael Morell published a column in Foreign Affairs titled: “The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again.” The piece talked about how warnings by CIA Director George Tenet of possible future terrorist attacks often went unheeded prior to 9/11 – and that current FBI Director Christopher Wray is raising similar alarms today. The Allison/Morell article seems to have made an impression. We say this because a day after the Foreign Affairs column appeared, the website SOFREP.COM published a similar piece. And by “similar” we mean nearly cloned. For example, the lead of the Foreign Affairs piece read: “From his confirmation hearing to become director of Central Intelligence in May 1997 until September 11, 2001, George Tenet was sounding an alarm about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.” The SOFREP story, on the other hand, started: “From the time George Tenet became the director of the CIA in May 1997 until the attacks on September 11, 2001, he persistently raised alarms about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.” SOREP repeated the first five paragraphs or so of the Foreign Affairs piece – slightly rearranging the words from time to time but mirroring it very closely. The copying and pasting must have been tiring, since SOFREP ended their piece after about 500 words, just a fraction of the original. SOFREP didn't not cite the source of their piece - nor credit Allison and Morell but originally portrayed their piece as “expert analysis”. We reached out to SOFREP to ask about the apparent replication — and they acknowledged reading the Foreign Affairs piece and expressed regret for copying it so closely. (Subsequently, SOFREP rearranged some more words and even altered a quote that Tenet gave to Congress in testimony two decades ago.) Still, we’re far more spun up about the threat of potential terror on U.S. soil than we are about hijacked opinion pieces. Almost immediately after the publication of the Foreign Affairs piece on June 10th, other media outlets reported that the U.S. had arrested 8 men in the U.S. over suspected ISIS ties.
POCKET LITTER: Dead Droplets and bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
CLOSE SHAVE: Hardly a week goes by without someone coming up with a genius solution to a problem we didn’t know existed. The latest example comes from two former naval officers who have developed a device to help sailors get a better shave while afloat. It doesn’t eliminate the danger of holding a sharp object to your throat while the ship is being tossed about in heavy seas. But the gizmo, called the Razor Rinser, cleans out hairs caught between blades in the razor head using “90 to 99 percent less water” that you might otherwise need. Shipboard water pressure is known to be quite finicky. “Fifty guys to one sink, you can imagine the carnage that results,” one of the inventors, Matt Semple said. Frankly, we’d rather not imagine it.
WE’D RATHER NOT GET IN A LATHER EACH WEEK, EITHER. YOU CAN HELP BY SENDING GOSSIP TIPS TO US AT: TheDeadDrop@theCipherBrief.com
Read more serious expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
