# The Cipher Brief - Complete Content

> The Cipher Brief: complete content export for LLMs - 548 sections and the 100 most recent articles. Navigation index: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/llms.txt

**Site Overview:**
- Domain: https://www.thecipherbrief.com
- Total Sections: 548
- Recent Posts Included: 100
- Content Word Count: ~89450 words
- Last Updated: 2026-09-12
- Generated: September 12, 2026 10:42:36

**Important Information:**

- Site ID: 26883708
- Markdown version: append .md to any URL
- Total sections: 548

## Site Structure
- [Recommended Reads](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/editorial/recommended-reads/index.md): (40 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/editorial/recommended-reads; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/editorial/recommended-reads.rss)
- [Cyber](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/cyber/index.md): (14 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/cyber; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/cyber.rss)
- [Nuclear](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/nuclear/index.md): (207 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/nuclear; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/nuclear.rss)
- [Intelligence](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/intelligence/index.md): (441 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/intelligence; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/intelligence.rss)
- [International](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/international/index.md): (645 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/international; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/international.rss)
- [Middle East](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/index.md): (2843 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/middle-east.rss)
- [Iran](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/iran/index.md): (286 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/iran; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/middle-east/iran.rss)
- [Saudi Arabia](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/saudi-arabia/index.md): (63 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/saudi-arabia; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/middle-east/saudi-arabia.rss)
- [Israel](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/israel/index.md): (108 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/israel; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/middle-east/israel.rss)
- [Syria](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/syria/index.md): (62 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/syria; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/middle-east/syria.rss)
- [NATO](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/nato/index.md): (64 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/nato; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/nato.rss)
- [Iraq](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/iraq/index.md): (40 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/middle-east/iraq; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/middle-east/iraq.rss)
- [Terrorism](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/terrorism/index.md): (515 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/terrorism; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/terrorism.rss)
- [Espionage](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/espionage/index.md): (82 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/espionage; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/espionage.rss)
- [Economic](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/economic/index.md): (10 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/economic; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/economic.rss)
- [Cyber Initiatives Group](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/cyber-initiatives-group/index.md): (12 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/cyber-initiatives-group; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/cyber-initiatives-group.rss)
- [DoD](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dod/index.md): (157 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dod; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/dod.rss)
- [Disinformation](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/disinformation/index.md): (8 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/disinformation; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/disinformation.rss)
- [CIA](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/cia/index.md): (168 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/cia; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/cia.rss)
- [National Security](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/national-security/index.md): (595 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/national-security; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/national-security.rss)
- [Africa](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/africa/index.md): (491 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/africa; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/africa.rss)
- [North Africa](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/africa/north-africa/index.md): An Egyptian teenage boy waves an Egyptian flag in Tahrir Square at sunsetMore of my images from the Egyptian Revolution:|An Egyptian teenage boy waves an Egyptian flag in Tahrir Square at sunsetMore of my images from the Egyptian Revolution: (59 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/africa/north-africa; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/africa/north-africa.rss)
- [Europe](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe/index.md): (1871 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/europe.rss)
- [Russia](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe/russia/index.md): (554 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe/russia; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/europe/russia.rss)
- [Central and Eastern Europe](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe/central-and-eastern-europe/index.md): (321 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe/central-and-eastern-europe; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/europe/central-and-eastern-europe.rss)
- [Ukraine](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe/ukraine/index.md): (323 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe/ukraine; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/europe/ukraine.rss)
- [Asia](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/asia/index.md): (2193 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/asia; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/asia.rss)
- [North Korea](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/asia/north-korea/index.md): (133 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/asia/north-korea; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/asia/north-korea.rss)
- [China](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/asia/china/index.md): (383 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/asia/china; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/asia/china.rss)
- [Afghanistan](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/asia/afghanistan/index.md): (121 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/asia/afghanistan; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/asia/afghanistan.rss)
- [military](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/military/index.md): (148 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/military; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/military.rss)
- [Entertainment](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/entertainment/index.md): (193 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/entertainment; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/entertainment.rss)
- [Reporting](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/reporting/index.md): (4687 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/reporting; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/reporting.rss)
- [Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/best-of-enemies/index.md): By Gus Russo & Eric Dezenhall (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/best-of-enemies; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/best-of-enemies.rss)
- [Betrayal & Resilience: My Story of the 1998 U.S. Embassy Bombings by Ambassador Prudence Bushnell](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/betrayal-resilience-my-story-of-the-1998-u-s-embassy-bombings-by-ambassador-prudence-bushnell/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/betrayal-resilience-my-story-of-the-1998-u-s-embassy-bombings-by-ambassador-prudence-bushnell; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/betrayal-resilience-my-story-of-the-1998-u-s-embassy-bombings-by-ambassador-prudence-bushnell.rss)
- [The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben MacIntyre](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-spy-and-the-traitor-the-greatest-espionage-story-of-the-cold-war-by-ben-macintyre/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-spy-and-the-traitor-the-greatest-espionage-story-of-the-cold-war-by-ben-macintyre; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-spy-and-the-traitor-the-greatest-espionage-story-of-the-cold-war-by-ben-macintyre.rss)
- [The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy by Mark Urban](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-skripal-files-the-life-and-near-death-of-a-russian-spy-by-mark-urban/index.md): (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-skripal-files-the-life-and-near-death-of-a-russian-spy-by-mark-urban; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-skripal-files-the-life-and-near-death-of-a-russian-spy-by-mark-urban.rss)
- [Beirut Rules: The Murder of a CIA Station Chief and Hezbollah's War Against America by Fred Burton a](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/beirut-rules-the-murder-of-a-cia-station-chief-and-hezbollahs-war-against-america-by-fred-burton-and-samuel-m-katz/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/beirut-rules-the-murder-of-a-cia-station-chief-and-hezbollahs-war-against-america-by-fred-burton-and-samuel-m-katz; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/beirut-rules-the-murder-of-a-cia-station-chief-and-hezbollahs-war-against-america-by-fred-burton-and-samuel-m-katz.rss)
- [Mike4](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/mike4/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/mike4; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/mike4.rss)
- [The Spy Who Was Left Behind: Russia, the United States, and the True Story of the Betrayal and Assas](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-spy-who-was-left-behind-russia-the-united-states-and-the-true-story-of-the-betrayal-and-assassination-of-a-cia-agent-by-michael-pullara/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-spy-who-was-left-behind-russia-the-united-states-and-the-true-story-of-the-betrayal-and-assassination-of-a-cia-agent-by-michael-pullara; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-spy-who-was-left-behind-russia-the-united-states-and-the-true-story-of-the-betrayal-and-assassination-of-a-cia-agent-by-michael-pullara.rss)
- [red war](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/red-war/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/red-war; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/red-war.rss)
- [Dawn of the Code War](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/dawn-of-the-code-war/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/dawn-of-the-code-war; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/dawn-of-the-code-war.rss)
- [The Enemy of My Enemy](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-enemy-of-my-enemy/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-enemy-of-my-enemy; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-enemy-of-my-enemy.rss)
- [Spy Pilot](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/spy-pilot/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/spy-pilot; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/spy-pilot.rss)
- [Strategic Warning Intelligence](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/strategic-warning-intelligence/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/strategic-warning-intelligence; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/strategic-warning-intelligence.rss)
- [Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called "Alien"](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/breaking-and-entering-the-extraordinary-story-of-a-hacker-called-alien/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/breaking-and-entering-the-extraordinary-story-of-a-hacker-called-alien; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/breaking-and-entering-the-extraordinary-story-of-a-hacker-called-alien.rss)
- [Putin’s World](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/putins-world/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/putins-world; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/putins-world.rss)
- [Code Name Lise](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/code-name-lise/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/code-name-lise; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/code-name-lise.rss)
- [How We Win](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/how-we-win/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/how-we-win; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/how-we-win.rss)
- [The Killer Collective](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-killer-collective/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-killer-collective; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-killer-collective.rss)
- [The Back Channel](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-back-channel/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-back-channel; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-back-channel.rss)
- [One Nation Under Drones](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/one-nation-under-drones/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/one-nation-under-drones; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/one-nation-under-drones.rss)
- [To Catch A Spy](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/to-catch-a-spy/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/to-catch-a-spy; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/to-catch-a-spy.rss)
- [The Moscow Rules](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-moscow-rules/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-moscow-rules; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-moscow-rules.rss)
- [Leading Intelligence Analysis](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/leading-intelligence-analysis/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/leading-intelligence-analysis; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/leading-intelligence-analysis.rss)
- [Bytes, Bombs, and Spies](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/bytes-bombs-and-spies/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/bytes-bombs-and-spies; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/bytes-bombs-and-spies.rss)
- [The Protected](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-protected/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-protected; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-protected.rss)
- [The Targeter](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-targeted/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-targeted; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-targeted.rss)
- [Surprise Kill Vanish](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/surprisekillvanish/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/surprisekillvanish; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/surprisekillvanish.rss)
- [Victor in the Jungle](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/victor-in-the-jungle/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/victor-in-the-jungle; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/victor-in-the-jungle.rss)
- [The New Girl](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-new-girl/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-new-girl; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-new-girl.rss)
- [The Spy in Moscow Station](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-spy-in-moscow-station/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-spy-in-moscow-station; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-spy-in-moscow-station.rss)
- [Rules of Engagement](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/rules-of-engagement/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/rules-of-engagement; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/rules-of-engagement.rss)
- [Bossert](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/bossert/index.md): (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/bossert; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/bossert.rss)
- [Madame Fourcade’s Secret War](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/madame-fourcades-secret-war/index.md): Madame Fourcade’s Secret War (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/madame-fourcades-secret-war; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/madame-fourcades-secret-war.rss)
- [Inside The Five-Sided Box](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/inside-the-five-sided-box/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/inside-the-five-sided-box; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/inside-the-five-sided-box.rss)
- [Guardian: Life in the Crosshairs of the CIA's War on Terror](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/guardian/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/guardian; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/guardian.rss)
- [Public Diplomacy](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/public-diplomacy/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/public-diplomacy; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/public-diplomacy.rss)
- [The Killing In The Consulate](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-killing-in-the-consulate/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-killing-in-the-consulate; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-killing-in-the-consulate.rss)
- [Empty Hearts](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/empty-hearts/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/empty-hearts; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/empty-hearts.rss)
- [The Compatriots](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-compatriots/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-compatriots; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-compatriots.rss)
- [Sailing True North](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/sailing-true-north/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/sailing-true-north; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/sailing-true-north.rss)
- [Black Site Book](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/black-site-book/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/black-site-book; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/black-site-book.rss)
- [Life Undercover](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/life-undercover/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/life-undercover; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/life-undercover.rss)
- [Agent Running In The Field](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/agent-running-in-the-field/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/agent-running-in-the-field; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/agent-running-in-the-field.rss)
- [Hunting The Caliphate](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/hunting-the-caliphate/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/hunting-the-caliphate; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/hunting-the-caliphate.rss)
- [The Spy](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-spy/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-spy; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-spy.rss)
- [The Man Who Solved The Market](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-man-who-solved-the-market/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-man-who-solved-the-market; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-man-who-solved-the-market.rss)
- [The Nuclear Spies](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-nuclear-spies/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-nuclear-spies; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-nuclear-spies.rss)
- [The Russia Trap](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-russia-trap/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-russia-trap; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-russia-trap.rss)
- [When Reagan Sent In The Marines](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/when-reagan-sent-in-the-marines/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/when-reagan-sent-in-the-marines; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/when-reagan-sent-in-the-marines.rss)
- [Agents of Influence](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/agents-of-influence/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/agents-of-influence; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/agents-of-influence.rss)
- [Russians Among Us](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/russians-among-us/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/russians-among-us; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/russians-among-us.rss)
- [Spy Sites of New York City](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/spy-sites-of-new-york-city/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/spy-sites-of-new-york-city; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/spy-sites-of-new-york-city.rss)
- [Secrets and Spies](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/secrets-and-spies/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/secrets-and-spies; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/secrets-and-spies.rss)
- [The Hacker and The State](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-hacker-and-the-state/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-hacker-and-the-state; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-hacker-and-the-state.rss)
- [The Ambassadors](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-ambassadors/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/the-ambassadors; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/the-ambassadors.rss)
- [Putin's People](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/putins-people/index.md): (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/putins-people; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/putins-people.rss)
- [China's Western Horizon](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/chinas-western-horizon/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/chinas-western-horizon; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/chinas-western-horizon.rss)
- [Burn In](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/burn-in/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/books/burn-in; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/books/burn-in.rss)
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- [Column: State Secrets](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/state-secrets/index.md): (13 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/state-secrets; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/state-secrets.rss)
- [Economic Tradecraft](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/economic-tradecraft/index.md): (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/economic-tradecraft; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/economic-tradecraft.rss)
- [Strategic View](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/strategic-view/index.md): The Cipher Brief`s expert contributors offer their views on the long-term, strategic issues facing security and business today to help identify and discuss risks and opportunities emerging from global events. (93 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/strategic-view; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/strategic-view.rss)
- [Cipher Expert Quick Take](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/cipher-expert-quick-take/index.md): (21 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/cipher-expert-quick-take; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/cipher-expert-quick-take.rss)
- [Expert View](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/expert-view/index.md): Our Network of Experts leverages extensive experience in government and business to explain key security issues around the globe. (262 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/expert-view; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/expert-view.rss)
- [Giving Back](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/giving-back/index.md): (6 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/giving-back; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/giving-back.rss)
- [Analysis](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/analysis/index.md): (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/analysis; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/analysis.rss)
- [Sponsored Content](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/sponsored-content/index.md): (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/sponsored-content; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/sponsored-content.rss)
- [Cipher Brief Expert View](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/cipher-brief-expert-view/index.md): (331 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/cipher-brief-expert-view; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/cipher-brief-expert-view.rss)
- [Moscow Station](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/moscow-station/index.md): (14 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/moscow-station; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/moscow-station.rss)
- [Innovation in Intelligence](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/innovation-in-intelligence/index.md): (3 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/innovation-in-intelligence; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/innovation-in-intelligence.rss)
- [News Update](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/news-update/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/news-update; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/news-update.rss)
- [Quick Take](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/quick-take/index.md): (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/quick-take; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/quick-take.rss)
- [The Homeland](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/the-homeland/index.md): (20 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/the-homeland; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/the-homeland.rss)
- [UnderCover](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/under-cover/index.md): (30 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/under-cover; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/under-cover.rss)
- [Academic Innovator](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/academic-innovator/index.md): (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/academic-innovator; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/academic-innovator.rss)
- [Cipher Select](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/cipher-select/index.md): (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/cipher-select; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/cipher-select.rss)
- [Soufan Center](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/soufan-center/index.md): (403 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/soufan-center; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/soufan-center.rss)
- [Syria Special Report](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/syria-special-report/index.md): (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/syria-special-report; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/syria-special-report.rss)
- [Academic Incubator](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/academic-incubator/index.md): (41 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/academic-incubator; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/academic-incubator.rss)
- [Cyber Initiator](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/cyber-initiator/index.md): (25 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/cyber-initiator; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/cyber-initiator.rss)
- [Pre-Conference Brief](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/pre-conference-brief/index.md): (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/pre-conference-brief; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/pre-conference-brief.rss)
- [Snapshots from the Hill](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/snapshots-from-the-hill/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/snapshots-from-the-hill; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/snapshots-from-the-hill.rss)
- [Profile](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/profile/index.md): (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/profile; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/profile.rss)
- [Trusted Source](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/trusted-source/index.md): Dark sky over the United States Capitol building in Washington DC. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/trusted-source; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/trusted-source.rss)
- [Behind the Headlines](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/behind-the-headlines/index.md): (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/behind-the-headlines; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/behind-the-headlines.rss)
- [The Listening Post](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/the-listening-post/index.md): (8 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/the-listening-post; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/the-listening-post.rss)
- [Perspectives on Disinformation](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/perspectives-on-disinformation/index.md): (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/perspectives-on-disinformation; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/perspectives-on-disinformation.rss)
- [Chalk Marks](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/chalk-marks/index.md): (8 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/chalk-marks; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/chalk-marks.rss)
- [From the C-Suite](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/from-the-c-suite/index.md): (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/from-the-c-suite; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/from-the-c-suite.rss)
- [Dead Drop National Security Gossip](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/dead-drop-national-security-gossip/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/columns/dead-drop-national-security-gossip; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/columns/dead-drop-national-security-gossip.rss)
- [Gilman Louie](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gilman-louie/index.md): Gilman Louie is Co-Founder & Managing Partner at America’s Frontier Fund, serves as Chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, and former CEO of In-Q-Tel. (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gilman-louie; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/gilman-louie.rss)
- [Emile Nakhleh](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/emile-nakhleh/index.md): Dr. Emile Nakhleh is a retired Senior Intelligence Service Officer, a founding director of the CIA's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program and the Global and the National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Since retiring from the government, Nakhleh has consulted on national security issues, particularly Islamic radicalization, terrorism, and the Arab states of the Middle East. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. (76 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/emile-nakhleh; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/emile-nakhleh.rss)
- [Bruce Hoffman](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/bruce-hoffman/index.md): Bruce Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University and co-author of Gods, Guns, and Sedition: Far Right Terrorism in America. He served on the Independent Commission to Review the FBI’s Post-9/11 Response to Terrorism and Radicalization, and is a Scholar-in-Residence for Counterterrorism at the CIA. He serves as a senior fellow for Counterterrorism & Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations and is President & CEO of The Hoffman Group. (19 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/bruce-hoffman; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/bruce-hoffman.rss)
- [Walter Pincus](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/walter-pincus/index.md): Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010. He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978. (506 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/walter-pincus; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/walter-pincus.rss)
- [Nick Fishwick](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/nick-fishwick/index.md): Nick Fishwick CMG retired after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. His postings included Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, he served as director for counter-terrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations. (32 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/nick-fishwick; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/nick-fishwick.rss)
- [Michael Vickers](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/michael-vickers/index.md): Dr. Michael Vickers served as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence from 2011 to 2015 and as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict, and Interdependent Capabilities from 2007 to 2011. Earlier in his career, he served as an operations officer with the CIA and as a U.S. Army Special Forces officer and operator. Mike is best known as the mastermind of the covert action program that defeated the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and helped bring an end to the Cold War. His exploits against the Soviets in Afghanistan were featured in the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War. More recently, he played central roles in our campaigns to dismantle and defeat al-Qa’ida and in the operation that killed Usama Bin Ladin. He is the recipient of the presidential national security medal, our nation’s highest award in intelligence. His memoir, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, (6 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/michael-vickers; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/michael-vickers.rss)
- [Ambassador Joseph DeTrani](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/joseph-detrani/index.md): Ambassador Joseph DeTrani served as the U.S. Representative to the Korea Energy Development Organization (KEDO), as well as former CIA director of East Asia Operations. He also served as Associate Director of National Intelligence and Mission Manager for North Korea, was the Special Envoy for the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, and served as the Director of the National Counter Proliferation Center, ODNI. He currently serves on the Board of Managers at Sandia National Laboratories. (177 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/joseph-detrani; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/joseph-detrani.rss)
- [Alex Vatanka](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/alex-vatanka/index.md): Alex Vatanka is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute. He specializes in Middle Eastern regional security affairs with a particular focus on Iran. He was formerly a Senior Analyst at Jane’s Information Group in London. Alex is also a Senior Fellow in Middle East Studies at the US Air Force Special Operations School (USAFSOS) at Hurlburt Field and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at DISAS at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/alex-vatanka; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/alex-vatanka.rss)
- [Admiral Robert J. Papp, Jr., USCG (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/admiral-robert-j-papp-jr-uscg-ret/index.md): Admiral Robert J. Papp, Jr., USCG (Ret.) was the State Department's Special Representative for the Arctic from July of 2014 to January 2017. In that position, he led the effort to advance U.S. interests in the Arctic Region, with a focus on Arctic Ocean governance, climate change, economic, environmental, and security issues in the Arctic region, when the United States held the chairmanship of the Arctic Council from 2015-2017. Prior to his appointment, Admiral Papp served as the 24th Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, and led the largest component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As a flag officer, Admiral Papp served as Commander, Coast Guard Atlantic Area; as the Chief of Staff of the Coast Guard and Commanding Officer of Coast Guard Headquarters; as Commander, Ninth Coast Guard District; and as Director of Reserve and Training. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/admiral-robert-j-papp-jr-uscg-ret; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/admiral-robert-j-papp-jr-uscg-ret.rss)
- [Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/james-r-clapper/index.md): Lt. Gen. James Clapper served from 2010 – 2017 as the Director of National Intelligence. He served in two administrations as the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and directed the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), transforming it into the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/james-r-clapper; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/james-r-clapper.rss)
- [Jonathan Rotner](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jonathan-rotner/index.md): During his time at MITRE, Jonathan Rotner has focused on applying Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) Technology to Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) applications. His projects have ranged from smartphones, to 3D printing, to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), to mixing all 3, to swarms, to trying to stop the drones that we've created. He has worked on internal research programs and sponsor projects, strategy teams to technology development, and enjoys working with STEM in the community. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jonathan-rotner; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/jonathan-rotner.rss)
- [Hans Kristensen](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/hans-kristensen/index.md): Hans M. Kristensen is Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists where he provides the public with analysis and background information about the status of nuclear forces and the role of nuclear weapons. He specializes in using open sources and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in his research to increase transparency of nuclear arsenals and is a frequent consultant to and is widely referenced in the news media on the role and status of nuclear weapons. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/hans-kristensen; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/hans-kristensen.rss)
- [Thomas Karako](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/thomas-karako/index.md): Thomas Karako is the director of the Missile Defense Project and a senior fellow with the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he arrived in 2014. His research focuses on national security, missile defense, nuclear deterrence, and public law. In 2010–2011, he was an American Political Science Association congressional fellow, working with the professional staff of the House Armed Services Committee and the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces on U.S. strategic forces policy, nonproliferation, and NATO. (6 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/thomas-karako; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/thomas-karako.rss)
- [Ambassador Alexander Vershbow](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ambassador-alexander-vershbow/index.md): Ambassador Alexander "Sandy" Vershbow is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. Vershbow was the deputy secretary general of NATO from February 2012 to October 2016. Prior to that, he served for three years as the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. He previously served as U.S. ambassador to NATO (1998-2001), the Russian Federation (2001-05), and the Republic of Korea (2005-08). (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ambassador-alexander-vershbow; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ambassador-alexander-vershbow.rss)
- [Jonathan Hillman](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jonathan-hillman/index.md): Jonathan E. Hillman is senior fellow for geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His expertise spans economic and security issues, including investment, trade, infrastructure, and technology. He is the author of The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future and The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jonathan-hillman; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/jonathan-hillman.rss)
- [David Daoud](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/david-daoud/index.md): David Daoud is a senior fellow at FDD focused on Lebanon and Hezbollah. He previously worked as a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, director of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria research at United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and a research analyst at FDD. David also has experience working as a staff member on Capitol Hill providing analysis on matters related to the Middle East, Israel, and Iran. David holds a JD with a concentration in International Law and the Laws of Armed Conflict from Suffolk University in Boston. He is fluent in Arabic and Hebrew and has spent extensive time living in the Middle East. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/david-daoud; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/david-daoud.rss)
- [Admiral Robert J. Papp](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/admiral-robert-j-papp/index.md): Admiral Robert J. Papp, Jr., USCG (Ret.) was the State Department's Special Representative for the Arctic from July of 2014 to January 2017. In that position, he led the effort to advance U.S. interests in the Arctic Region, with a focus on Arctic Ocean governance, climate change, economic, environmental, and security issues in the Arctic region, when the United States held the chairmanship of the Arctic Council from 2015-2017. Prior to his appointment, Admiral Papp served as the 24th Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, and led the largest component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As a flag officer, Admiral Papp served as Commander, Coast Guard Atlantic Area; as the Chief of Staff of the Coast Guard and Commanding Officer of Coast Guard Headquarters; as Commander, Ninth Coast Guard District; and as Director of Reserve and Training. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/admiral-robert-j-papp; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/admiral-robert-j-papp.rss)
- [Daniel Hoffman](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/daniel-hoffman/index.md): Hoffman served as a three-time station chief and a senior executive clandestine service officer with assignments included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union, Europe, and war zones in the Middle East and South Asia. Hoffman also served as director of the CIA's Middle East and North Africa Division. He is currently a national security analyst with Fox News. (51 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/daniel-hoffman; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/daniel-hoffman.rss)
- [Mark-Roger De Souza](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mark-roger-de-souza/index.md): (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mark-roger-de-souza; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/mark-roger-de-souza.rss)
- [Bob Griffin](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/bob-griffin/index.md): Robert Griffin is currently the Managing Partner for DVI Equity Partners a Private Equity Investment arm of Diamond Ventures. As the Managing Partner he focuses on technology investments that are concentrated on delivering disruptive or disintermediating technology in areas of National Security, Law Enforcement, critical infrastructure, and emerging trends. Mr. Griffin has been a key player and successful serial entrepreneur in the Software and Services industry for more than 40 years. In Oct. of 2011 he facilitated the sale of his company, i2, to IBM into their Industry Solutions, Software Product Group, where he remained as the General Manager for the Safer Planet and Smarter Cities brand until February of 2017. Mr. Griffin had the global leadership responsibility for solutions that address the Intelligence and Law Enforcement Industries, for the development and deployment of Counter Fraud and Financial Crimes solutions and for solutions that make cities more resilient and sustainable (Smarter Cities). Mr (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/bob-griffin; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/bob-griffin.rss)
- [Ali Soufan](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ali-soufan/index.md): Ali Soufan is a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent who investigated and supervised highly sensitive and complex international terrorism cases, including the East Africa Embassy Bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, and the events surrounding 9/11. Mr. Soufan also serves as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ali-soufan; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ali-soufan.rss)
- [Alex Finley](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/alex-finley/index.md): Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She has experience working with foreign liaison and military partners, and received an award for her outstanding contributions to the counterterrorism mission. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Alex currently works as an adjunct professor, teaching about terrorism and disinformation / covert influence. (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/alex-finley; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/alex-finley.rss)
- [Tim Willasey-Wilsey](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/tim-willasey-wilsey/index.md): Tim Willasey-Wilsey served for over 27 years in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and is now Visiting Professor of War Studies at King's College, London. His book “The Spy and the Devil” will be published in the UK on 8th May and in the U.S. on 16th September. His first overseas posting was in Angola during the Cold War followed by Central America during the instability of the late 1980s. His final years were focused mostly on South Asia. (61 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/tim-willasey-wilsey; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/tim-willasey-wilsey.rss)
- [Andy Weber](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/andy-weber/index.md): Weber also served as an advisor in the Pentagon on Threat Reduction Policy and serving a foreign service officer in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong. Weber now serves on the Board of the Arms Control Association and the James Martin Center for Non-proliferation Studies International Advisory Council. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/andy-weber; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/andy-weber.rss)
- [William Courtney](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/william-courtney/index.md): William Courtney is a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia. He is an adjunct senior fellow at RAND and professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/william-courtney; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/william-courtney.rss)
- [General David Petraeus (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gen-david-petraeus/index.md): General David Petraeus served more than 37 years in the U.S. military with six consecutive commands, five of which were combat, including command of the Multi-National Force-Iraq during the Surge, U.S. Central Command, and Coalition and U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. He is a partner in the KKR global investment firm and chairs the firm’s global institute. (8 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gen-david-petraeus; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/gen-david-petraeus.rss)
- [Sebastian J. Bae](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/sebastian-j-bae/index.md): Sebastian J. Bae, a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation. He specializes in defense wargaming, emerging technologies, counterinsurgency, and strategy and doctrine for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Previously, he served six years in the Marine Corps infantry, leaving as a Sergeant. He deployed to Iraq in 2009. He has previously published in Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, Strategy Bridge, Task & Purpose, the Diplomat, and Georgetown Security Studies Review. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/sebastian-j-bae; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/sebastian-j-bae.rss)
- [Benjamin Powell](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/benjamin-powell/index.md): Benjamin Powell co-chairs the cybersecurity and privacy practice and artificial intelligence practice and is a partner at WilmerHale. Mr. Powell served as General Counsel to the first three Directors of National Intelligence, Special Assistant to the President and associate White House Counsel, Air Force officer, work at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, corporate counsel at a software company in Silicon Valley, and part of the trial team that obtained the largest antitrust jury verdict in US history. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/benjamin-powell; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/benjamin-powell.rss)
- [Cipher Brief Experts](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/cipher-brief-experts/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/cipher-brief-experts; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/cipher-brief-experts.rss)
- [Intel Brief](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/intel-brief/index.md): (402 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/intel-brief; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/intel-brief.rss)
- [Paul R. Pillar](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/paul-r-pillar/index.md): Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community. His senior positions included National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, Deputy Chief of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and Executive Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/paul-r-pillar; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/paul-r-pillar.rss)
- [Rob Joyce](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/rob-joyce/index.md): Rob served 34 years at the NSA, where he spent his final years as the head of the Agency’s cybersecurity directorate. He also served on the White House National Security Council as a Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator, as well as Acting Homeland Security Advisor. Throughout his career, he led operations pursuing the most sophisticated hackers and innovated technologies to protect vital national assets — including the the US classified networks and nuclear authorization codes. He remains dedicated to upholding our national security in the cyber realm. (3 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/rob-joyce; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/rob-joyce.rss)
- [Gen. Keith Alexander (Ret.) and Jamil Jaffer](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gen-keith-alexander-ret-and-jamil-jaffer/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gen-keith-alexander-ret-and-jamil-jaffer; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/gen-keith-alexander-ret-and-jamil-jaffer.rss)
- [Calder Walton](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/calder-walton/index.md): Calder Walton is Director of Research for the Intelligence Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is the author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. He is an advisor to the strategic intelligence company, Strider Technologies. (9 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/calder-walton; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/calder-walton.rss)
- [Christopher Costa](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/christopher-costa/index.md): Christopher P. Costa is the Executive Director, International Spy Museum, and an adjunct associate professor with Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, Walsh School of Foreign Service. He was special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018. (6 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/christopher-costa; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/christopher-costa.rss)
- [Martin Petersen](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/martin-petersen/index.md): Martin Petersen spent 33 years with the CIA, retiring in February 2005 as Deputy Executive Director and Acting Executive Director. In the course of his agency career, he ran two large analytic units (The Office of East Asian Analysis and the Office of Asian Pacific Latin America Analysis) before becoming Associate Deputy Director of Intelligence for Strategic Plans and Programs, the first Chief Human Resources Officer for CIA, and Deputy Executive Director. He is the author of City of Lost Souls, A Novel of Shanghai 1932. (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/martin-petersen; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/martin-petersen.rss)
- [Ellen McCarthy](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ellen-mccarthy/index.md): Ellen McCarthy is Chairwoman and CEO of the Trust in Media Cooperative. She has over three decades of national security service in a variety of leadership roles that span numerous intelligence organizations, most recently serving as the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. She’s currently a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University. (6 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ellen-mccarthy; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ellen-mccarthy.rss)
- [Chris Savos](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/chris-savos/index.md): Savos served for 22 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he earned the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. He ran analytical units following the Middle East and South and East Asia. Savos was also Deputy Director of the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center; served on the National Intelligence Council; and spent several years in the Directorate of Operations. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/chris-savos; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/chris-savos.rss)
- [Stephanie Bellistri](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/stephanie-bellistri/index.md): Stephanie Bellistri served as Deputy Chief of Operations in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and as Deputy Chief of WMD Counterterrorism and Chief of Interagency Relations on the Afghan Task Force. She also served as CIA Liaison to US Atlantic Command, Special Assistant to the Associate Deputy Director for Counterintelligence and Chief of Iran Branch in CIA’s Counterproliferation Division. She is a partner at New North Ventures. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/stephanie-bellistri; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/stephanie-bellistri.rss)
- [Alec Bierbauer](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/alec-bierbauer/index.md): Alec Bierbauer is the CEO of Blackrock Strategy LLC and co-author of “Never Mind, We’ll Do It Ourselves, The inside Story of How a Team of Renegades Broke Rules, Shattered Barriers, and Launched a Drone Warfare Revolution.” During his government service, Alec served on active duty in the US Army, and then as a government civilian at DIA and the Pentagon before finishing his government career in the Directorate of Operations at the CIA as a Case Officer. While at CIA, Alec served as the Program Manager for the design, build and implementation of the armed predator program. Alec’s other assignments include serving in multiple war and conflict zone assignments. Alec’s post-government service at Blackrock Strategy LLC focuses on helping select corporations and non-governmental organizations mitigate risk in dynamically changing environments. These activities include threat/vulnerability assessments, market entry due diligence, liaison and cooperative efforts with foreign governments to mitigating corporate risks (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/alec-bierbauer; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/alec-bierbauer.rss)
- [Brad Christian](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/brad-christian/index.md): Brad Christian is COO and Executive Editor of The Cipher Brief's Open Source Report. Follow him on LinkedIn. (11 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/brad-christian; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/brad-christian.rss)
- [Matt Scott](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/matt-scott/index.md): Matt Scott, an Army intelligence veteran, is the president of Apira Federal, a national security AI innovator. He has built and led several private sector companies specializing in technology adoption in the IC, and is a trustee of the Intelligence and National Security Foundation. (3 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/matt-scott; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/matt-scott.rss)
- [Rob Bassett Cross](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/rob-bassett-cross/index.md): Robert Bassett Cross MC is the CEO and founder of Adarga, one of the UK’s leading developers of artificial intelligence software, serving customers in National Security and Defence. Robert has applied his experience as a former British Army officer, leading teams on counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world, to build an intelligent platform that allows users to analyze vast amounts of disparate, complex data at speed to discover the deep and mission-critical insights that drive faster and better decisions. After leaving the British Army, Rob joined J.P. Morgan as an investment banker in the corporate finance group where he advised international corporate customers from a number of sectors across the spectrum of corporate finance advisory, mergers and acquisitions, and offerings roles. Rob graduated with a degree in law (LLB (Hons)) from Exeter University. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/rob-bassett-cross; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/rob-bassett-cross.rss)
- [Beth Sanner](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/beth-e-sanner/index.md): Beth Sanner served in the U.S. Intelligence Community for 35 years holding senior roles at ODNI and CIA. She was former Deputy Director for National Intelligence at ODNI, and served as daily briefer to the president during the Trump Administration. (13 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/beth-e-sanner; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/beth-e-sanner.rss)
- [Emily Harding](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/emily-harding/index.md): Emily Harding is Vice President of the Defense and Security Department and Director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology (INT) Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She joined CSIS from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), where she was deputy staff director. (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/emily-harding; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/emily-harding.rss)
- [Tess Newton Cain](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/tess-newton-cain/index.md): (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/tess-newton-cain; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/tess-newton-cain.rss)
- [Liesl Jordan](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/liesl-jordan/index.md): Liesl Jordan has had a 27-year career spanning national security, multilateral organisations, and the private sector. Her career has been characterised by international postings, including with the United Nations Development Programme in New Delhi and with the Australian High Commission in London, where she collaborated with UK intelligence heads and Five Eyes partners to coordinate security threat responses. Currently, Liesl serves as the CEO of Connect2Effect, a Canberra-based firm that assists UK and US companies in entering the Australian market. Additionally, she holds the position of senior Fellow with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and serves on the board of the National Spy Museum of Australia. (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/liesl-jordan; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/liesl-jordan.rss)
- [Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/rear-adm-ret-mark-montgomery/index.md): Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is a senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He directs CSC 2.0, which works to implement the recommendations of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Montgomery is a principal member of the Cyber Initiatives Group. (26 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/rear-adm-ret-mark-montgomery; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/rear-adm-ret-mark-montgomery.rss)
- [Anastasiia Carrier, Contributing Journalist](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/anastasiia-carrier-contributing-journalist/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/anastasiia-carrier-contributing-journalist; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/anastasiia-carrier-contributing-journalist.rss)
- [Linda Weissgold](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/linda-weissgold/index.md): Linda Weissgold spent 37-years at CIA. Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she was an analyst and leader of analytic programs focused on the Middle East. She served as head of the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis and helped to identify Usama Bin Laden’s location and the rise of ISIS. For more than two years, she served as President George W. Bush’s intelligence briefer. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/linda-weissgold; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/linda-weissgold.rss)
- [Ken Westbrook](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ken-westbrook/index.md): Ken Westbrook is the Founder and CEO of Stop Scams Alliance and a distinguished fellow at the Wilson Center. A 33-year veteran of the US Intelligence Community, he served at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). He subsequently held senior positions with two Fortune 500 software firms, co-invented a patented security technology, and created and taught a course in Information Management at Georgetown University. (3 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ken-westbrook; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ken-westbrook.rss)
- [Ralph Goff](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ralph-goff/index.md): Ralph Goff is a 35-year veteran of the CIA where he was a 6-time Chief of Station with extensive service in Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia including several war zones. He served as Chief of Operations for Europe and Eurasia. Goff also served as Chief of CIA's National Resources Division, working extensively with "C Suite" level US private sector executives in the financial, banking, and security sectors. (6 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ralph-goff; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ralph-goff.rss)
- [Chip Usher](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/chip-usher/index.md): William “Chip” Usher is the Senior Director for Intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project. Prior to SCSP, Chip served 32 years in the Central Intelligence Agency where he held a variety of executive positions. Chip is a former member of the Senior Intelligence Service and has expertise on East Asia, the Near East, and Eurasia. (10 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/chip-usher; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/chip-usher.rss)
- [Geoffrey Corn](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/geoff-corn/index.md): Geoffrey Corn is the George R. Killam, Jr. Chair of Criminal Law and Director of the Center for Military Law and Policy, Texas Tech University School of Law and a Distinguished Fellow with the Gemunder Center for Defense Strategy (part of the Jewish Institute for National Security in America). A retired U.S. Army Judge Advocate Officer, he served as the Army's senior law of war advisor. (12 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/geoff-corn; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/geoff-corn.rss)
- [Andrew Boyd](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/andrew-boyd/index.md): Andy Boyd was a Senior Intelligence Service officer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Operations (DO). His most recent assignment was Director of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) which is responsible for intelligence collection, analysis, and operations focused on foreign cyber threats to US interests. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/andrew-boyd; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/andrew-boyd.rss)
- [Andy Dunn](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/andy-dunn/index.md): Dunn retired from the CIA in 2021 after a 29-year career as an analyst and Agency leader. He last served as Deputy Assistant Director of the Near East Mission Center from 2020 to 2021 and as Chief of Analysis in the Iran Mission Center from 2018 to 2020. Previous assignments included the Counterterrorism Mission Center and two war zone tours. Dunn served as a commissioned officer in the US Army. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/andy-dunn; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/andy-dunn.rss)
- [Dave Pitts](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dave-pitts/index.md): Pitts is a senior national security executive, board member, and advisor. His background includes great power competition, global affairs, counterterrorism, and special operations. Pitts served as the Assistant Director of CIA for South and Central Asia, Chief of National Resources Division, senior leadership positions in the Counterterrorism Center, and led CIA’s two largest Field Stations. He is a co-founder of The Cipher Brief’s Gray Zone Group. (21 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dave-pitts; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/dave-pitts.rss)
- [Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mike Studeman](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mike-studeman/index.md): Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mike Studeman was former Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence. He also served as Director of the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO) and as principal advisor to the Director of National Intelligence as National Intelligence Manager-Maritime, as well as the Director of Intelligence (J2) at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Honolulu and Director of Intelligence (J2) at U.S. Southern Command, Miami (2017-2019.) (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mike-studeman; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/mike-studeman.rss)
- [Lucy Minicozzi-Wheeland](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lucy-minicozzi-wheeland/index.md): Lucy Minicozzi-Wheeland is an Eastern Europe and Caucasus specialist who recently earned her master's degree from Harvard. She previously worked as a Research Assistant and an Administrator at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Intelligence Project. She spent a year and a half living in Georgia as a Boren Fellow, Critical Language Scholar, and Invited Lecturer, and seven months living in Odesa, Ukraine, as a Fulbright Student Researcher. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lucy-minicozzi-wheeland; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/lucy-minicozzi-wheeland.rss)
- [Admiral Mike Rogers (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/admiral-mike-rogers-ret/index.md): Admiral Mike Rogers (Ret.) served as Director of the NSA, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. He also served as the Commander of the Tenth Fleet and Commander of the United States Fleet Cyber Command. He was also the director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/admiral-mike-rogers-ret; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/admiral-mike-rogers-ret.rss)
- [Philip Wasielewski](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/philip-wasielewski/index.md): Philip Wasielewski is the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare and a Senior Fellow in FPRI’s Eurasia Program. He previously served as a paramilitary case officer with a 31-year career in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/philip-wasielewski; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/philip-wasielewski.rss)
- [Edward Bogan](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/edward-bogan/index.md): Edward Bogan is a retired CIA Operations Officer with 24 years of experience in national security and intelligence operations in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. He is a two time Chief of Station (COS) and three time Chief of Base (COB). Bogan served five of his seven PCS assignments in three designated war/combat zones, as well as Acting positions in countries in armed conflict. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/edward-bogan; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/edward-bogan.rss)
- [Paula Doyle](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/paula-doyle/index.md): Paula Doyle served as Associate Deputy Director for Operations at CIA, where she oversaw worldwide HUMINT operations and activities that required the use of air, land, maritime, space-based and cyber technologies. She was the Deputy National Counterintelligence Executive from 2012-2014, where she oversaw the official US Damage Assessment resulting from Private Manning’s 2010 unauthorized disclosures to Wikileaks and led the IC’s extensive review of Edward Snowden’s unauthorized disclosures and defection to Russia. She led three CIA stations in Europe, the Levant, and Asia. (3 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/paula-doyle; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/paula-doyle.rss)
- [Isaac Harris CDR USN (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/isaac-harris/index.md): Isaac “Ike” Harris, CDR USN (Ret.), is an adjunct fellow at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He most recently served as an advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy on matters relating to China and technology competition. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/isaac-harris; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/isaac-harris.rss)
- [Darrell Blocker](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/darrell-blocker/index.md): Blocker is Founder of DMB Consulting Services. He is a career intelligence officer with 15 field assignments over 32 years as a USAF analyst and a CIA operative (28 years); with time spent in Africa, Asia, Europe, Central America and Pakistan and four domestic assignments in the United States. His TEDxUGA presentation is titled, “LISTEN MORE, SPEAK LESS: LESSONS IN KINDNESS FROM A CIA OPERATIVE.” (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/darrell-blocker; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/darrell-blocker.rss)
- [Michelle Grisé](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/michelle-grise/index.md): Michelle Grisé is a senior policy researcher at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research focuses on Iran, Russian foreign policy and military strategy, South Asia, and international law. Before joining RAND in 2018, she clerked at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/michelle-grise; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/michelle-grise.rss)
- [Matthew Pottinger](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/matthew-pottinger/index.md): Matthew Pottinger served for four years in senior roles on the National Security Council staff, including as deputy national security advisor and as senior director for Asia. He fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a US Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. He spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He is currently Chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/matthew-pottinger; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/matthew-pottinger.rss)
- [Stephen P. Friot / University of Oklahoma Press](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/stephen-p-friot-university-of-oklahoma-press/index.md): (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/stephen-p-friot-university-of-oklahoma-press; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/stephen-p-friot-university-of-oklahoma-press.rss)
- [Jon Darby, Former Director of Operations, National Security Agency/CSS](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jon-darby/index.md): Darby is a nearly 39-year veteran of the U.S. Intelligence Community, primarily serving in the National Security Agency (NSA)/Central Security Service (CSS). As DO, he oversaw all of NSA’s collection, code-breaking, analysis and production of signals intelligence (SIGINT). | (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jon-darby; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/jon-darby.rss)
- [Annie Fixler](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/annie-fixler/index.md): Annie Fixler is the director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, contributing to the cyber-enabled economic warfare project and the Transformative Cyber Innovation Lab. She is also a research fellow at FDD and works on issues related to the national security implications of cyberattacks on economic targets, adversarial strategies and capabilities, and U.S. cyber resilience. (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/annie-fixler; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/annie-fixler.rss)
- [Johanna Yang](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/johanna-yang/index.md): Johanna “Jo” Yang is a research and editorial associate at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Her research focuses nation-state cyber threats, critical infrastructure protection, and U.S. cybersecurity policy. (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/johanna-yang; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/johanna-yang.rss)
- [Metropolitan Borys Gudziak](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/metropolitan-borys-gudziak/index.md): Borys Gudziak was ordained a Bishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) on August 26, 2012. Since 2012, he has been a member of the UGCC Permanent Synod. He has been the head of the Department of External Church Relations of the UGCC since 2014. On February 18, 2019, Bishop Gudziak was appointed Metropolitan and Archbishop of Philadelphia for Ukrainian Catholics in the United States of America. On June 4, 2019, Metropolitan Archbishop Gudziak was enthroned as the leader of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Philadelphia. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/metropolitan-borys-gudziak; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/metropolitan-borys-gudziak.rss)
- [Dr. Tom Inglesby](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dr-tom-inglesby/index.md): Dr. Inglesby is the Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was Chair of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Center for Preparedness and Response at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2010 to 2019. He also has served as an advisor to the US Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Defense, and Homeland Security, and he has testified before Congress on many occasions. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dr-tom-inglesby; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/dr-tom-inglesby.rss)
- [Greg Levesque](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/greg-levesque/index.md): Greg Levesque is the CEO and co-founder of Strider Technologies. As a leading expert on strategic intelligence, Greg works with government leaders around the world and Fortune 500 companies to identify, assess, and respond to state-sponsored risk. Prior to founding Strider, Greg co-founded an intelligence firm, Pointe Bello. Previously, he led the China Services team at Crumpton Group and served as Business Advisory Manager at the U.S.-China Business Council. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/greg-levesque; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/greg-levesque.rss)
- [Counterfeit Spies](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/counterfeit-spies/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/counterfeit-spies; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/counterfeit-spies.rss)
- [Mike Cozad](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mike-cozad/index.md): Mark Cozad is a senior international defense researcher at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution. He is also a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mike-cozad; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/mike-cozad.rss)
- [Ambassador Michael Carpenter](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ambassador-michael-carpenter/index.md): Ambassador Michael Carpenter is Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe at the National Security Council. He previously served as Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He previously served in the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, and Conventional Arms Control; worked in the White House as a foreign policy advisor to then-Vice President Biden and as Director for Russia at the National Security Council; and was a career Foreign Service Officer with the State Department. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ambassador-michael-carpenter; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ambassador-michael-carpenter.rss)
- [General Charles “Chuck” Wald, USAF (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/general-charles-chuck-wald-usaf-ret/index.md): General Charles Wald, USAF (ret.), former Deputy Commander of United States European Command (EUCOM) – General Charles Wald is a proven leader who specializes in global military strategy and development. As EUCOM Deputy Commander he was responsible for developing the air campaign in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Gen. Wald has also served as the Director of Strategic Planning and Policy at USAF Headquarters, Chief of USAF Combat Terrorism Center, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations at the Pentagon. In 35 years as a USAF command pilot, Gen. Wald accumulated more than 3,600 flying hours and 430 combat hours. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/general-charles-chuck-wald-usaf-ret; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/general-charles-chuck-wald-usaf-ret.rss)
- [Orville Schell](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/orville-schell/index.md): Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/orville-schell; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/orville-schell.rss)
- [Ryan C. Berg](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ryan-c-berg/index.md): Ryan C. Berg is director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is also an adjunct professor at the Catholic University of America and a course coordinator at the United States Foreign Service Institute. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ryan-c-berg; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ryan-c-berg.rss)
- [Lawrence O. Gostin](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lawrence-o-gostin/index.md): Lawrence O. Gostin is Distinguished University Professor, Georgetown University’s highest academic rank conferred by the University President. Prof. Gostin is Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and is the Founding O’Neill Chair in Global Health Law. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lawrence-o-gostin; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/lawrence-o-gostin.rss)
- [Ian Brzezinski](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ian-brzezinski/index.md): Ian Brzezinski is a resident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and is a member of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Advisors Group. He also leads the Brzezinski Group, which provides strategic insight and advice to government and commercial clients. Brzezinski served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy (2001-05) and served in senior policy positions in the US Department of Defense and the US Congress. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ian-brzezinski; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ian-brzezinski.rss)
- [James S. Gilmore III](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/james-s-gilmore-iii/index.md): Ambassador James S. Gilmore III was the 68th Governor of Virginia from 1998 to 2002. He chaired the Republican National Committee in 2001. He also served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe during the first Trump administration. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/james-s-gilmore-iii; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/james-s-gilmore-iii.rss)
- [Lt. Gen. Charles L. Moore Jr. (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lt-gen-charles-l-moore-jr/index.md): Lt. Gen. Charles L. Moore Jr. is a retired United States Air Force lieutenant general who last served as Deputy Commander of the United States Cyber Command. He previously was the Deputy Director for Global Operations of the Joint Staff. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lt-gen-charles-l-moore-jr; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/lt-gen-charles-l-moore-jr.rss)
- [Mariam Davlashelidze](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mariam-davlashelidze/index.md): Mariam Davlashelidze has extensive experience in cybersecurity research and policy analysis. She is currently studying at Montgomery College for her associate degree in cybersecurity, having previously received a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in negotiation and conflict resolution. She is also a research intern with the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mariam-davlashelidze; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/mariam-davlashelidze.rss)
- [Arseniy Yatsenyuk](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/arseniy-yatsenyuk/index.md): Arseniy Yatsenyuk served two terms as Prime Minister of Ukraine — from February 27, 2014 to November 27, 2014 and November 27, 2014 to April 14, 2016. He also served as Minster of Economy, Foreign Minister and Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada. In 2014, he started the Narodnyi Front (People's Front) Political Party. He is Chairman fo the Kyiv Security Forum and Founder of Open Ukraine Foundation. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/arseniy-yatsenyuk; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/arseniy-yatsenyuk.rss)
- [Michael Salazar](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/michael-salazar/index.md): Michael Salazar is a cybersecurity and national security strategist specializing in emerging threats and technology policy. He is a Senior Manager in Microsoft's Security Business Development team, where he leads initiatives in cybersecurity strategy, partnerships, and AI-driven security solutions. He holds graduate degrees in Business Administration and Global Security, with expertise in the intersection of technology, intelligence, and counterterrorism. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/michael-salazar; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/michael-salazar.rss)
- [Bradley Bowman](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/bradley-bowman/index.md): Bradley Bowman serves as senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he focuses on U.S. defense strategy and policy. He has served as a national security advisor to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, as well as an active duty U.S. Army officer, Black Hawk pilot, and assistant professor at West Point. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/bradley-bowman; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/bradley-bowman.rss)
- [David P. Mansdoerfer](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/david-p-mansdoerfer/index.md): David P. Mansdoerfer currently serves as Owner & Managing Director of DPM & Associates, a political consulting, public affairs and communications firm. David also serves as an adjunct professor for Health Policy and Politics at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and as a board member for the Stop Scams Alliance. During the first Trump Administration, David served as a senior executive service presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2017 to August 2019, serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health (Operations and Management), HHS Chief Labor Negotiator, and as Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Administration. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/david-p-mansdoerfer; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/david-p-mansdoerfer.rss)
- [Chasing Shadows](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/chasing-shadows/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/chasing-shadows; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/chasing-shadows.rss)
- [Nikhil Kumar](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/nikhil-kumar/index.md): Nikhil Kumar is Executive Editor at TIME. He was previously TIME's South Asia Bureau Chief and a senior editor working on international coverage. Before rejoining TIME, he served as Deputy Global Editor at The Messenger and was CNN's New Delhi Bureau Chief. He also worked at Grid, and as an editor and foreign correspondent for the Independent and the Evening Standard. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/nikhil-kumar; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/nikhil-kumar.rss)
- [Colin Shea-Blymer](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/colin-shea-blymer/index.md): Colin Shea-Blymyer is a Research Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on the CyberAI Project. His research has spanned safe reinforcement learning, formal methods, adversarial machine learning, and AI ethics. Previously, he was a graduate researcher with MITRE, where he helped establish the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) program on adversarial machine learning research at the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCOE). (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/colin-shea-blymer; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/colin-shea-blymer.rss)
- [Bill Browder](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/bill-browder/index.md): Bill Browder is CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and Head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign. Browder was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when he was denied entry to the country and declared “a threat to national security” for exposing corruption in Russian state-owned companies. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/bill-browder; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/bill-browder.rss)
- [Colin Ahern](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/colin-ahern/index.md): Colin Ahern was appointed the first-ever Chief Cyber Officer of the State of New York by Governor Kathy Hochul in June 2022. He previously served as the Acting Director of New York City’s cyber defense agency, and commanded a cyberspace operations company in the Army. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/colin-ahern; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/colin-ahern.rss)
- [Ksenia Kirillova](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ksenia-kirillova/index.md): Ksenia Kirillova is an investigative journalist and analyst focused on analyzing Russian society and mechanisms of action of Russian propaganda (including in the US) along with Russian “soft power,” “active measures” and foreign policy. Ms. Kirillova is the author of several hundred articles, including research on Russian propaganda and soft power. While living in Russia, she worked as a journalist for the largest Ural media holding Ural Worker (2008-2010) and the Ural branch of Novaya Gazeta (2011-2013). (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ksenia-kirillova; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ksenia-kirillova.rss)
- [Vasily Gatov](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/vasily-gatov/index.md): Vasily Gatov is a Russian media researcher and author based in Boston. Gatov has over 30 years of professional experience in domestic and international media. Gatov is currently working on a book about the re-emergence of totalitarian censorship of the Russian media. Gatov served as an executive and strategist for several Russian media companies, including RenTV network, Media3 (Russia’s largest print conglomerate in 2007-2012), and RIA Novosti, a national multimedia news agency. While working for RIA Novosti (2011-2013), Gatov founded Novosti Media Lab, the research and development company, fostering innovation in communication and the social impact of media. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/vasily-gatov; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/vasily-gatov.rss)
- [Liana Fix](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/liana-fix/index.md): Liana Fix is a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She is a historian and political scientist, with expertise in German and European foreign and security policy, European security, transatlantic relations, Russia, Eastern Europe, and European China policy. Dr. Fix is also the author of A New German Power? Germany’s Role in European Russia Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University in the Center for German and European Studies and the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/liana-fix; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/liana-fix.rss)
- [Mohamad Mirghahari](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mohamad-mirghahari/index.md): Mohamad Mirghahari is the National Security Fellow at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations. Mirghahari previously served in the Department of Defense and with Special Operations in key leadership positions, in support of counterterrorism and Special Operations initiatives that have significantly impacted mission-critical outcomes across the globe. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/mohamad-mirghahari; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/mohamad-mirghahari.rss)
- [Matin Bek](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/matin-bek/index.md): Matin Bek is a fellow at New America's Future Security Program and a former senior Afghan government official. He served as Chief of Staff to the President and was a member of Afghanistan’s Peace Negotiation Team in the Doha talks with the Taliban. He previously led the country’s local governance body and served as Deputy Director of the National Directorate of Security. Bek holds master’s degrees in Security Studies from Georgetown University and in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University, as well as a bachelor’s degree from Delhi University. (3 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/matin-bek; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/matin-bek.rss)
- [Steven Moore](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/steven-moore/index.md): Steven Moore is a former Republican chief of staff in the US House of Representatives who has worked on Republican campaigns for most of his career. He arrived in Ukraine on day five of the war to help. He now spends all day every day building conservative support for Ukraine. He is executive producer on A Faith Under Siege, which tells the story of Ukrainian Christians who have been tortured and murdered by the Russians for their faith. He also writes a Substack column “Tales from WWIII – A Beginner’s Guide to the End of the World.” (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/steven-moore; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/steven-moore.rss)
- [Oleksiy Goncharenko](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/oleksiy-goncharenko/index.md): Oleksiy Goncharenko is a member of the Ukrainian parliament, member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and President of the PACE Committee on Migration, Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/oleksiy-goncharenko; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/oleksiy-goncharenko.rss)
- [Max Boot](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/max-boot/index.md): Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author and foreign-policy analyst. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a weekly columnist for The Washington Post. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/max-boot; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/max-boot.rss)
- [Kori Schake](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/kori-schake/index.md): Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Before joining AEI, Dr. Schake was the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has had a distinguished career in government, working at the US State Department, the US Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. She has also taught at Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and the University of Maryland. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/kori-schake; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/kori-schake.rss)
- [Libby Lange](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/libby-lange/index.md): Libby Lange is a Director of Intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project. Prior to SCSP, Libby worked as an Intel Analyst at Graphika, where she focused on Chinese state-linked influence operations and public health misinformation. Prior to Graphika, she served as a speechwriter and communications manager for Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, accompanying the President on multiple state visits. Libby holds an M.A. in Global Affairs from Yale University and a B.A. in Political Science from National Taiwan University. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/libby-lange; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/libby-lange.rss)
- [Thomas Graham](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/thomas-graham/index.md): Thomas E. Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book, Getting Russia Right, was published in September, 2023. He is a cofounder of Yale University’s Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies program and sits on its faculty steering committee. He is also a research scholar at Yale’s MacMillan Center. He has been a lecturer in global affairs and political science since 2011, teaching courses on U.S.-Russian relations and Russian foreign policy, as well as cybersecurity and counterterrorism. Graham was special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007, during which he managed a White House-Kremlin strategic dialogue. He was director for Russian affairs on the staff from 2002 to 2004. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/thomas-graham; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/thomas-graham.rss)
- [Neil Thomas](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/neil-thomas/index.md): Neil Thomas is a Fellow on Chinese Politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, where he studies elite politics, political economy, and foreign policy. Previously, he was a Senior Analyst for China and Northeast Asia at Eurasia Group, a Senior Research Associate at MacroPolo, and a lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. He has testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/neil-thomas; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/neil-thomas.rss)
- [Christopher Covino](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/christopher-covino/index.md): Christopher Covino is an experienced policy professional specializing in cybersecurity and AI. He serves as Senior Cyber Policy Advisor at The Rosslyn Group, working with clients including CISA, and as Senior Policy Advisor for the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. Previously, he was Policy Director for Cybersecurity in the LA Mayor's Office. Chris holds a Master of Public Administration from the University of Southern California. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/christopher-covino; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/christopher-covino.rss)
- [Oscar Delaney](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/oscar-delaney/index.md): Oscar Delaney researches the national security implications of frontier AI systems at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy. He has previously worked in biosecurity policy and quantitative trading. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/oscar-delaney; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/oscar-delaney.rss)
- [Donald Blersch](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/donald-blersch/index.md): Donald Blersch is SVP of Government Innovation at Clearspeed; Chair of the INSA Security Policy Reform Committee (Intelligence and National Security Alliance); and a former Senior Coordinator for Security Infrastructure at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security in the U.S. Department of State. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/donald-blersch; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/donald-blersch.rss)
- [Oleh Kiper](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/oleh-kiper/index.md): Oleh Kiper has served as the Governor of Odesa Oblast since May 30, 2023. Previously, he served as the Deputy Chief Prosecutor and then Chief Prosecutor for the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/oleh-kiper; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/oleh-kiper.rss)
- [Ronan Mainprize](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ronan-mainprize/index.md): Dr. Ronan P. Mainprize is an Ax:son Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Statecraft and Strategic Communication. His research is broadly focused on the role of intelligence agencies in the creation and implementation of strategy and grand strategy. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ronan-mainprize; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ronan-mainprize.rss)
- [Kelly A. Grieco](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/kelly-a-grieco/index.md): Kelly A. Grieco is a Senior Fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center, where her work focuses on US foreign policy and defense policy, addressing questions about military strategy, force structure, military alliances, air operations, and the future of war. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/kelly-a-grieco; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/kelly-a-grieco.rss)
- [Colonel Maximilian K. Bremer](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/colonel-maximilian-k-bremer/index.md): Colonel Maximilian K. Bremer, U.S. Air Force, is the director of the Special Programs Division at Air Mobility Command. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/colonel-maximilian-k-bremer; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/colonel-maximilian-k-bremer.rss)
- [Alexander Khara](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/alexander-khara/index.md): Alexander Khara is CEO of the Centre for Defence Strategies in Ukraine. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/alexander-khara; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/alexander-khara.rss)
- [Fabian Villalobos](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/fabian-villalobos/index.md): Fabian E. Villalobos is a senior engineer at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the RAND Graduate School of Public Policy. He is an inaugural fellow of RAND's Global Scholar Program. He manages RAND's Engineering and Applied Sciences Speaker Seminar Series. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/fabian-villalobos; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/fabian-villalobos.rss)
- [Gracelin Baskaran](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gracelin-baskaran/index.md): Gracelin Baskaran is director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She is a mining economist, and her primary expertise is in critical minerals and trade. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gracelin-baskaran; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/gracelin-baskaran.rss)
- [Tamerlan Vahabov](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/tamerlan-vahabov/index.md): Tamerlan Vahabov is former advisor to the Director of the Defense Procurement Agency of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/tamerlan-vahabov; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/tamerlan-vahabov.rss)
- [Emmanouil M. Karatarakis](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/emmanouil-m-karatarakis/index.md): Emmanouil M. Karatarakis is a National Security & Defense Correspondent. Former Senior Advisor, Greek Ministries of Defense and Finance and in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister of Greece. He's worked for CNBC in London and as TIME Magazine's Correspondent in Athens. He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, the Foreign Press Association of Greece and a former member of the Association of American Correspondents in London. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics (Departments of Government and International Relations)​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ (11 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/emmanouil-m-karatarakis; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/emmanouil-m-karatarakis.rss)
- [Trent Emeneker](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/trent-emeneker/index.md): Trent Emeneker is the Blue UAS Lead at the Defense Innovation Unit in the Department of Defense. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/trent-emeneker; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/trent-emeneker.rss)
- [Isaac Stone Fish](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/isaac-stone-fish/index.md): Isaac Stone Fish is the CEO and founder of Strategy Risks, a business intelligence firm which quantifies corporate exposure to China, and helps companies and entities manage and reduce their China risk. He is the author of America Second (Knopf, 2022), a book about Beijing's influence in the United States. He is also a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, an adjunct at New York University, and the author of a column on China risk for Barron's. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/isaac-stone-fish; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/isaac-stone-fish.rss)
- [Jacek Siewiera](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jacek-siewiera/index.md): Jacek Siewiera served as Poland's Secretary of State and Head of the National Security Council of the Republic of Poland. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jacek-siewiera; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/jacek-siewiera.rss)
- [Lonnie Henley](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lonnie-henley/index.md): Lonnie Henley is an independent consultant and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He retired from federal service in 2019 after more than 40 years as an intelligence officer specializing in East Asian security. He served 22 years as a US Army China foreign area officer and military intelligence officer, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2000 to join the senior civil service, serving as Defense Intelligence Officer for East Asia, Senior Defense Intelligence Analyst for China, and National Intelligence Collection Officer for East Asia among other posts. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lonnie-henley; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/lonnie-henley.rss)
- [Samuel Bendett](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/samuel-bendett/index.md): Samuel Bendett is an Adviser with CNA Strategy, Policy, Plans and Programs Center (SP3), where he is a member of the Russia Studies Program. He is Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Technology and National Security Program in the Center for a New American Security. His work involves research on the Russian defense and technology developments, unmanned and autonomous military systems and Artificial Intelligence, as well as Russian military capabilities and decision-making during crises. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/samuel-bendett; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/samuel-bendett.rss)
- [Jack Burnham](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jack-burnham/index.md): Jack Burnham is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. His research primarily focuses on China’s military, including emerging technologies, force posture, and strategic culture as well as the role of innovative technology in changing the character of contemporary conflict. Previously, he served as a senior policy research analyst at the China Institute at the University of Alberta (3 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/jack-burnham; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/jack-burnham.rss)
- [Beth Asch](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/beth-asch/index.md): Beth Asch is a senior principal economist at RAND. Her areas of study include labor and personnel economics and defense manpower. She has led numerous studies on compensation design in the military and in the federal civil service, on the workforce implications of state and local pension reform, and on military recruiting and personnel supply to the armed forces. Her most recent work includes analysis and redesign of the military pay table, military retirement reform, state and local pension reform, enlistment supply and recruiting resource effectiveness, retention and compensation in the federal civil service, and food insecurity in the armed forces. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/beth-asch; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/beth-asch.rss)
- [Vali Nasr](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/vali-nasr/index.md): Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He served as the eighth Dean of Johns Hopkins SAIS between 2012 and 2019 and served as Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/vali-nasr; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/vali-nasr.rss)
- [Kody McKinley](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/kody-mckinley/index.md): Kody McKinley is a U.S. Army Special Operations noncommissioned officer with 12 years of experience and holds an M.S. in National Security from Liberty University. He has deployed multiple times across the Middle East, including as a Team Chief in Northeast Syria in 2019, where he earned a Bronze Star. He previously served as an Information Operations Planner at U.S. Cyber Command. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/kody-mckinley; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/kody-mckinley.rss)
- [Lyn Brown](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lyn-brown/index.md): Jacqueline F. "Lyn" Brown is a partner at Wiley. She served as a senior national security and cyber attorney at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and was the General Counsel to the President's Intelligence Advisory Board in the Executive Office of the President at The White House. She was the FBI’s Privacy Officer (Acting); Deputy General Counsel for the FBI’s General Law Branch (Acting); Section Chief for Counterterrorism Law (Acting); and Chief Counsel to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center. Earlier in her career, she served as senior counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and helped draft the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. She subsequently became the first FBI attorney detailed to help stand up the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). She also served as the Senior Counterterrorism Legal Advisor at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/lyn-brown; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/lyn-brown.rss)
- [Ambassador John Negroponte](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ambassador-john-negroponte/index.md): Ambassador John D. Negroponte is Vice Chairman at McLarty Associates. He has been Ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines, the United Nations, and Iraq. In Washington he served twice on the National Security Council staff, first as Director for Vietnam in the Nixon Administration and then as Deputy National Security Advisor under President Reagan. He has also held a cabinet level position as the first Director of National Intelligence under President George W. Bush. His most recent position in government was as Deputy Secretary of State, where he served as the State Department’s Chief Operating Officer. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ambassador-john-negroponte; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ambassador-john-negroponte.rss)
- [Michael Coyne](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/michael-coyne/index.md): Michael Coyne is a retired career FBI counterintelligence analyst, now a Visiting Fellow with George Mason University’s National Security Institute and an incoming Adjunct Lecturer for the University of Maryland’s Fellows Program. Coyne was formerly the FBI’s Senior National Intelligence Officer for Counterintelligence, the National Intelligence Officer for Counterintelligence at the National Intelligence Council, and acting National Intelligence Manager for Counterintelligence at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/michael-coyne; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/michael-coyne.rss)
- [Sheetal Patel](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/sheetal-patel/index.md): Sheetal Patel retired from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after a distinguished 28 year career. In her last assignment she served as the Assistant Director for CIA’s Transnational and Technology Mission Center. In this role she established and led a new mission center dedicated to leveraging emerging technologies for U.S. strategic advantage. Patel also served as Assistant Director for CIA Counterintelligence, Deputy Chief of Station in South Asia, Chief of Analysis for Counterintelligence, and Executive Assistant to two CIA Directors. She has extensive experience briefing White House officials, Congressional leaders, foreign partners, and industry executives. She also served as a Navy Intelligence Officer in the Reserves from 1999 to 2007. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/sheetal-patel; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/sheetal-patel.rss)
- [Charles Galbreath](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/charles-galbreath/index.md): Charles Galbreath is a Senior Resident Fellow for Space Studies at the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence (MI-SPACE). He is a retired United States Space Force Colonel and a Command Space Operator with expertise in Missile Warning, Space Control, Space Launch, and ICBM operations. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/charles-galbreath; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/charles-galbreath.rss)
- [Clayton Swope](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/clayton-swope/index.md): Clayton Swope is the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Before joining CSIS, Swope led national security and cybersecurity public policy for Amazon’s Project Kuiper. Prior to his time at Amazon, Swope served as a senior adviser on national security, space, foreign affairs, and technology policy issues for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He also worked for more than 14 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, serving largely in the Directorate of Science and Technology. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/clayton-swope; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/clayton-swope.rss)
- [Ray Donovan](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ray-donovan/index.md): Ray Donovan served as chief of operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He was previously a U.S. Border Patrol Agent, a DEA Special Agent in the New York Drug Enforcement Task Force, and served in the DEA Special Operations Division. He is now Founder and CEO of Stack21 Solutions. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ray-donovan; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ray-donovan.rss)
- [John Erath](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/john-erath/index.md): John Erath is the Senior Policy Director for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, overseeing the policy team and guiding work on issues including Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, U.S. domestic nuclear policy and more. This follows 30 years of government service, much of it in arms control and non-proliferation. Most recently, he completed a two-year assignment on the U.S. National Security Council, where he was responsible for European issues. In this capacity, he focused on cooperation with NATO and the European Union, as well as heading White House efforts to improve stability in the Balkans. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/john-erath; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/john-erath.rss)
- [Ankit Panda](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ankit-panda/index.md): Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research interests include nuclear strategy, escalation, missiles and missile defense, space security, and U.S. alliances. He is the author of The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon (Polity, 2025), Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals: Avoiding Spirals and Mitigating Risks (Carnegie, 2023), and Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea (Hurst/Oxford, 2020). Panda is co-editor of New Approaches to Verifying and Monitoring North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal (Carnegie, 2021). (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/ankit-panda; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/ankit-panda.rss)
- [Gilbert W. Merkx](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gilbert-merkx/index.md): Gilbert W. Merkx is a professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico and Duke University, where he also served as Vice Provost for International Affairs. He was the founding chair of the Group of Advisors to the National Security Education Program and served as a consultant to the Defense Intelligence College. (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gilbert-merkx; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/gilbert-merkx.rss)
- [Dak Hardwick](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dak-hardwick/index.md): Dak Hardwick is Vice President of International Affairs at the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA). He worked previously at the Harris Corporation, as a budget appropriations analyst for the Marine Corps, and at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he helped establish the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense after September 11, 2001. He also held various national security positions, including country director for Georgia and the Republic of Moldova and director for peacekeeping operations. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dak-hardwick; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/dak-hardwick.rss)
- [Dan Blumenthal](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dan-blumenthal/index.md): Dan Blumenthal is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on East Asian security issues and Sino-American relations. Mr. Blumenthal has served in and advised the US government on China issues for more than a decade. Before joining AEI, Mr. Blumenthal served as senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the US Department of Defense. He is the author of “The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State.” (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dan-blumenthal; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/dan-blumenthal.rss)
- [Dr. Joshua Tallis](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/joshua-tallis/index.md): Dr. Joshua Tallis is a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses. He is a naval analyst with expertise in maritime security as well as Arctic, Euro-Atlantic and NATO naval strategy. In his first field assignment for CNA, Tallis embarked the Harry S. Truman strike group as the only civilian analyst during the U.S. Navy’s first Arctic carrier deployment since the Cold War. Later, he embedded with Naval Forces Europe - Naval Forces Africa in support of the 6th Fleet commander and other U.S. flag officers in leadership positions. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/joshua-tallis; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/joshua-tallis.rss)
- [Sophie Arts](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/sophie-arts/index.md): Sophie Arts is a Washington, DC-based fellow with GMF Geostrategy North. She leads the team’s research on Nordic and Arctic security and geopolitics, covering North American homeland defense against conventional and hybrid threats, and cooperation with allies and partners. She also focuses on Russian and Chinese activities in the Arctic region. Arts serves as co-chair on the task force for global peace and security for the Think7 (T7), the official G7 group that brings together the world’s leading think tanks and research centers. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/sophie-arts; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/sophie-arts.rss)
- [Carlton Haelig](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/carlton-haelig/index.md): Carlton Haelig is a fellow with the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). His research and expertise include national security strategy, force design and employment, and military innovation. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/carlton-haelig; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/carlton-haelig.rss)
- [Radio Treason](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/radio-treason/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/radio-treason; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/radio-treason.rss)
- [John Parachini](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/john-parachini/index.md): John Parachini is a senior international and defense researcher at RAND, former director of the RAND Intelligence Policy Center, and a professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. He recently served in the Office of Chemical and Biological Weapons Affairs at the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability. He has led RAND projects on chemical and biological weapons terrorism, pandemic response, intelligence, nuclear smuggling, conventional arms trade, Iran, North Korean, open-source Intelligence, and emerging technologies. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/john-parachini; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/john-parachini.rss)
- [Itai Shapira](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/itai-shapira/index.md): Itai Shapira is a brigadier general in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Reserves, with more than 25 years of service in the Israeli Defense Intelligence (IDI) at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. He is a graduate of the Israeli National Defense College and holds a PhD from the University of Leicester. His book about Israeli National Intelligence Culture was published in 2024, and his forthcoming book will discuss Israeli Defense and Intelligence establishments before and after October 2023. (3 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/itai-shapira; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/itai-shapira.rss)
- [Brigadier General Kevin Ryan (U.S. Army, Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/kevin-ryan/index.md): Brigadier General Kevin Ryan (U.S. Army retired) is a visiting professor at Kyiv School of Economics and its Defense and Security Center. He is a specialist on the Russian military and security establishment and former US Defense Attache in Moscow. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/kevin-ryan; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/kevin-ryan.rss)
- [David Kirichenko](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/david-kirichenko/index.md): David Kirichenko is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. His work on warfare has been featured in the Atlantic Council, Center for European Policy Analysis, and the Modern Warfare Institute, among many others. (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/david-kirichenko; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/david-kirichenko.rss)
- [Joey Gagnard](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/joey-gagnard/index.md): Chief Warrant Officer 5 (Ret.) Joey Gagnard concluded nearly three decades of distinguished service in the U.S. military, retiring from the special operations community in early 2025. His extensive career included multiple leadership positions during deployments across the Middle East and other key operational areas. Gagnard is a graduate of numerous specialized intelligence and operational courses, as well as military and civilian executive leadership programs. Gagnard also serves as CEO of Atlas Special Projects and Director of Field Operations at Swarmer. (20 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/joey-gagnard; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/joey-gagnard.rss)
- [Laura Galante](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/laura-galante/index.md): Laura Galante is former Director of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Laura founded Galante Strategies in 2017 to equip governments and corporations to respond effectively to cyber and information threats. Galante was a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and previously served as the Director of Global Intelligence at cybersecurity company FireEye Inc. (now Trellix). Prior to FireEye, she led a team analyzing state cyber capabilities for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/laura-galante; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/laura-galante.rss)
- [Christopher Whyte](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/christopher-whyte/index.md): Christopher Whyte is an associate professor (with tenure) of homeland security and emergency preparedness at the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government & Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is author of nearly four dozen peer-reviewed research articles, numerous reports, and five books focused on information warfare, the decision-making dimensions of cyber conflict, and the dynamics of organizational innovation and technology adoption. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/christopher-whyte; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/christopher-whyte.rss)
- [Matt Hefler](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/matt-hefler/index.md): Dr. Matt Hefler is an Ax:son Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Statecraft and Strategic Communication at the Stockholm school of Economics, and a member of the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy. His research examines the role of intelligence and secret services in international diplomacy. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/matt-hefler; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/matt-hefler.rss)
- [William P. Cromwell](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/william-p-cromwell/index.md): William P. Crowell is a Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, a San Francisco Venture Capital company. He is also an Independent Consultant specializing in Information Technology, Security and Intelligence Systems. He served as Deputy Director of Operations of NSA from 1991 to 1994 running its core signals intelligence mission. In February 1994 he was appointed by President Clinton as the Deputy Director of NSA and served in that post until his retirement in September 1997. After 9/11 he served on the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age, which published three landmark studies on Homeland Security and information sharing. He also served as Chairman of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Senior Advisory Group from 2007 through 2014 and on the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Advisory Board. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/william-p-cromwell; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/william-p-cromwell.rss)
- [Dr. Jerry Laurienti](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dr-jerry-laurienti/index.md): Dr. Jerry Laurienti is a former Senior Intelligence Service officer and current NGA account manager at Leidos, with nearly three decades of national security experience across the CIA, State Department, and Department of Defense. A former CIA Deputy Associate Director and member of the CIA Leadership Board, he has expertise in intelligence, strategic operations, foreign policy, and geopolitical analysis, with regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Near East, and global energy. (5 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/dr-jerry-laurienti; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/dr-jerry-laurienti.rss)
- [David Fitzgerald](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/david-fitzgerald/index.md): A 37-yr. CIA veteran, David Fitzgerald retired in 2021 as Chief of Station in a Middle Eastern country, which hosted CIA’s largest field station. As a seven-time Chief of Station, Fitzgerald served in numerous conflict zones to include Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia. He also held senior HQS positions that included Latin America Chief of Operations and Latin America Deputy Division Chief. He also served as the senior DCIA representative at U.S. Military’s Central Command from 2017-2020, where he participated in several tier 1 operations as the intelligence advisor to the commander. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/david-fitzgerald; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/david-fitzgerald.rss)
- [Renee Pruneau Novakoff](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/renee-pruneau-novakoff/index.md): Renee Pruneau Novakoff served for over forty years in the Department of Defense and in several Intelligence agencies to include NSA, CIA, ODNI, and DIA. Her last assignment was in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, providing oversight and guidance for the Defense Department’s special programs and sensitive activities to include Human intelligence and Information Operations. (17 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/renee-pruneau-novakoff; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/renee-pruneau-novakoff.rss)
- [Major General Ryan Heritage (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/major-general-ryan-heritage-ret/index.md): Major General Ryan Heritage (ret.) graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in 1990 and was commissioned through the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He began his career as an infantry officer serving in multiple assignments within both II and III Marine Expeditionary Force. As a General Officer he served as the Director of Future Operations at U.S. Cyber Command; the Commanding General Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, and Western Recruiting Region; and Commanding General Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command, Marine Corps Forces Space Command, and the Marine Corps Information Command. He retired after serving a successful tour as the Director of Operations, U.S. Cyber Command. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/major-general-ryan-heritage-ret; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/major-general-ryan-heritage-ret.rss)
- [Gloria Glaubman](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gloria-glaubman/index.md): Gloria Glaubman served as the Senior Cyber Advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo from 2023 to 2025, supporting cybersecurity collaboration across U.S.–Japan diplomatic, defense, and commercial sectors. Her background in national security, cyber policy, and executive-level technical advisory informed her contributions to efforts aimed at strengthening cyber resilience. During her tenure in government, she worked on initiatives involving information-sharing frameworks and the integration of critical and emerging technologies to address evolving threats and promote innovation. (4 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/gloria-glaubman; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/gloria-glaubman.rss)
- [Vice Admiral Mark Fox, USN (Ret.)](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/vice-admiral-mark-fox-usn-ret/index.md): Vice Admiral Mark Fox, USN (ret.) is a member of the JINSA Eastern Mediterranean and Abraham Accords policy projects and a 2018 JINSA Generals and Admirals Program participant. He retired in 2016 after a 38-year Navy career. Fox’s last active-duty military assignment was as Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida. He also served as commander of U.S. Naval Central Command/U.S. 5th Fleet/Combined Maritime Forces from 2010-2012, and commanded Carrier Strike Group 10 aboard USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) in 2008-2009. After retiring from the Navy, he subsequently worked as Corporate Vice President for Customer Affairs at Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII). He retired from HII in 2021. (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/vice-admiral-mark-fox-usn-ret; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/vice-admiral-mark-fox-usn-ret.rss)
- [Sandrea Hwang](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/sandrea-hwang/index.md): Sandrea Hwang served as the National Intelligence Manager for Counterintelligence and Assistant Director at the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC). She has also served tours at the White House National Security Council (NSC) as Director for Homeland Issues and Counterterrorism. Her previous assignments span the National Counterterrorism Center, Central Intelligence Agency, and Department of Defense. (0 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/sandrea-hwang; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/sandrea-hwang.rss)
- [Open Source Reports](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/index.md): (2013 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/report.rss)
- [Headlines](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/headline/index.md): (14 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/headline; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/headline.rss)
- [critical minerals](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/critical-minerals/index.md): (2 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/critical-minerals; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/critical-minerals.rss)
- [ODNI](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/odni/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/odni; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/odni.rss)
- [Economy](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/economy/index.md): (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/economy; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/economy.rss)
- [Alternative Perspectives](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/alternative-perspectives/index.md): (434 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/alternative-perspectives; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/alternative-perspectives.rss)
- [Xen](https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/xen/index.md): Xen is a former US Special Operations veteran with experience fighting alongside Ukrainian forces. We have granted his request for anonymity (1 posts; HTML: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/experts/xen; RSS: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/feeds/experts/xen.rss)

## Recent Content

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### Reflect, Remember, Renew

**Published:** September 11, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/reflect-remember-renew.md

PERSONAL REFLECTION -- Majestic blue skies greeted me as I turned into the Pentagon’s North Parking lot on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. As I made my way into work, I was thinking less about what the day might bring—life as a Joint Staff action officer could often feel like Groundhog Day—and more about the beautiful fall morning.

Less than three hours later, I would leave the Pentagon emerged in a profoundly different world, greeted by billowing black smoke rising into that same blue sky after American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building.

It became the most consequential day of my life—one that shaped my actions, my career, and my thinking ever since.

Twenty-five years later, I recall particular moments: the smell of smoke as we evacuated, the morgue erected to identify the victims, the fire burning through the Pentagon roof and the heroic firefighters who battled to extinguish it, and the enormous American flag unfurled across the Pentagon on September 12—a symbol of mourning, resolve, and national unity.

What forever remains with me is the memory of leaving the Pentagon that morning and the questions that haunted me:

How could we have missed this? How could our intelligence community and national security leaders have failed to protect the nation? How had we failed to connect the dots? How could we have suffered what the 9/11 Commission would later describe as a “failure of imagination?”

As with most intelligence failures, the warning signs appear painfully obvious in hindsight. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center demonstrated the potential consequences of a major terrorist attack on American soil. Osama bin Laden and the World Islamic Front openly declared war against Americans in 1998. That same year, al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa. In 2000, terrorists attacked the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors.

Individually and collectively, these events should have raised our level of concern and preparedness. They did not. We failed.

Looking back, I believe the roots of that failure can be traced to three areas: a lack of vigilance, poorly developed and undervalued partnerships, and an inadequate understanding of al Qaeda.

Intelligence failures—from Pearl Harbor to the 1973 Yom Kippur War to 9/11—often begin with a failure of vigilance. Nations minimize threats, overestimate their own capabilities, or explain away indicators because they do not fit prevailing assumptions. Warning signs are interpreted through the lens of what leaders believe an adversary is likely to do rather than what it may actually be capable of doing.

The 9/11 Commission’s finding of a “failure of imagination” captured a glaring weakness. But imagination in national security begins with discipline: examining vulnerabilities, challenging assumptions, developing mitigations, and running down leads even when they do not conform to conventional thinking.

Perhaps hubris played a role. A decade after winning the Cold War, the United States stood as the world’s preeminent power. That success may have contributed to a belief that our homeland was largely beyond the reach of a foreign adversary. Our guard was down. The result was the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.

September 11 also exposed serious weaknesses in our government’s ability to build and employ partnerships. Across the interagency, intelligence remained too often stove-piped. Agencies approached difficult problems through the narrow lens of their own authorities and responsibilities, creating seams an adaptive adversary could exploit.

Those seams were especially dangerous at the boundary between foreign intelligence collection and domestic law enforcement. Information held by one agency did not always reach another. Opportunities for integrated analysis were missed. We had capable organizations staffed by dedicated professionals, but too often they operated within separate cylinders of responsibility rather than as parts of an integrated national security enterprise.

Al Qaeda exploited those seams.

Perhaps most sobering was how little we understood about the enemy we suddenly faced. The attacks of September 11 were not al Qaeda’s opening act. The organization had already demonstrated its intent and capability through the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet after 9/11, it quickly became apparent how we were limited in our collective understanding.

Strikingly, among the first circulated materials on al Qaeda that I encountered after the attacks was a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst’s handbook describing the tactics, techniques, and practices of Osama bin Laden and his followers. I remember senior leaders on the Joint Staff asking for copies and acknowledging how little they knew about the organization.

Our adversary had studied us in extraordinary detail. We had not studied our adversary with the same intensity. We were, in important respects, blind to a deadly threat.

Today, remembrance alone is not enough.

The American philosopher George Santayana famously warned: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Remembering September 11 must mean more than recalling where we were, honoring those who died, or recounting the heroism that followed. It must mean examining whether we have truly absorbed the lessons purchased at such extraordinary cost.

The first lesson is vigilance. Today’s threats may emerge in cyber, space, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, terrorism, or domains we have yet to fully appreciate. Vigilance demands healthy skepticism about our own capabilities and respect for those of our adversaries. It requires leaders willing to challenge comfortable assumptions and recognize weak signals before they become catastrophic warnings.

The second lesson is partnership. Public-private partnerships are now foundational to understanding many threats confronting the nation, particularly in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure. But partnerships cannot become static arrangements or bureaucratic slogans. We must continually reassess relationships across government, industry, and our allies, asking whether they provide meaningful access, insight, speed, and competitive advantage.

The third lesson is understanding the adversary. Our limited understanding of al Qaeda before September 11 should force us to ask a difficult question today: Which adversary are we underestimating now? Where are our greatest knowledge gaps? Which emerging tactics, technologies, organizations, or intentions are we explaining away because they do not fit our assumptions? Who is studying us more carefully than we are studying them?

These questions should make us uncomfortable.

On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people began an ordinary morning never imagining what would follow. For those of us who experienced that day from inside the Pentagon, the memories remain deeply personal. But the responsibility to learn from that day belongs to all of us—especially those entrusted with our nation’s security.

As we honor those who lost their lives, we should do more than look backward. We should reflect on where we failed. We should remember what complacency cost us. And we should renew our commitment to vigilance, partnership, and understanding—so that the lessons of September 11 are never again learned only after tragedy strikes.

The Cipher Brief is publishing the personal reflections of our expert community this month. Sign up for the Nightcap Newsletter and follow on social media for more reflections.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### 25 years after 9/11. Whatever happened to mass-effect terrorism?

**Published:** September 11, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/25-years-after-9-11-whatever-happened-to-mass-effect-terrorism.md

One remaining mystery about 9/11 is why there have been no attacks of comparable scale since. But, with the combination of new motivations, enhanced means of delivery and AI -devised payloads there should be no cause for complacency.

9/11 changed everything. It led to two decades when the United States and much of Europe became fixated on Islamism. Western strategists became fluent about half absorbed subjects such as Wahhabism, Pashtun tribal customs, Frontier Crimes Regulations, and the Anbar Awakening while giving insufficient attention to Chinese economic dominance and Russian military rearmament. Who knows what that diversion of strategic and intellectual resources (and the chaos it left behind in the region) has cost the West?

9/11 also bookends that remarkable period from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/90 when peace and reconciliation seemed to break out everywhere. The Oslo Accords of 1993 seemed to chart a trajectory towards a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. One year later the peaceful multi-party elections in South Africa were nothing short of a miracle. For years Afrikaners had insisted they would fight black rule until the last drop of white blood. This was the brief ‘unipolar moment’ under the (then) benign supervision of Washington.

9/11 ushered in a new world; one with which Thomas Hobbes would be all too familiar. “Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.” “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.” Leviathan could be quoted endlessly. .

Of course, first and foremost, 9/11was a tragedy for the victims and their families. It was an act of appalling savagery. It was not only the largest terrorist attack in history by a country mile but it also introduced a new concept of mass-effect terrorism.

From the terrorists’ point of view it was also an attack of breathtaking scale and ambition. Osama Bin Laden had the imagination to view an aircraft full of fuel and passengers as a terror weapon by knitting together two of Al Qaida’s (AQ) previous failures; the truck-bomb attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993 and the 1995 Operation BOJINKA in the Philippines. Both attacks had been planned by Ramzi Yousef whose uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief planner for 9/11.

It was also, from an AQ viewpoint, both triumphant and disastrous. Its success was that a superpower overreacted for two decades and allowed 9/11 to shape the whole of Western foreign policy as a Global War on Terror (GWOT). Its failure was due to Washington’s largely successful determination to destroy AQ, a success which was only imperilled when President Trump approved the feckless Doha Accords with the Taliban in 2020 opening the way to the return of AQ to Afghanistan the following year. The latest United Nations report on terrorism confirms that AQ continues to reestablish itself.

As early as 1998 the British government had warned Washington that it was the likely next target in an operation which would involve hijacked aircraft. This story was told in detail by RUSI for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The intelligence was briefed to both Presidents Clinton and Bush (junior). Contrary to widespread opinion the concept of mass-effect terrorism had been exercising minds in Washington and Whitehall long before 9/11. If they had not made the intellectual leap of imagining airliners as weapons, they had nonetheless been thinking a great deal about mass casualty attacks. This was prompted by three convergent factors.

First, in Tokyo a doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo had, in 1995, released sarin on the Tokyo metro in an attack which (had it been carried out more effectively) could have killed thousands. This led to much discussion of how to react to a similar attack on the London Underground. There was also concern about CBW elements being brought into the country inside the diplomatic mail bags of state sponsors of terrorism (the bags being protected from scrutiny by the Vienna Convention of 1961).

Secondly there were fears at the time about Al Qaida getting its hands on nuclear material and producing a dirty bomb (not a nuclear explosion). At the time it was believed that fissile material was being sold by former employees of Soviet nuclear programme and finding its way through Central Asia to Pakistan. Most of it was a scam called ‘red mercury’ which was thoroughly investigated at the time but there were enough more credible reports to create uncertainty.

And finally it was known that AQ had two scientists working on CBN (chemical, biological and nuclear) experiments out of Derunta camp near the Afghan/Pakistan border. Not all the fine detail was known but one of the scientists, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, had previously worked on Pakistan’s own sovereign nuclear programme. This story was well-told a decade later by the veteran journalist Peter Bergen.

Thus began a decade long United States fixation with the danger of terrorists obtaining access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. President Obama insisted that ‘The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short term, medium term and long term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon.’

Once 9/11 had happened the assumption was that there would be numerous copy-cat attacks. In London much focus was devoted to the towers at Canary Wharf which housed some of the world’s premier financial institutions and which were also close to the flight paths of both London Heathrow and London City airport.

In the years immediately after 9/11 terrorist ambitions remained high including the Bali bombing in 2002 (202 killed), the Madrid train bombings in 2004 (193) and London 2005 (52). There were some dangerous plots in UK notably CREVICE in 2003 and RHYME in 2004 but the only one on the scale of 9/11 was Operation OVERT in 2006, AQ’s plan to bring down seven airliners in mid Atlantic. Fortunately it was thwarted by MI5.

And herein lies the real mystery. There have been numerous nasty and costly terrorist attacks since but none on the 9/11 scale. There is a danger of sounding callous when observing that none of Mumbai in 2008 (166 killed), Paris in 2015 (130), Sri Lanka 2019 (269) come even close to 9/11 (2,976).

Two types of terrorism have emerged since OVERT in 2006.

The first was ‘urban siege’, ‘swarm’ or ‘rampaging’ terrorism which we first saw at Mumbai in 2008 and the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in 2013 (which killed 71). This is an effective form of terrorism because it captures press attention for hours (62 hours in the case of Mumbai) and makes prompt armed response extremely difficult. However it is also costly for the terrorists who are nearly always killed or captured and their supporting organisations and states identified. The Indians were relentlessly successful in following up the Mumbai attack although the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba still exists and represent a significant threat to regional peace.

The second (and now the most common) is ‘lone wolf’ terrorism committed usually by lone (and lonely) young men who have become self-radicalised online in their bedrooms and take the family car or a kitchen knife and seek to kill as many people as possible. The problem with this second type is that it is almost indistinguishable from wider mental health problems brought about by social isolation. It risks a substantial drain on the precious resources of security services which need to be focussing on strategic threats (such as those posed by Russia, Iran and China as well as terrorist groups).

In terms of mass casualties only one is comparable with 9/11; the brutal Hamas incursion into southern Israel on 7th October 2023. As a proportion of Israel’s population it is probably the most lethal terrorist attack in history. But there the comparison ends. The attack involved guns, knives and grenades; a far cry from the use of aircraft as a weapon against a ground-based target.

Aircraft and their passengers have often been targets before, notably PanAm 103 at Lockerbie in 1988 (270 deaths), UTA flight 772 the following year over Niger (170) and the often-forgotten Air India flight 182 off the Irish coast in 1985 (329). But in each case the aircraft and passengers were the target rather than the means of delivery against an objective on the ground. 25 years after 9/11 one would have expected to have seen several similar attacks using aircraft against buildings or (even worse) against stadiums full of spectators.

Why has this not happened?

Precautions taken by airlines should take some credit. Cockpit doors have been strengthened and protocols have been largely enforced although there are signs of laxness creeping back in.

Security services have used bulk data to identify suspicious trends and plots early. Artificial Intelligence will help here. It is now much harder for terrorists to operate as groups.

And the US military, their intelligence services and allies wreaked considerable damage on both AQ and Islamic State (IS) from 2001 through until 2019.

So was 9/11 a one off rather than (as we feared) the start of a new trend? It is still too early to say. Motivation for terrorism remains strong (especially following the destruction of Gaza since October 2023). The advances in drone technology in Ukraine since 2022 could provide terrorists with an effective means of delivery at a time when counter-measures are still in their infancy. And AI could enable terrorists to research and develop lethal payloads.

As we remember 9/11 it is still too early to elcome the absence of a successful repeat during that costly quarter century.

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/terrorism-less-existential-threat-russia-and-china

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leviathan-Oxford-Worlds-Classics-Thomas/dp/0199537283

https://docs.un.org/en/S/2026/651

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/british-and-911-so-near-and-yet-so-far

https://www.cwccoalition.org/events/anniversaries/tokyosubwaysarinattack30th/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45354548

https://ctc.westpoint.edu/reevaluating-al-qaidas-weapons-of-mass-destruction-capabilities/

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-agonizing-problem-of-pakistans-nukes/

https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/911-investigation

https://www.rusi.org/publication/terrorism-and-crowded-places-lessons-mumbai

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/heres-why-the-next-clash-between-india-and-pakistan-could-be-even-more-dangerous

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-66909820

https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/25-years-after-911-next-global-shock-could-be-infinitely-worse

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Twenty-Five Years Later, Remembering 9/11

**Published:** September 11, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/twenty-five-years-later-remembering-9-11.md

In “Aftermath,” a 1919 retrospective poem on his war, Siegfried Sassoon asked: “Have you forgotten yet?” “Look up,” he appealed, “and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.” With the approach of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I have been reflecting on that terrible day and how we remember it. Specifically, I was comparing how we recall it with how we recall the only other comparable event in American history: Pearl Harbor. Admittedly, I was only nine years old in 1966 on the 25th anniversary of that attack and have no specific recall of December 7th of that year. But I do have clear memories of the atmosphere of that time and the tone that pervaded Americans’ collective honoring of the courage and sacrifice of those who fought in the Second World War. And I must admit being a bit unsettled by the comparison.

Even in an era of rising protest over the war in Vietnam, the vast majority of Americans commemorated the dead from the global conflict that preceded it and honored the veterans of it who walked among them. And perhaps that is part of the difference. Some 12.2 percent out of a total population of about 135 million 135 million—about one in eight Americans—donned their country’s uniforms during World War Two. There was scarcely an American family that did not have at least one member who served. In contrast, about five million Americans served in the post-9/11 era. Even when one adds to that total the relatively small numbers of Americans from Other Government Agencies such as CIA who served alongside them, this amounts to only some 0.9 percent of the U.S. population. Many Americans do not even know anyone who served. Indeed, all too many of our countrymen don’t seem to know much about 9/11, much less the twenty years of war thereafter.

Perhaps this dearth of knowledge is reflective of the state of the teaching of history and civics in our schools. But I suspect there are other factors at work. The first is an apparent reluctance on the part of sizeable swaths of the media to present to Americans, many of whom came of age after 9/11, the brutal realities of that day in the form of video of the attacks and their aftermath. The second is a seeming reluctance on the part of some public personalities to correctly portray what occurred, using phrases such as “some people did something” to describe the terrorists and the attack they carried out. We have even seen a few who outrageously assert that our country deserved 9/11.

Such perspectives were anathema to the post-Second World War era. My professor of ancient military history while I was at Valley Forge Military Academy, for example, had no such qualms in unequivocally characterizing the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor as what it was and attributing responsibility for it. A veteran of the Pacific War, when he wanted to hit us with a pop quiz, he announced it by pinning his souvenir Japanese battle flag—riddled with bullet holes and stained with blood—up on the blackboard. The response of an Agency case officer to criticism by a Japanese diplomat’s wife of our decision to use the atomic bomb is likewise instructive. “Well, Madame,” he said, “you shouldn’t have sunk our damned ships.” Such incidents might seem insensitive to some today, but they are indicative of how that generation saw that infamous day.

Another reason for this seeming reluctance to speak to the realities of 9/11 and what came thereafter is the characterization by some of the actions undertaken by the U.S., and particularly by CIA, as somehow dishonorable if not illegal. Although we had, in fact, been told those actions were lawful, I can clearly recall discussions with colleagues at the time wherein all involved understood there was a risk - if not a likelihood - that others looking at those actions years later would judge us harshly. Yet my colleagues had the courage to act nonetheless. It is worth noting that some of the harshest critics of the Agency’s actions after 9/11 were the same political leaders who had been fully briefed on, and supported, those actions at the time.

Finally, there is the way it all ended. The disgraceful flight of the U.S. from Afghanistan was driven by a cynical attempt to politically exploit a withdrawal by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It left a bad taste in the mouths of many Americans, not least among those who had given so much during twenty years of war. There was no signing ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri. But that end does not obviate what they accomplished. Nor does it dim the heroism they, like the first responders who rushed into mortal peril on 9/11, repeatedly displayed.

The men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces and other government agencies ran towards the sound of the guns after that terrible day in September. They deserve our lasting gratitude. In my own Agency, the two decades after 9/11 was a time of both victories and losses. Our successes can be measured by what did not happen. There was no large-scale follow-up terrorist attack on our country on the scale of 9/11 as was feared in its immediate wake. In a years-long—indeed ongoing—battle against jihadi terror, my colleagues and our military counterparts degraded our enemies’ ability to mount operations against the U.S. and its allies and delivered justice to the murderous architects of 9/11. The sanctimonious preening of critics of our actions after 9/11 cannot obviate the fact that we would not have prevented such an attack or gotten to Abbottabad without them.

The cost of those successes was steep. I have seen this as the number of stars on the wall in the lobby of our Headquarters Building has grown over the last twenty-five years. Just as the 2,977 souls taken on 9/11 must be remembered, we must keep all those who sacrificed their lives and bodies in the conflicts that followed in our hearts. “No day,” the inscription adapted from Virgil’s Aeneid on the National September 11 Memorial reads, “shall erase you from the memory of time.” We must do all we can to see to it that the generations born after 9/11 know its history, understand its significance and embrace their legacy.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### The Battle for Decision Autonomy, The New Front in Strategic Competition

**Published:** September 11, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-battle-for-decision-autonomy-the-new-front-in-strategic-competition.md

This is the talk Dave Pitts gave at the Sarajevo Security Conference in September 2026, which was based on the talk presented at the Cognitive Security Institute Conference in August 2026. Dave has identified Decision Autonomy as a key battle in the cognitive domain and a new front in strategic competition.

In 2022, Russia expected Ukraine’s political leadership to fracture in the face of pervasive disinformation, subversion, efforts to decapitate the government and to persuade Russian-speaking Ukrainians to support Russia. It expected fear, confusion, and chaos to result in surrender, flight, or capitulation. There was one problem—Ukraine resisted.

President Zelensky's refusal to flee, combined with unified military and civilian resistance—critical decisions—enabled Ukraine to hold in those critical early hours and days. How did such a small number of people resist such extraordinary pressure and make such consequential decisions?

In 2024, a mature Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, a major producer of artillery shells for Ukraine, was discovered and disrupted by German and Western intelligence. More recently, German reporting described a suspected Russian-linked plot against Stefan Thumann of Donaustahl, a German drone producer supporting Ukraine.

What could those plots have achieved if successful? What did they actually achieve?

Russian drone incursions, airspace violations, political interference, cyberattacks, undersea cable cutting, GPS jamming, forced migration, sabotage, assassination, and attacks on critical infrastructure—several things have become increasingly clear. Russia’s gray zone attacks have increased since it invaded Ukraine. They have become more brazen, more lethal and more destructive—and spread across an increasing number of European countries.

The real question behind these attacks is why Russia is doing this. There are some obvious answers, but do we have it right?

America directly—and many countries indirectly—face a strategic challenge in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s attempts to control the flow of vital global energy as leverage in its conflict with the United States and Israel have created a wicked strategic decision point. Iran’s concurrent attacks on its neighbors may also serve as decision accelerants, compressing the time available to assess options and increasing pressure to act.

What decisions are possible and potentially effective? What are the risks and consequences of each option? And, perhaps most importantly, how much influence over that decision does Iran have?

No single human capacity is more powerful—or more vulnerable—than the ability to make decisions. Throughout history and continuing today, human decision-making has remained a target of those who seek to control the choices of others.

The ability—and the autonomy—to make decisions, from the ordinary choices of everyday life to the most consequential decisions of war and peace, makes us uniquely human. We instinctively resist—and, if necessary, fight—as individuals, groups, and nations when others seek to control our choices, think for us, or suppress this core human capacity.

At first glance, these stories seem completely unrelated.

A President fighting for his nation’s survival
Targeted assassinations of defense executives
Sabotage across the cities of Europe
A high-stakes standoff in the Strait of Hormuz.

They aren't.

They're four stories about the same thing: Decision autonomy. Different actors. Different circumstances. Different outcomes. One framework.

What is Decision Autonomy?

Decision Autonomy is our individual and collective ability to accurately see the world around us, to trust the knowledge we have and the information we receive, and to make independent, confident decisions based on our own judgment. “I decide—we decide.” To be clear, this is about all of us—citizens, private sector leaders, military commanders and officials, and policymakers.

It’s not a perfect state, it isn’t binary, and it exists on a spectrum. Individuals, organizations, and nations are constantly moving along this spectrum—sometimes toward greater autonomy, and sometimes toward greater vulnerability to external pressure.

In the middle of that spectrum is Decision Malleability—a state in which decision autonomy becomes increasingly susceptible to external influences. We see reality less clearly, cognitive clarity erodes, judgment is increasingly influenced, and decisions are increasingly shaped by external pressures.

At the far end of that spectrum is Decision Compromise—a state in which external influences have displaced or constrained independent judgment, resulting in the loss of decision autonomy. Reality is distorted, cognitive clarity is lost, independent judgment is displaced, and decisions are no longer fully your own.

Our adversaries understand this. They don't have to completely compromise our decision-making to succeed. They simply have to move us toward greater decision malleability—just enough to delay a decision, divide an organization, increase uncertainty, create hesitation, or influence a false choice.

If we accept that the ultimate objective of cognitive warfare is to undermine, degrade, and compromise decision autonomy, then understanding what our adversaries are doing to achieve that goal is important. This battle—the battle for Decision Autonomy—is becoming the new front in strategic competition.

What external pressures are our adversaries using in this battle? There are many, but I want to focus on four primary pathways.

First—deception. Deception distorts our understanding of the world around us—reality itself—by persuading us that false realities are real, to doubt the truth we actually see, or simply misperceive the environment in which we are making decisions. What does deception sound like?

“Ukraine is run by Nazis.”

“We are not attacking you—we are protecting you.”

“They started it.”

“Joining NATO would be a hostile act.”

Second—manipulation. Manipulation influences our judgment by exploiting our emotions, identities, biases, and motivations, steering how we evaluate information and the decisions we make. Fear, anger, exhaustion, hopelessness, or hope can override deliberate reasoning. What does manipulation sound like?

“The West doesn’t respect who you are.”

“America will abandon you.”

“China offers a future that NATO can’t.”

“Why should those from outside the region tell you how to run your country?”

Third—coercion. Coercion constrains our freedom to choose by threatening or imposing unacceptable consequences if we do not make the decision our adversaries desire. The logic is simple: “you do X and we’ll respond forcefully.” What does coercion sound like?

“Join and we will take action.”

“Recognize Taiwan and there will be consequences.”

“Support our enemies and your interests will not be safe.”

“Advance our interests in the region or lose access to our markets.”

Fourth—cognitive overload. Cognitive overload overwhelms our ability to think clearly and rationally by exceeding our capacity to process information, evaluate competing narratives, and anticipate the consequences of our decisions. What does cognitive overload feel like?

“An endless stream of conflicting narratives.”

“One video says one thing—another says the opposite.”

“Experts disagree.”

“Anonymous sources contradict official sources.”

“Too many decisions, too much information, too little certainty, too little time.”

Our adversaries seek to create cognitive overload; our objective is to preserve cognitive clarity.

Cognitive clarity isn’t merely the absence of confusion. It’s the ability to remain intellectually focused, emotionally composed, and deliberately engaged despite uncertainty, complexity, competing information, information overload, and attempts to shape judgment.

In terms of these decision states, let’s test the framework against the five examples I opened with.

In Ukraine, President Zelensky and Ukraine maintained decision autonomy. They held firmly to reality, resisted deception, manipulation, and coercion, and made independent decisions despite extraordinary pressure. In this case, decision autonomy prevailed.

Russia’s assassination plots failed to remove key decision makers or undermine support for Ukraine. In fact, exposure of the plots appears to have had the opposite effect—hardening political resolve, increasing intelligence collaboration, strengthening protective measures around critical industrial leaders, and prompting defense companies to increase production. In this case, exposing Russia’s deception sharpened the view of reality and strengthened decision autonomy rather than degrading it.

Russia’s sabotage campaign has been heavy and costly. It is hard to assess if decision autonomy has been degraded. What is clear is that shared operational awareness has increased, defense collaboration is on the rise, an awareness that Russia favors Endless Warfare over peace is settling in, and a goal of shared strategic deterrence has emerged. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that an adversary can create enormous pressure without necessarily achieving decision compromise.

Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has revealed the limitations of conventional military power against an adversary employing gray and asymmetric warfare methods. More importantly, it demonstrates how even a superpower finds its decision space constrained by a committed adversary.

The U.S. and its allies are moving along the decision continuum as they seek a decision to resolve this crisis. The question is whether this movement along the continuum reflects normal strategic decision-making under pressure—or a degradation of decision autonomy.

All these examples identify five key points that can protect decision autonomy:

Protect reality.
Seek evidence. Challenge assumptions. Verify before believing.

Preserve independent judgment.
Don't outsource your thinking to algorithms, echo chambers, crowds, or even experts that speak at conferences.

Maintain cognitive clarity.
Slow down. Reduce noise. Watch for fatigue, anger, urgency, despair, and overload.

Recognize and resist coercion.
“Am I choosing this—or am I being pressured into it?”

Continuously assess your decision autonomy.
Where am I on the continuum right now—autonomy, malleability, or compromise?

Is this relevant to the great power competition we all play a role in today?

Imagine these same pathways—deception, manipulation, coercion, and cognitive overload—employed deliberately and systematically by our adversaries over years or even decades, supported by intelligence services, state media, proxies, cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, economic leverage, and military power. Scale changes everything.

Let’s talk about Russia, China, and Iran. All three countries use all four pathways, but each tends to emphasize them differently.

Russia has increasingly adopted a strategy of persistent confrontation with the West. It recognizes that it cannot match the United States, NATO, and its allies across every dimension of national power, so it competes asymmetrically and in the Gray Zone.

Russia seeks advantage by increasing uncertainty, delaying decisions, dividing alliances, employing proxies, and raising the perceived costs of action. It exploits negotiations to shift blame, abruptly change positions, and weaponize deception, delay, and distraction.

Russia understands that it doesn't have to defeat its adversaries militarily if it can influence their decisions before military force is ever employed. Deception and coercion define its approach.

Deception through disinformation, false narratives, active measures, and reflexive control.

Coercion through nuclear signaling, red lines, energy leverage, sabotage, assassination, and intimidation.

For China, patience is a strategic weapon. Rather than seeking to influence a single decision, China seeks to shape the long-term decision environment so that decisions favorable to Beijing gradually become the norm and ultimately viewed as being in the target's own interest.

As leading foreign policy expert Elizabeth Economy has observed, “China is executing a patient, multi-decade campaign to dominate the "new frontiers of power"—a continuous effort to set conditions, rewrite rules, and erode Western advantages below the threshold of open conflict.

Manipulation and coercion define this approach.”

Manipulation through United Front activities, influence operations, elite networks, and weaponized narratives.

Coercion through economic leverage, market access, technology dependence, sanctions, military expansion, and aggressive maritime tactics.

Iran views its struggle against the West as enduring and existential. Rather than seeking decisive military victory against stronger powers, it relies on persistent gray-zone competition, asymmetric warfare, and proxies to preserve regime security while constraining the decision of its adversaries.

Iran seeks to narrow the choices of the U.S. and its regional allies—"accommodate its interests or accept an unending and costly regional conflict.”

Manipulation and coercion define its approach.

Manipulation through ideological narratives, proxy media, and the exploitation of political divisions, sectarian identities, and regional instability.

Coercion through threats to global energy supplies, proxy violence, direct attacks on neighbors, hostage-taking, and terrorism.

Although their approaches differ, all three share a common objective: to shape how we perceive reality, exercise judgment, and ultimately make decisions that advance their interests over our own.

Of course, our adversaries still try to shape specific beliefs, but the longer-term payoff comes from shaping the conditions under which those beliefs form—to keep us consistently closer to Decision Malleability on issues most important to them.

So, what do we do about it? Let me close with what I believe are the human foundations of cognitive security—protecting cognition and decision autonomy.

This is often where we start talking about structural fixes—new organizations, whole-of-government approaches, media literacy, and technology. Some may be necessary; some remain aspirational. But I'd like to leave that conversation for another day and focus on the more human side of cognitive security: protecting cognition and decision autonomy.

Today, a clear view of reality can resemble a wilderness of mirrors—seeing isn't believing. If adversaries can replace facts with disinformation and synthetic realities, they gain a decision advantage.

Most of us have too many sources of information flooding our professional and private lives—I certainly do. It is easy to rely on so-called experts, chatbots, social media, comfortable echo chambers, and ubiquitous algorithms to do our thinking for us. It can become a blissful rut. When we knowingly or unknowingly cede judgment and decision space to others—we begin to lose decision autonomy.

We are living in a cognitive storm—a chaotic and unreliable global information environment where a single operator with a laptop can reach millions at the speed of global communications, where countless media sources are almost impossible to vet in real time, and where adversaries deploy AI-enabled networks of surrogates, fake sites, cybercriminals, hacktivists, and bots to target all of us and our institutions. It is easy to feel overwhelmed.

Russia, China, Iran, and even North Korea use redlines, threats and intimidation as tools of persuasion. The fear of escalation can be powerful, and our adversaries will seek to use coercion to move us along the continuum toward malleability and compromise. Coercion changes how we see the cost of our decisions and what we are willing to risk.

Our goal is to recognize coercion for what it is and not allow the fear of consequences—real or manufactured—to become the basis for our decisions.

We do have to accept certain things.

We cannot eliminate deception.

We cannot eliminate manipulation.

We cannot eliminate coercion.

We cannot eliminate cognitive overload.

But before making our most consequential decisions—in a military command post, a policy meeting, during a crisis, or in negotiations with our adversaries—we can stop—and ask four questions. I call this the Decision Autonomy Diagnostic: four questions to instantly evaluate where you stand on the continuum.

Do I accurately see and understand the world around me?

or - Do I know what’s true?

Am I evaluating the information objectively, or is something shaping my judgment?

or - Can I recognize manipulation?

Have I preserved cognitive clarity despite uncertainty, complexity, and overload?

or- Can I still think and deliberate clearly?

Can I decide independently despite external pressures?

or - Can I resist false threats and real pressure?

Finally, decision autonomy is ultimately about sovereignty. For nations, sovereignty is the freedom to determine their own future without external influence or interference—self-determination.

For individuals, decision autonomy is the expression of that same principle—personal sovereignty—the freedom to see reality clearly, exercise independent judgment, and make decisions that remain our own. Sovereignty gives us the right to decide. Decision Autonomy gives us the ability to decide.

No human capacity is more powerful—or more vulnerable—than our ability to make decisions—as individuals, as people, as nations—together, we must go to great lengths to protect it.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Friday, September 11, 2026

**Published:** September 11, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-friday-september-11-2026.md



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### Global Intelligence Report for Thursday, September 10, 2026

**Published:** September 10, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-thursday-september-10-2026.md



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### China’s Challenge to Western Alliances

**Published:** September 10, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/chinas-challenge-to-western-alliances.md

At the 25th anniversary session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an alternative model to Western alliances.

Mr. Xi urged developing nations and the Global South to leverage “SCO wisdom” to argue for a more equitable and orderly multipolar world and reform of global governance institutions like the United Nations. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, and other guest delegations were in attendance for this anniversary session of the SCO.

The 26th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the SCO convened on September 1, 2026, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Leaders from the 10 member states (China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus and the four Central Asian nations) signed the Bishkek Declaration and 13 other documents dealing with security, technology and anti-drug cooperation.

Mr. Xi committed China to provide localized technical projects, collaboration on Artificial Intelligence with SCO member countries and alignment through the Belt and Road initiative (BRI), a massive global and economic strategy proposed by Mr. Xi in 2013. (The BRI, with 146 member states, seeks to link Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America through a network of ports, railways, roads, and energy pipelines. The World Bank and other studies claim that BRI transport projects have lowered trade costs, integrated developing regions into global supply chains, increased local GDPs and lifted millions out of moderate poverty. Critics claim that aggressive, large-scale lending by Chinese state banks have saddled several developing nations with heavy external debt burdens).

Mr. Xi talks about alternatives to Western alliances and creating multipolar institutions, an appealing message to developing nations and the Global South.

It is ironic, however, that two of the 10 members of the SCO, Russia and Iran, are pariah states. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, despite security guarantees provided to Ukraine after they sent all their nuclear warheads to Russia; and Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism that, in 1999, 2009, 2019, 2022, and 2026, killed thousands of peaceful protesters.

A new alliance between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan – the Mecca Defense Alliance – was established in August 2026. Indeed, this is an unprecedented alliance of three U.S. allies’ intent on building a security architecture independent of the U.S.

The BRICS (Brazil, Rusia, India China, and South Africa), formed in 2006, has 11 members, with more than 30 countries that either applied or expressed interest in becoming a member.

It appears that Mr. Xi’s exhortations for a more multipolar war resonates with several developing countries and the Global South, despite the inclusion of Russia and Iran in the SCO and BRICS.

Mr. Xi is competing with several U.S. led international organizations: the QUAD (Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.), AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.), and NATO. Indeed, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was established in April 1949. It’s mission: to safeguard the freedom and security of all 32 member countries through diplomacy and military means. Article 5 of the NATO charter is clear: An armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all of them.

Any real or perceived tension between the U.S. and member countries within NATO, the QUAD or AUKUS will make Mr. Xi’s efforts to create “an orderly multipolar world”, with China in the lead, more attractive to developing countries and the Global South.

The U.S. has played a global leadership role after World War II. The Marshall Plan, established by the U.S. in 1948, provided $13 billion to help rebuild Western European economies.

And it was U.S. leadership in 1949 that established NATO.

Our allies and partners continue to look to the U.S. for this type of global leadership. And developing countries and the Global South should be looking to the U.S. as the democratic leader they should emulate and work with.

The author is a former Associate Director of National Intelligence. All statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government.

This piece was originally published in The Washington Times.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Russia’s AI Blueprint Exposes an Authoritarian Playbook

**Published:** September 10, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/russias-ai-blueprint-exposes-an-authoritarian-playbook.md

Russia, China, and Iran are all sharing the same playbook for corrupting Western elections. The United States is on track to be the next target this November.

A troveof Russian documents leaked in May outlines Moscow’s plans to use AI to warp foreign decision-making and sway elections. The Kremlin’s “Projects 2026” strategy reveals Russia’s plot to influence upcoming elections in Europe and Israel. Their tactics are similar to those used by China and Iran for years, and what emerges isn’t a Russian innovation — it’s a shared authoritarian playbook.

Projects 2026 calls for the creation of an opinion leader database to monitor the social media profiles of 10,000 influential individuals across Europe, including the 100 most prominent opposition figures in France alone. This is precisely the model Chinese state-aligned company GoLaxy piloted against the United States in 2025. The firm reportedly built constantly evolving psychological profiles of 117 members of Congress and roughly 2,000 additional American opinion leaders.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University warned that GoLaxy appeared prepared to target these individuals with messaging aligned with Beijing’s priorities. By monitoring the social media profiles of Western leaders, China and Russia are able to map the target’s values, beliefs, emotional tendencies, and vulnerabilities, making their influence operations more tailored and impactful.

In addition to using AI to build psychological profiles, the authoritarian playbook calls for countries like Russia and Iran to flood their targets with tailored generative AI content. Projects 2026’s “AI News” initiative calls for producing more than 500 short videos to target French audiences across six social media platforms. This tactic mirrors Iranian information operations during the 2025 and 2026 wars with Israel and the United States, when pro-Iranian networks pushed AI-generated and AI-assisted videos tailored to different audiences across X and TikTok, which racked up millions of views. These countries are running highly productive propaganda engines.

The most durable piece of Projects 2026 isn’t the content at all — it’s the plan to create fictitious think tanks and research institutes that can hand Russian narratives a “legitimate information source,” making them more likely to be cited by real news outlets and large language models. The leak shows this already underway: A site called the “World Center for Strategic Studies,” registered in March 2026, published unsigned analysis aimed at Western think tank audiences, with versions planned in German, French, and Spanish. The fake think tank doesn’t need to fool a discerning reader. It needs to get quoted, indexed permanently, and cited by the next AI model that goes looking for sources on the topic.

Iran ran a cruder version of this same play: Iranian state-sponsored cyber espionage groups have repeatedly impersonated real institutions — such as the Royal United Services Institute, the Aspen Institute, and the Washington Institute — to steal credentials and plant material under a trusted name. Projects 2026 proposes something more sustainable: Don’t just hijack existing credibility but manufacture new institutions and let them accrue it over time.

Projects 2026 also proposes building a real Israel-based research institute staffed by Israeli citizens with genuine academic credentials. This approach is reminiscent of the 2014 “Iran Expert Initiative,” where Iranian Foreign Ministry officials attempted to court and influence Western think tank researchers to promote their perspectives and give them legitimacy. Emails leaked in 2023 showed that Iranian diplomats had worked with Western experts across 10 think tanks to aggressively tout the merits of the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and major world powers, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

In the age of AI, influencing think tanks is narrative laundering at its most dangerous. Once a fabricated or state-aligned source gets cited by a legitimate outlet or indexed by a search engine, it can become part of the training and retrieval corpus that AI systems draw upon.

While the plays are reusable, the targets are new, and for Russia, the target is European elections.

The leaked documents outline a plan to swing Armenia’s parliamentary vote through a Russian-diaspora outlet and a “Mitteleuropa” initiative aimed at reshaping alignments in Hungary and Slovakia. This is where the surveillance, flooding, and laundering modules converge. To counter it, policy solutions must be swift and targeted.

First, allied governments should require disclosure of foreign funding and foreign state links for any media outlet, think tank, or “research institute” operating ahead of an election in an at-risk state — closing exactly the gap that lets a “World Center for Strategic Studies” pass as domestic and independent. Research by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) into Qatari money in American higher education shows what a real transparency regimen requires: disclosures reaching individual researchers, not just institutions; low reporting thresholds with real penalties; registration in the style of the Foreign Agents Registration Act for state-directed “institutes” masquerading as independent organizations; and provisions against the kind of obstruction Qatar used to block Texas A&M’s funding records in court. Russia is proposing to build the same laundering vehicle in Europe that Gulf money has already normalized in American academia. The fix already exists — it just needs to be strengthened.

Second, platforms should both demonetize and remove unlabeled AI-generated political content during designated pre-election windows in at-risk states. X’s own emergency policy during the Iran war, which suspended digital influencers’ ability to monetize their content for 90 days on undisclosed AI-generated war footage, shows platforms already have the infrastructure to act fast when the stakes are high enough. But demonetization alone left the content up and circulating; independent researchers found AI-generated war footage kept flooding feeds regardless of the policy. Elections warrant a harder line: If posts feature undisclosed AI-generated content during an active election period, they shouldn’t just lose ad revenue. They should come down.

Third, Washington should prepare for future attempts at election influence by boosting the protection mechanisms it already has in place. Currently, 31 states have passed election deepfake laws, but they are under legal scrutiny because they touch on domestic speech. Federal action targeting foreign actors rests on firm ground. The 2002 McCain-Feingold Act prevents electioneering communications by foreign actors, but this only applies to broadcast, cable, and satellite communications. It must be updated to explicitly include paid internet and digital advertisements. It should also close the gap on AI-generated political content and require labeling so that foreign deepfakes can’t hide behind current ambiguities.

Projects 2026 is not evidence that Russia has cracked something new. It’s evidence that Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are now running the same AI playbook against the same democracies, taking turns testing which module works best. The future outlined in Projects 2026 may not be here yet, but objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Leah Siskind is director of impact and an AI research fellow for the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Leah and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### The War You Don’t See: How Russia, China & Iran Are Targeting America

**Published:** September 9, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-war-you-dont-see-how-russia-china-iran-are-targeting-america.md



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### The Gulf Bought Its Air Defense From Kyiv. We Sold Them The Radar.

**Published:** September 9, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-gulf-bought-its-air-defense-from-kyiv-we-sold-them-the-radar.md

Chief Warrant Officer 5 (Ret.) Joey Gagnard concluded nearly three decades of service in the U.S. military, retiring from the special operations community in early 2025. He serves as CEO of Atlas Special Projects and Director of Field Operations at Swarmer.

Disclosure: Atlas Special Projects leads investor delegations to Ukraine and maintains working relationships with Ukrainian drone manufacturers, some of which would benefit from the arrangements argued for below. The argument is my own.

Welcome to The Iron Triangle, the Cipher Brief column serving Procurement Officers tasked with buying the future, Investors funding the next generation of defense technology, and the Policy Wonks analyzing its impact on the global order.

Riyadh, spring 2026. Between February 28 and the April 8 ceasefire, Iran put roughly 6,400 missiles and drones into the Gulf states and Jordan, more than eighty percent of everything it fired at anyone. Six countries fought six separate wars against one coordinated adversary, with no shared early warning and interceptor stockpiles that ran thin in days. An Iranian drone struck a tactical operations center in Kuwait and killed six Americans.

Three suppliers answered the same incoming fire. Here is the ledger.

The United States answered with paper. Over $36.6 billion in Foreign Military Sales notifications to the Middle East in a single quarter, headlined by 730 PAC-3 MSE missiles to Saudi Arabia for $9 billion. That is a little over $12 million per round, aimed at a Shahed that costs about as much as a used pickup, on a delivery schedule measured in years.

Ukraine answered with people. Washington asked Kyiv on a Thursday to send interceptor teams to protect American bases in Jordan, and Kyiv said yes the same day. Within weeks about two hundred Ukrainian advisors were on the ground in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE with interceptors that Ukraine sells for between $800 and $3,000 and builds at two thousand a day. Days after the Jordan request, the President went on Fox News Radio and said, “We don’t need their help in drone defense. We know more about drones than anybody.”

Turkey answered with a delivery date. Kuwait signed a government-to-government protocol with Aselsan, Havelsan, and Baykar for Hisar and Korkut air defense, and Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi opened their own talks with Ankara, because Turkey could put hardware on a ramp this decade and the American backlog for Patriot and THAAD runs to several years.

Then, on March 27, Saudi Arabia signed a ten-year defense partnership with Ukraine built around counter-drone technology and co-production facilities on Saudi soil. Qatar signed two days later. The UAS followed in April. Ten years each, minimum.

So the outcome of America’s largest arms-sales quarter in memory is that our closest Gulf partners now buy their sensors from us and their answer to the actual threat from Kyiv and Ankara. We sold them the radar. Somebody else sold them the thing that shoots.

Expensive Confetti

The arithmetic is not subtle, and the Gulf did it faster than we did. Iran can turn out hundreds of Shaheds a week. The U.S. builds roughly six hundred Patriot interceptors a year, for the whole world, with a waiting list. A Patriot battery is a good answer to a question Iran stopped asking in about 2019.

The Ukrainian answer is a different species. The Wild Hornets Sting costs about $2,500, flies at 195 miles an hour, fits in a duffel bag, and has killed nearly 4,000 Russian drones since may 2025. The SkyFall P1-SUN costs about $1,000, flies at 280 miles per hour, and took down 1,500 Shaheds in its first four months. One Ukrainian firm sold a thousand of them for $3.5 million, total, which is less than a third of one PAC-3 round. More than twenty Ukrainian companies now build interceptors and the Octopus alone is licensed to fifteen of them.

None of this makes the Patriot obsolete. Interceptor drones do not touch ballistic missiles ,and the 6,400 included plenty. But the Gulf learned in six weeks what Ukraine learned in three years: you defend against a thousand cheap things with two thousand cheaper things, and you save the twelve-million-dollar round for what it was built to hit.

Built in Munich

Here is the detail that turns the Gulf story into an Iron Triangle story. The Pentagon has bought exactly one interceptor with a Ukrainian combat record. In May, Joint Interagency Task Force 401 gave Perennial Autonomy, Eric Schmidt’s company, a three-year, $500 million ceiling for the Merops interceptor, a fifteen-thousand-dollar fixed-wing that has downed more than 4,000 Russian drones over Ukraine. It is the right buy. It is also built in Germany, through a partnership with Munich’s Twentyfour Industries.

The American flag interceptor, proven in Ukraine, bought by the Pentagon for the homeland, is made in Bavaria. This is not a scandal. It is a symptom. The design talent is in Kyiv, the production tooling is in Europe, and the one thing that has to be in the United States, the contract, is the only part we have managed to put here.

Meanwhile the July agreement that lets Ukraine sell to the Pentagon for the first time since 2022 approves six Ukrainian companies to ship about one hundred drones for testing under Drone DOminance, and contemplates, someday, Ukrainian production on American soil. One hundred drones. Kyiv ships that many to Riyadh before the coffee is brewed.

What an American Flag Would Actually Mean

Not an American airframe. That race is over; twenty Ukrainian firms iterate faster than any American line will for years, and pretending otherwise is how we ended up with a hundred test articles and a factory in Munich. The American contribution is the three things nobody else at the table can bring.

The first is the kill chain. An interceptor without a sensor network is expensive confetti with a propeller. Ukraine’s cheap drones work because they fly under a national acoustic and radar mesh that took three years to build. The Gulf has no such thing; the after-action reports say so. Turkey cannot integrate Korkut with Patriot and THAAD. The United States owns IBCS, the LTAMDS radars Kuwait just bought eight of for $8 billion, and the $4.5 billion discrimination radar the UAE is buying for THAAD. The offer writes itself: your thousand-dollar Ukrainian interceptor gets cued by our eight-billion-dollar sensor layer. That is the flag.

The second is the paper. Licensed co-production under FMS is a forty-year-old tool. Abrams in Egypt. F-16 in Turkey. Patriot itself in Japan. The structure is a trilateral: Ukrainian design and Ukrainian intellectual property, Gulf capital and final assembly to satisfy Vision 2030 localization, American components, integration, and the FMS wrapper that turns a purchase into a security relationship. The UK has already proven the licensing half, building Octopus interceptors in Britain at a thousand a month and sending them back to Ukraine.

The third is reciprocity. Kyiv’s own ask was one sentence: “We can help you fight against Shaheds. Help us fight against ballistic missiles.” Gulf money buys the interceptor line. A slice of the PAC-3 allocation that the Gulf money is already funding flows to Ukraine. Stings for Patriots. Three countries get what they cannot build, and the United States is the reason it happens.

What It Has Not Happened

Every obstacle is one I have written about before, which is the depressing part.

Start with ITAR. The moment a Ukrainian design is produced by an American licensee with American controlled content, it becomes ITAR-controlled, its re-export to Riyadh needs a DDTC license, and Kyiv loses the freedom to sell the same design to Oslo. Ukrainian founders already decline to domicile intellectual property here for exactly this reason. The fix is the one I argued for in July: a trusted-trader tier, or an AUKUS-style exemption scoped to the trilateral, with the IP staying in Kyiv and the United States as licensee rather than owner.

Then the parts bin. A thousand-dollar P1-SUN is a thousand-dollar P1-SUN because of Chinese motors, cells, and cameras. Under an American flag it must clear NDAA Section 848 and, if the Department of War is the buyer of record, the Blue UAS list. The cost of making the interceptor American is not the airframe. It is the audit and the re-sourcing, and nobody in the building has priced how much of the thousand dollars survives that. Turkey does not have this problem. That is the entire reason Turkey is winning the Gulf.

Then tempo. Ukraine signed three Gulf deals in about three weeks. FMS notification to first delivery is measured in Congressional recesses. Either the trilateral runs on Direct Commercial Sales with expedited licensing, or it is a press release.

And then the politics, which I will state once and then be finished. The Commander in Chief said we do not need their help days after his own government asked for it, and the Pentagon spent the spring resisting broader cooperation. The Gulf hosts Russian diplomacy. Kyiv keeps state control over exports, with its own forces first in line. None of these are fatal. All of them are real.

For the Procurement Officer. Your requirement is not an interceptor. It is a kill chain that accepts an interceptor you did not design. Write the sensor and command-and-control interface as the requirement and let the airframe compete, or you will spend the next POM cycle buying an American drone that arrives in 2029.

The Investment Thesis. The value in this market is not in the airframe and it never was. It is in the integration layer, the domestic component that lets a Ukrainian design survive Section 848. And the licensing paper. The company that can take a thousand-dollar Kyiv design and hand the Pentagon an American-compliant unit at two thousand, on a line this side of the Atlantic, is worth more than the company that designs the next one.

The Policy Wonk’s Warning. The security guarantee is being unbundled from the hardware. For seventy years those were the same product. Our partners are learning they can buy the guarantee from us and the shooting from someone else, and the day they discover they can buy the sensors elsewhere too, the guarantee is just a speech.

My Take. I have been in the room in Kyiv when founders explain, patiently, why they will not bring their IP to America. It is not ingratitude. It is that our export regime treats an ally’s design as a hostage the moment it touches our supply chain. We asked those same founders for help defending our bases in Jordan, and they sent people the same day, and then we told the world we did not need them. I have watched a lot of good capability lose to bad processes. I have not often watched it lose to bad manners.

The Risk. A co-production line in the Gulf is a leakage path to whoever the Gulf talks to next, and that list includes Beijing and Moscow, which is precisely why the British license sends its output home to Ukraine rather than into a third market. Iran is already fielding jet-powered Shaheds that outrun a Sting. And anyone who reads this as an argument to cancel the Patriot order has misread it; the 730 rounds to Riyadh are for the thing the drones cannot touch. The argument is not fewer Patriots. It is that a thousand-dollar problem should not be the one part of Gulf air defense that American has nothing to do with.

We spent the spring selling our partners the most sophisticated radar on earth. Kyiv and Ankara sold them what the radar is for. When the next 6.400 comes over the horizon and the Saudi interceptor that meets them has a Ukrainian design, Turkish neighbors, Chinese motors, and an American radar track, whose air defense is that?

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Pakistan’s New Military Order Is a Warning for Washington

**Published:** September 9, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/pakistans-new-military-order-is-a-warning-for-washington.md

In Washington, Field Marshal Asim Munir increasingly looks like the man who can make Pakistan useful to the United States. Pakistan has just written Munir even more deeply into the architecture of the state as he now sits atop a legally centralized command that reaches conventional forces, strategic systems, and the prime minister’s national-security advice. Munir, now formally serving as Chief of Defense Forces, speaks directly with President Donald Trump and has become Washington’s principal channel for engaging Tehran.

The latest restructuring of Pakistan’s military command has actually made the opposite case. The 27th Constitutional Amendment, followed by legislation passed this month to implement the new command architecture, has concentrated unprecedented authority in Munir’s hands. Yet his military cannot stabilize Pakistan-administered Kashmir, cannot contain the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Baloch insurgents, and has still signed a mutual-defense pact with Turkey and Saudi Arabia—dubbed the Mecca Accord—that could drag it into distant crises. For the world, treating Pakistan as a reliable intermediary in negotiations with Iran would be a mistake of timing and of judgment as the state becomes more militarized domestically, more ambitious diplomatically, and increasingly overstretched militarily.

A Field Marshal Above the State

In November 2025, the 27th Constitutional Amendment abolished the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and created the office of Chief of Defense Forces (CDF), held concurrently by the army chief. The restructuring was completed with another step this month when Pakistan’s parliament passed the Defense Forces Act 2026 and amendments to the National Command Authority Act, providing the statutory framework for Munir's new position and headquarters. The new architecture gives the CDF a central role in operational command and joint military coordination across the armed forces.

The new law places the army, navy, and air force under a unified Defense Forces Headquarters commanded by Munir. He is designated the prime minister’s principal military adviser on national security and defense and exercises operational command and control across the services with sweeping personnel authority—hiring, firing, retirement, and extensions. Amendments to the National Command Authority law align nuclear and strategic command with the same hierarchy, with a new four-star Commander of the National Strategic Command sitting alongside the CDF. The significance goes beyond military administration, as Munir now occupies a position from which military command, strategic security policy and foreign-policy influence converge. He is not constitutionally Pakistan's president or prime minister, but describing him merely as a military officer increasingly misses the political reality. Such radical consolidation of power in Pakistan’s civil-military landscape matters for Washington because the United States is increasingly treating Munir personally as a diplomatic asset. Therefore, Washington must factor in that any “Pakistani” channel on Iran now runs, in practice, through a single command that answers first to its own institutional interests.

Consolidation Without Control

The strongest argument against treating Munir's Pakistan as a reliable strategic partner can actually be found inside Pakistan itself. The military has acquired unprecedented institutional power, yet the state remains under enormous security pressure. Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies data show that July 2026 was the deadliest month of the year, with 606 people killed in militant violence and counter-militancy operations, including 112 security personnel and 401 militants. The violence is concentrated precisely in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) and Balochistan, where Pakistan's military has struggled for years. Such a security landscape is a sustained counterinsurgency burden for a military that is simultaneously presenting itself as a regional security provider.

The latest round of violence in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir has added another layer of security burden for an overly stretched military. In the surrounding areas of Rawalkot, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, protests led by the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) escalated after authorities outlawed the movement under anti-terrorism laws, suspended mobile data and internet services, and deployed security forces ahead of a JAAC-organized June 9 strike. According to a local human rights watchdog report dated August 8, at least 89 civilians died in Pakistan-administered Kashmir as a direct result of the state’s brutal crackdown on unarmed protesters.

Locals demanded cheaper power from dams that generate electricity for Pakistan, representation that is not diluted by non-resident seats, and an end to elite privileges. The state’s answer was lethal force, sedition cases, travel advisories, and the criminalization of a civic coalition that had previously extracted limited subsidies through protest. That is the Balochistan playbook applied to a territory Pakistan still markets internationally as “Azad” or free. It did not produce consent but a banned movement, underground leaders, and a legitimacy crisis inside a territory the army treats as strategic hinterland. If Munir’s new command structure was meant to deliver coherence, Kashmir shows the opposite, where a security establishment that can rewrite the constitution faster than it can address bread-and-butter revolt. An army that cannot manage a rights protest in Muzaffarabad and Rawalakot without mass casualties is not an army that can be trusted to midwife a delicate regional settlement with Iran or be a reliable partner for the so-called Mecca Accord.

Pakistan’s Utility Should Not Be Mistaken for Reliability

US talks with Iran already sit on a knife-edge of “Economic D-Day” politics, Hormuz control, and factional vetoes inside Tehran. None of this means the United States should abandon Pakistan as that would be strategically simplistic. Pakistan remains nuclear-armed, sits between Iran, Afghanistan, India and China, and retains diplomatic access across the Muslim world. Its ability to communicate with Tehran can be useful, particularly when direct US-Iranian channels are blocked. Three factors that Washington should use to distinguish between utility and reliability while dealing with Munir’s Pakistan:

First, Munir’s legal supremacy does not equal policy reliability. A CDF who is also army chief, principal adviser, and strategic-command fulcrum will filter any Iran file through the army’s need to look indispensable at home—that incentive points toward swagger, not quiet brokerage.

Second, Washington cannot treat Islamabad’s internal security failure as a side issue. An institution that answers civic protest in Kashmir with live fire and a terrorist ban is the same institution that would be asked to counsel restraint, verification, and de-escalation with Iran. The record says it prefers coercion when legitimacy frays.

Third, Munir’s capacity is already committed to a plethora of insurgencies. TTP and Baloch campaigns consume attention, ammunition, and men. A Mecca clause adds hypothetical external obligations without adding spare combat power. A partner that is simultaneously over-centralized and overstretched cannot deliver the one thing Washington would need from it: consistent, low-drama influence on a file that can restart a wider war.

If the United States wants Pakistan to help mediate with Iran, it should judge Islamabad by the outcomes of that diplomacy, not by the personal access Munir enjoys in Washington. And if Washington wants Pakistan as a security partner, it should look beyond the impressive authority of its field marshal to the increasingly unstable state that authority is supposed to govern. A stronger Pakistani army does not automatically produce a stronger Pakistan. And a stronger Munir does not automatically produce a more reliable American partner.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### Global Intelligence Report for Wednesday, September 9, 2026

**Published:** September 9, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-wednesday-september-9-2026.md



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### Are We Ready for AI Warfare?

**Published:** September 8, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/are-we-ready-for-ai-warfare.md

EXPERT INTERVIEW -- For decades, national security officials have worried about cyberattacks moving at the speed of machines and today the frontier AI race is shifting from models that answer questions to models that are capable of independently making consequential decisions and taking action in today’s digital world. So, what comes next?

Several of the world's leading AI companies have released powerful new models in the past few months. Open AI introduced GPT-6 Astra, with major advances in autonomous computer use. Notably, OpenAI says Astra is the company's first model to reach its "Critical" cybersecurity capability threshold, meaning it can potentially discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities with substantially less human direction.

Anthropic recently released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, emphasizing more sophisticated coding and scientific research. Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, with the latter specifically designed to autonomously find, verify and help fix software vulnerabilities. And not to be left out, Meta recently released Muse Spark 1.3, focused on coding and autonomous-agent tasks.

The headline out of all of these headlines is that models are becoming increasingly capable of acting independently. And the releases underscore just how quickly the competition among U.S. AI companies (and increasingly Chinese and Gulf-based developers) is accelerating.

We saw a first glimpse of what’s possible this past July, when AI agents being tested by OpenAI broke out of their intended cybersecurity evaluation environment and found ways to communicate and collaborate with one another. The agents gained broader internet access and ultimately compromised systems belonging to AI platform Hugging Face, executing code on dozens of the company’s servers.

What made the incident particularly notable was that humans were not in this loop. They had not instructed the agents to attack Hugging Face. Instead, the behavior emerged while the models were attempting to solve difficult cybersecurity tasks and ended up collaborating on exploits beyond their assigned environment.

Few people understand this new environment and what it means to future cybersecurity and national security better than former director of the National Security Agency, General Paul Nakasone (Ret.). In addition to founding Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security since retiring from government service, Nakasone also serves on the board of OpenAI. And from 2018 to 2024, he simultaneously led both the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, overseeing some of America's most sensitive intelligence and cyber operations.

I spoke recently with Gen. Nakasone about what AI warfare could look like and about what it will take to navigate this new cyber environment. Below is a part of our conversation - lightly edited for length and clarity. You can also watch the full episode on The Cipher Brief’s YouTube Channel or you can listen to it on the State Secrets podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Kelly: If you were walking back into the director's office at the NSA tomorrow, what would be at the top of your briefing book that wouldn't have been there just two years ago?

Gen. Nakasone: Certainly, it would be artificial intelligence. I left NSA and U.S. Cyber Command just as AI was getting started. And I will tell you, when you think about disruptive technology, there is nothing more disruptive today than AI, even more so than the smartphone technology that we started to see in 2007. This really is today and tomorrow's great opportunity and for the most part, also it's great challenge.

Kelly: And the challenge is keeping up with it, right? It feels like, in every morning’s Cipher Brief Open Source Report, there are new details about machines hacking machines, AI being used by different countries, adversaries, criminal groups. What concerns you the most, and is the U.S. ready to tackle it?

Nakasone: I think the first piece that is so dramatically different is speed. When we think about the temporal aspect of artificial intelligence, my goodness, ChatGPT was just released in the fall of 2022. And in less than four years, we've gone from prompts to reasoning to deep research to agentic AI. And we're starting to see a difference between offense and defense. And I think our challenge over the next couple of years is going to be ‘How do we bring defense up to the power of offense as we look forward?’

Kelly: We've talked for years now about AI being used by hackers but it feels like we're now witnessing something really fundamentally different: AI systems that can actually conduct significant portions of a cyber operation autonomously.

Nakasone: And I would tell you that as we take a look at the recent demonstration of Hugging Face and the challenges associated with that, and also the recent testing of models like GPT 5.6 and in Claude Fable 5, we're starting to see these models get incredibly powerful. So, I think the question becomes whether these models can just as well do offense as they can defense. And how do we ensure that we start to give more weight to the defense necessary than we do the offense?

Kelly: It’s fascinating to think about that when the attacker really isn't sleeping, isn't getting tired, isn't making silly mistakes and it can probe millions of potential victims simultaneously. It changes the entire landscape, which means each section of that landscape needs to be thinking about their roles differently. So, let's dig in on the government side. Do you think the government is currently positioned to deal with this new reality?

Nakasone: Are any of us really ready for the dramatic changes that are going on right now? If I can just take a step back, think about what we used to talk about when we were defending our networks: our data and our weapons systems. We had the 1–10–60 rule. Within one minute, we'd identify something that was anomalous, within 10 minutes, we would determine what it was, and within 60 minutes, we'd fix it.

I will tell you that today that rule is out the door. It's happening too rapidly. So, the question becomes: if we've gone to autonomous operations on the offensive side, how do we get that on the defensive side? We're capable of doing this, but we've got to think differently about how we do our penetration testing, how we do our red teaming, how we identify vulnerabilities, and then rapidly patch them. How do we prioritize? There are a number of different areas that I'm sure both the government and the private sector are thinking differently about in terms of time.

Kelly: On the government side, are there things that we could be doing differently that might better position us to keep up with this new pace?

Nakasone: As we think about our government responsibilities, the government is responsible for the safety and security of our nation and our people. So, the near-term piece of it - is how do we think about ensuring that these closed-weight models are safe and secure going forward? How do we do this with both the public sector and the private sector? It's really interesting because artificial intelligence is a technology that is almost entirely being developed by the private sector.

So, instead of nuclear capabilities and Space where government was so deeply involved and was able to advance it, this is really all being done by the private sector. So, I think the question is, what can government do? And the answer is that Government can do a number of things.

First, they can assemble the major companies in the U.S. in terms of what they're doing. They can provide a series of both carrots and sticks in terms of what we're going to do in the future. And most importantly, they can bring together an idea of how we start to think differently about securing these models and we do it in a safe manner.

The recent Executive Order on the 2nd of June begins this discussion for models coming in - on a voluntary measure – and being evaluated 30 days before they're released. That’s a good step in the right direction.

Kelly: Are we approaching a time where you think humans in the loop might actually be a vulnerability?

Nakasone: Coming back to speed, in terms of the scale at which these models are able to perform, I think we’re going to have to move away from the idea of humans always being in the loop. I think the humans might be on top of the loop. Humans have a responsibility for understanding the outcomes and the goals and in understanding and setting up the parameters in terms of what the guardrails and safeties are as well as whether these models comport with our values and our beliefs. That's a role for humans. But I think increasingly, we are going to move toward more autonomous operations, both on the defensive side and certainly on the offensive side as well.

Kelly: The adversaries have a different rule book. They're not democracies, they don't share the same values. Salt Typhoon and the broader Chinese campaigns have really raised this disturbing possibility that Beijing isn't simply stealing information but is really positioning itself inside of American infrastructure for an advantage during a crisis. We've known about this for a while. We've also known where the vulnerabilities are that we can't always identify. How are you thinking about these differences in adversarial capabilities and what the U.S. needs to do defend better?

Nakasone: We’ve talked about Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon as we took a look at both our communications and our critical infrastructure. But I would also fast forward to today where we have water concerns in 12 different states. We think about that as a significant brittle part of our critical infrastructure and key resources. So, what I'm starting to think about are the areas where we have to raise the bar for cybersecurity. What do we do in the near term? What do we do in the midterm? And what are we going do in the far term?

The big piece of this is that we have to think different about our partnerships. How do we bring the public and the private together? How do we take academia and see what they can do in terms of being able to research and look differently at what our vulnerabilities might be? And by the way, if we really have folks in our critical infrastructure, how do we prioritize getting them out and then being able to mitigate those vulnerabilities?

When we stood up the Institute of National Security at Vanderbilt University two years ago, there were a series of ideas that were at the foundation of what we wanted to do. First, it was the idea that the definition of national security has changed dramatically. When I entered the army, it was all about having two very friendly neighbors to our north and south and two wide oceans to our east and west. I would tell you today that geographic boundaries no longer keep out things like artificial intelligence and cyber. So, we have to think differently about how we define national security.

The second piece is that we need a whole new generation of young people that are going to work in national security. Let me give you a statistic. In our national security workforce today across our government, less than 9 % of that workforce is under the age of 30 and over 40% are over the age of 50. We need a whole new generation of young people that are coming in to work in the Peace Corps, to work in the State Department, to be part of the military forces to be able to work at the state and local levels and also our national level. So, how do get people excited in college about thinking differently about their future?

And the final piece really touches on the Wicked Problems Lab at Vanderbilt. We are the pragmatic solution to problems. We take a look at a problem and instead of writing a broad policy paper that may be put on a shelf for the next 10 years or never even looked at, we’re taking a national security challenge like securing our water systems and asking how we develop a series of partnerships through that bring together technology and talent and trade craft. And so this Wicked Problems Lab is one of the foundations of what we do at Vanderbilt University.

Kelly: Here’s a wicked problem: How confident are you that we will actually know the extent of Chinese access to American infrastructure?

Nakasone: I am confident, I'm very confident. I spent my entire career in the intelligence community and there are certain competitive advantages that the United States has over any nation in the world and one of them is intelligence. So, the question is how we take this new technology like artificial intelligence, and develop new talent and ensure that our intelligence community has the trade craft to really dig deep in terms of both the capability and intent of our adversaries. If we’re talking about the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans, Iranians, or even a series of hackers, my sense is that we have an advantage. What we have to do is continue to pursue these advantages and ensure that we have the right authorities - like the reauthorization of 702. And we have to ensure that we're going to bring new partners in to be able to solve these challenging problems.

Kelly: I have to ask you about the tradecraft question with AI. How dramatically do you see the role of an analyst or an operator, or someone in one of those very special units at the NSA? How dramatically do you see their roles changing because of AI?

Nakasone: Dramatically. When people used to ask me what the National Security Agency does, I had a pretty quick answer. There are two things that we do better than anyone in the world. We make code and we break code. Well, it was very interesting to read recently that Anthropic was talking about their models now starting to look at different cryptographic algorithms, algorithms that are really intended for post quantum cryptography and being able to break them. So, I think how we're going to use the tradecraft to be able to understand how our code is made and how our code is broken. Tradecraft is really going to lead us to new pathways.

Kelly: When you think about what's happening right now with Iran being suspected of infiltrating the water systems in 12 states, that's not a new problem. So, how do you inform more Americans about the real risks and the real cybersecurity environment we're living in?

Gen. Nakasone: The first thing is that we have to be able to communicate in a way that's concise and clear. If you take a look at the problem of Iranians allegedly in our water systems, one of the things that we could tell you is the fact that it's pretty easy to solve this problem. The first thing is that programmable logic controllers, really the digital brain of our water infrastructure, if they're connected to the Internet, they're at risk. So, if we just kind of take that away and make sure that they're separated from the Internet and if we start to think differently about constructing a series of firewalls or bringing in multi-factor authentication, driving the level of cybersecurity up, my guess is that this is really going to change the problem and being able to ensure that we solve it.

But here's the other thing I would tell you. We have adversaries today that we're not going to be able to patch our way out of this problem. So, with my other hat that I used to wear as Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, my thought is that any adversary that is starting to look at our infrastructure in a way that they have an intent or capability, we need to take on. And we need to make it as difficult as possible, erasing their infrastructure overseas, working with a series of partners, conducting a series of preemptive strikes to ensure that they no longer can take a look at our communications, our transportation, our water, our financial areas, and ensure that we're sending a message: ‘if you are going to interfere within our infrastructure, we are going to ensure that you have a very, very miserable day.’ Much of the same that we’ve done with elections, we should translate to other parts of our critical infrastructure.

Kelly: Do you feel like fundamentally the capabilities and the decisions that are being made are just as robust as they were a few years back?

Gen. Nakasone: I don't know in terms of what they're doing today. But here's what I do know. I know the organizations well. I know the community well. And my sense is that they are very, very focused on being able to not only identify and attribute but also take a series of actions against these folks. Are they capable of doing this? Yes. Where they're at in the process right now, that's more for the government to be able to talk about.

One of the things I would also share with you is that I think being able to talk about this with a bit more transparently, much in the same way we have done previously, is something that would be very, very helpful here. Americans need to understand that we're not just watching this. We're not waiting for them to come and attack our critical infrastructure, but we're really taking measures to ensure the safety of our citizens and our intellectual property are things that would be welcomed by the American populace.

Kelly: These things are happening, but these things don't always gain traction in the headlines. How should the public be thinking about the activities that are done on a day-to-day basis? You’ve said before that you believe we have the best people in the world, do you still feel that way?

Gen. Nakasone: I do. I do feel that way. And I think we have the best private sector in the world. And it might be very, very helpful to talk about what are the large companies are doing in terms of making our infrastructure much more defensible. I think that'd be something that would be of great assistance to being able to communicate to the public that this is something that we're doing. I would also tell you that there is a role for government to do this. This is the synchronization that the government can do to ensure our national security. And I think this is one of the things that as we take a look at the new cybersecurity strategy that was recently released, you know, being able to challenge our adversaries, the first part of the cybersecurity strategy is one of the things that I think we can do more of.

Kelly: How do you feel overall about the strategy? I know that there was a great outreach on behalf of the government to the private sector for input on the strategy.

Gen. Nakasone: So, here's what I would say: strategies are documents. What really matters is the implementation of the strategy. I’m looking forward to seeing what the department's strategy is going forward and how we start to move it.

Kelly: Time is the number one thing we talk about now. When you look five years out, what technological development do you think national security leaders are still maybe underestimating?

Gen. Nakasone: Certainly, it’s the whole idea of AI as a mid to long term problem. But I would say the near-term piece is autonomous capabilities. I mean, look at what Ukraine has demonstrated to us. On the 24th of February, 2022, there were zero ships in the Ukrainian Navy. Today, there are still zero ships in the Ukrainian Navy, but they have sunk half of the Russian Black Sea fleet. And they did it with a laptop, a Starlink connection, and a semi-submersible platform. That's the difference in terms of what's going on.

I’ve listened to podcasts that you've done with General David Petraeus and others who have talked about Ukraine being able to manufacture nine million drones a year. That's amazing. And they're launching 10,000 a day. I think this is the near-term piece that we rapidly have to catch up with.

Certainly, the mid and the longer-term piece are artificial intelligence and how we're going to be able to institute this within our economy and our national security. And let me be honest with you, I think the longer-term piece is continuing to develop the talent that goes along with this technology and tradecraft.

Kelly: I also talked to General Petraeus about the future of war and what that looks like. When you think about your perspective and you're thinking about how quickly the technology's changing, the cybersecurity risks are changing, how do you see the future of war taking shape?

Gen. Nakasone: Well, think about three Ds: detect, decide and deliver. I would tell you that the challenge right now will be on the detect and the decide pieces. These are the areas that we've got to really think differently. We used to challenge ourselves at the National Security Agency about whether we could really take in all this collection and be able to make sense of it. My sense today is that artificial intelligence is probably doing that right now for the folks at the agency and the folks in our intelligence community. So, if we've got to be able to do that, being able to detect it now becomes a bit easier.

Then we have to decide what we do about it. And I think this comes down to your question about how we communicate. How do we think and deliver our critical thinking skills in a different way as humans? And then do we have the character to really stand behind what we're going to do and what we're going to decide to do?

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### The Future of Intelligence in the Age of AI | VADM Trey Whitworth

**Published:** September 8, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-future-of-intelligence-in-the-age-of-ai-vadm-trey-whitworth.md

Artificial intelligence, drones and commercial satellites are transforming the way intelligence is collected, analyzed and used — but as technology delivers answers faster than ever, how do intelligence professionals make sure those answers are actually right?

In this episode of The Cipher Brief’s State Secrets Podcast, Suzanne Kelly sits down with retired Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and former Director for Intelligence on the Joint Staff, to discuss how emerging technology is changing intelligence and the character of modern warfare.
Whitworth explains his concept of “drones, codes and spacecraft,” why AI could fundamentally change the intelligence cycle, and the danger of what he calls a “veneer of understanding” — having information at our fingertips without the expertise or rigor needed to truly understand it.

The conversation also explores source validation in the age of AI, the changing nature of deterrence, NGA’s role in warning and targeting, the growing importance of commercial satellite imagery, and Whitworth’s move from government into the private sector.The Cipher Brief brings together experienced intelligence, military, diplomatic and private-sector leaders to help subscribers understand what is happening behind the headlines - and what national security professionals are watching next. Learn more at: www.thecipherbrief.com

Become a Subscriber+ member for exclusive access to The Cipher Brief’s Daily Open Source Report, described by some as the best, unclassified national security report they’ve ever read. Sign up today at: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/subscr

Learn more about how to attend the 2026 Cipher Brief Threat Conference at: www.tcbconference.com

Today’s sponsor: Two Six Technologies https://twosixtech.com/

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### The AI We Cannot Deploy — And What Is at Stake

**Published:** September 8, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-ai-we-cannot-deploy-and-what-is-at-stake.md

Last week, I argued in these pages that the United States is buying an army it cannot command — writing procurement checks at a scale its adversaries cannot match, without writing the doctrine or arbitration to decide how the capability behind those checks gets used. Not everyone agreed. The sharpest pushback came from readers with institutional equity in the current procurement path — those with the most to lose if the diagnosis is right. Fair question they kept asking: what is at stake if we get this wrong?

The answer arrived this week, and it is not what most observers are watching.

Beijing is pursuing a two-pronged strategy against the American artificial-intelligence industry, and neither prong depends on beating American laboratories on model capability. The first prong attacks the market instrument that finances the industry: paid enterprise access to closed frontier models at premium margins. The weapon is state-backed open-source saturation of the global developer market. When Chinese laboratories release high-performing models at zero marginal cost, the price American laboratories can charge collapses — and with it, the revenue that funds tens of billions in specialized compute committed to their pipelines.

The second prong is architectural. American frontier laboratories run closed models in centralized data centers connected to their customers via fiber. The Pentagon has awarded contracts for missions that cannot use that architecture — drone swarms, autonomous undersea platforms, cognitive attack detection, and tactical multi-sensor fusion. Consider a drone swarm over the Taiwan Strait that must identify and engage a hostile target in seconds. It cannot query a compute cluster in Virginia and get an answer in time. The bandwidth needed in a denied, degraded, intermittent, or limited spectrum environment is unavailable. Chinese research has shifted toward Large Concept Models — smaller, edge-resident, multi-sensor — that run on the platform and fuse light-detection-and-ranging, radiofrequency, electro-optical and infrared, and acoustic inputs at the edge, without a network dependency an adversary can touch.

This is not a theoretical architecture. Ukraine is running it now. Ukrainian drone units operate with organic, edge-resident targeting within seconds of adversary contact, without a reliable network back to headquarters. Ukrainian schools graduate thousands of drone specialists each year. The country teaching NATO the most about the next fight is doing so in the register the American AI stack cannot yet operate in. The contracts are being placed. The integration doctrine has not yet been written.

Beijing has run this playbook before. Western economies depend on China for rare-earth and critical-minerals processing — the industry that supplies permanent magnets, batteries, and defense electronics. Every F-35 electric-actuation system, every Virginia-class submarine drivetrain, and every Patriot interceptor guidance package relies on rare-earth processing capacity the United States cannot reconstitute within a decade. That capacity was lost not because the deposits lie under Chinese soil but because Beijing sustained state-subsidized processing for twenty years at prices that broke the private-sector cost of capital in every alternative jurisdiction. Open-source artificial intelligence is the same instrument, aimed at a different substrate.

What is at stake?

First, America's most consequential capital-expenditure cycle. Roughly $400 billion a year in AI infrastructure is financed against a revenue model an opposing state has organized its economy to defeat. If that model breaks on Beijing's timeline, the compute pipelines carrying a meaningful share of American growth do not close.

Second, Pentagon operational readiness. Contracts placed today for missions the Pentagon needs to field in three to five years cannot be executed by an AI stack designed for centralized data centers. Platforms that cannot operate in a multidomain and joint-force environment at wartime tempo are not a deterrent. They are procurement projects.

Third, alliance credibility. Sovereign AI programs in Korea, Japan, and the Gulf price today against the American premium-margin model. If it breaks, those programs re-price against Chinese open-weight tooling, and the alliance's technological dependency structure shifts.

Fourth, deterrence. The Taiwan Strait scenario is not theoretical. The platforms that would decide it are being contracted for now, on an architecture that cannot execute the mission at wartime tempo.

What needs to happen requires an integration authority the American sovereign apparatus does not yet exercise. Two responses.

A state-capacity capital response to the first prong. Some form of federal instrument that bridges the compute-to-market pipeline so a Chinese-organized collapse in AI pricing does not take the compute build-out with it. Export-import financing, defense production authorities, and strategic stockpiles are the precedent. No current U.S. government office owns this problem.

A Pentagon-led investment in a distributed inference substrate — the shape of what the Joint Fires Network concept was originally designed to be. Edge-native, platform-resident, multi-sensor, doctrinally integrated. This is procurement of an integration architecture as much as procurement of a technology. The Pentagon has placed the contracts for the platforms. It has not placed the contract for the integration.

Last week I wrote that America is buying an army it cannot command. The diagnosis has evolved: America is also buying an artificial intelligence it cannot deploy. Ukraine is teaching the doctrine the American AI stack has not been designed to run. Beijing is engineering the collapse of the revenue model that stack is financed against.

Coordination assigns. Integration arbitrates. What is at stake is whether the American sovereign apparatus can find the integrator — for the capital response and the operational doctrine — before the platforms the Pentagon is buying arrive without an architecture capable of commanding them.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### Q&A with former CIA Operations Officer James 'Mad Dog' Lawler

**Published:** September 8, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/qa-with-former-cia-operations-officer-james-mad-dog-lawler.md

James Lawler serves as a national security consultant and is a noted speaker on the Insider Threat in government, academia and industry. He has been the guest on over ninety national podcasts specializing in intelligence and counterintelligence. His Insider Threat presentations have included Honeywell Corporation (twice a year since 2015), Salesforce, Abbott Laboratories, LinkedIn, Rice University (twice), Duke University, Harvard University, Syracuse University Law School, The LBJ School Clements Center for National Security (three occasions), CIA, DIA, NSA, NNSA, FBI, DoD, Office of Secretary of Defense, Joint Special Operations University, National Intelligence University (ten occasions), DEVGRU, DARPA, ARLIS, IARPA, National Defense University, The Institute of World Politics, Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (twice), and numerous times at Applied Physics Laboratory and all of the U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories.

Prior to this, James Lawler served for 25 years as a CIA operations officer in various international posts and as Chief of the Counterproliferation Division's Special Activities Unit. He had five overseas assignments from 1982 to 1994.

James Lawler was a member of CIA's Senior Intelligence Service (SIS-3) from 1998 until his retirement in 2005. He was a specialist in the recruitment of foreign spies, and he spent well over half of his CIA career battling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As Chief of the A.Q. Khan Nuclear Takedown Team, which resulted in the disruption of the most dangerous nuclear weapons network in history, James Lawler was the recipient of one of the CIA's Trailblazer Awards in 2007, marking the 60th anniversary of CIA.

In 2004, former DCI George Tenet sent Mr. Lawler a note which stated, “Jim, what you and your team have achieved will rank up there as one of the most spectacular intelligence accomplishments in the history of the CIA. It occurred because of your exemplary leadership. Not only are we in the process of taking down a network, we are also in the process of disarming a country as a result of your fine work. With respect, George J. Tenet”.

And former DDCI John McLaughlin noted that the effort was “the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a perfect intelligence operation.” James Lawler also received the Director's Award from Director of the CIA George Tenet, the U.S. Intelligence Community's HUMINT Collector of the Year Award, and the Donovan Award from the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations.

Let's hear his story:

EMK: Jim, you’ve written three spy novels already, they have been approved by the CIA Prepublication Review Board of course, and they are very, very interesting. I assume that, omitting real-life names, places etc., you drew from your real-life experiences to write them?

JL: Yeah, I weave a lot of real-life incidents into my spy fiction and they're accurate and they're realistic because I've lived these things and so I fictionalize the time, the place, the people, of course, the nationalities. But they're highly accurate as if there's a movie going on in my head and I'm writing about something that either I did or some of my colleagues did, so I try and stick as close to reality as possible. I focus on the human angle and the human condition and to me, that's the most fascinating thing about spy fiction. Of course, the master was John Le Carre, who I just adore his fiction.

You also mentioned to me a while ago that you try to insert into your novels the agency’s first and foremost priority; to protect its people and its assets.

Absolutely, that's a sacred commitment. All three of my novels weave that into the story; that we will go to hell and back to try and honor that commitment to an asset, to one of our sources. All three of my books have that as a theme that we are going to go and try and keep our assets, our sources safe, yes.

Do you remember the first time you were asked to handle an asset? How old were you then?

I was on my first tour. I was, I guess, about 30 years old and so I had had a terrible first year. I hadn't recruited anybody and I was beginning to wonder if I was really good at this profession or not and had a lot of doubts. So, I got a classified message from Washington, D.C., from CIA headquarters, and they told me that there was going to be a big series of negotiations in another year where we were going to be negotiating with a certain foreign country.

A high-stakes national security treaty and we didn't have any sources on the side of the other country to tell us what their negotiating positions were, and therefore if you had any contact with anybody from this specific country who had the following type of access then we were encouraged to go out and develop a good relationship with that person, find out what they needed, see if there was any way we could recruit the person to be a source. So, I'd been in a ski class a few weeks earlier with someone who was from this country.

He had the access they needed so I began what we call the “developmental stage” of trying to build the trust, see what this person needed and then outline what we would call a “recruitment pitch” where we would propose that the person become a source for us and in return we would do things for them, some kind of financial compensation or something like that.

So, after a few weeks of developing the source, I decided I'm ready to “pitch” this person, but I was very naive, this was my first recruitment pitch, and I really didn't have a grasp of what this guy needed or vulnerabilities or anything like that as I should have.

But I thought I could just use the power of my personality and our friendship to persuade this guy to betray his country which is incredibly stupid and naive, but I thought I could do it. So, I wrote this proposal to CIA headquarters and obviously they were very desperate because they approved this stupid scheme of mine and so I took this guy to dinner and I pitched him and I remember he looked at me and he said, ‘Jim you and I are friends but what you're proposing that's morally wrong’.

That didn't sound good at that point, right?

No, of course not, and I tell you I've pitched probably 50 or 60 people in my career and he's the only person who ever posed a moral objection. The only one. Normally, if they pose an objection, what do you think the objection is?

Not enough money... I'm afraid I'm gonna get caught…

That's it, it's the second one, it's the fear. I had an African intelligence officer say, ‘Jim they hang people in my country for doing things like that’. He's right, they would. Although he didn't surprise me, this African intelligence officer, he said that ‘could I have a rain check’? I said, ‘what do you mean?” He said, ‘well my son is only three years old, and I don't need you now but in 15 years he'll be university age and I might need you then.”

Well, 15 years later he was posted to Washington and guess what? We cashed in that rain check and he needed us. But going back to where I've had my first big pitch and I've been turned down: We have a saying in the CIA's Directorate of Operations ‘that it's okay to be turned down but not turned in’. Meaning, what if this guy goes and reports this pitch to his ambassador and the repercussions could be very severe.

I neglected to tell you that the man I just pitched was the number two guy in the embassy. He was the deputy chief of mission, the ambassador's deputy.

I just pitched him, he's turned me down and this ambassador had a terrible reputation for being a hothead and a kind of a jerk and I could just envision him marching into our ambassador's office and screaming about what an outrage it was that young Mr. James Lawler, third secretary, had just propositioned his deputy to become a spy. I could see that happening and even though CIA headquarters had approved this, I thought they're going to cut me loose. They're going to wonder how I messed this up and I thought there's a good chance I'll be going home because this will be such a nasty diplomatic incident.

Well, after about two or three days, I worked up my courage to call this guy, just to see if he's mad or not. And so, I called him and I said, “You know, we really enjoyed, I really enjoyed that dinner the other night. I was thinking maybe this Friday night we'd go out and do it again one week later” and to my great relief, he didn't hang up in my ear but instead he said, “you know, Jim, I think you're, I was thinking the same thing. That would be good”.

So, I thought, “okay, fine”. I've got to meet this guy for the second time, you know, or, you know, one week after my failed pitch and my only goal was to smooth any turbulent waters to try and plead for mercy and say my words were taken out of context and I apologize.

I see where this is going…

But I never had to get to that because when we got to the restaurant and the waiter had dropped the menus off, the first words out of my friend's mouth, “Jim, that offer you made me last Friday, is that still good?” And I said, “well, I said, of course it is” and he says, “well, what you don't know was two days after our dinner, my wife announced that she wants a divorce and I can't afford to pay her the alimony to which she's entitled or put my two high school age boys in private schools when we go home next summer. And in my country, if you're not in a private school, you're not going to get a good education. I can't afford to do that. I can't afford to do that unless I accept your offer”, you know, with the consultant fee that I had promised. And he said, “I know it's morally wrong, but I don't have a choice”.

How did that make you feel?

I felt great. He explained to me at the very next meeting, he brought a whole stack of classified material to give to me and he said, “Jim, let me now tell you why I'm really doing this”. He said, “I hate my ambassador”. He said, “that guy steals the credit for everything I do and everything everybody else in the embassy does. And he goes around this country, you know, acting as if he's God's gift to my country”. And he says, “I hate the guy. And so, as I hand you this classified material, it's as if I'm kicking that son of a bitch in the face”.

And so, I took it from him, and I said “you and I are on the same team. Bring me some more of this and let's kick that son of a bitch again”.

So, one of the prime motivators for espionage is somebody needs revenge. They've been dissed; they've been treated poorly. And so that's how they psychologically can cope with the fact that they're betraying a trust because they feel like they've been betrayed first.

What motivates someone to betray their country? You mentioned revenge. What are the other factors?

We have a very simple acronym at the CIA called MICE. That stands for money, ideology, coercion, and ego. And I will tell you that in my experience, nobody ever does it purely for money. Money may be a means to an end. In his case, he needed money because of his alimony requirements. He needed money for his children's education. But money by itself is not the prime motivator.

Tolkachev (GTVANQUISH) didn't do it for money.

Nobody does it just for money. Tolkachev didn't do it for money, Polyakov (TOPHAT) didn't do it for money. They don't do it for money. They do it for other reasons.

Now, I stands for ideology. And I've had people say, “well, I hate communism, or I hate nuclear weapons”. And that's true to an extent. I don't think they're lying to me. But I think by trying to pin their motivations for some noble reason, you know, ideology sounds very noble. That sounds better than saying, “I hate my boss”, or “I'm in trouble”, something like that.

Now, the C stands for coercion, which the Russians and the Chinese use a lot. You know, you've heard of the sparrows, the swallows, the extortion, blackmail, the honeypot. We don't typically use that. And the reason I don't like using it is because I don't want a rattle snake in my backseat as I'm driving down the road. I want somebody to be positively motivated and not be scared. But the most powerful of all of them is the E, ego.

And that encompasses revenge, it encompasses the fact that you've got marital problems, you may have a lover, you may have all kinds of issues, gambling problems, you may have problems with your boss, problems at work, all kinds of things. E is the most powerful motivator of them all. And I'd say most of the people I recruited, at the root of their motivation, ego was a big, big part of it, probably 90% of it.

To mention an example, Aldrich Ames, the worst espionage case in CIA's history was an E, correct? Because he had to take care of his wife's expensive lifestyle and his vices.

Absolutely. He was a very mediocre to poor operations officer. He was an alcoholic. He was a failure, basically. We don't recruit water walkers. We recruit people who are under stress, people who are desperate. I never once recruited a happy person. You don't recruit happy people. You don't recruit people at the top of their profession. You recruit people who are very unhappy and stressed out. And he was unhappy and stressed.

Same with Edward Lee Howard

Ed was fired because he had drinking problems, substance abuse problems, and one time on an airplane, he ruffled a woman's purse and stole $20 because he was pissed off that her baby was crying. So, when she went to the bathroom, he stole $20. Now, he was fired. Well, he got back at us by contacting the KGB.

After he had been read into everything

Absolutely. He was the one that basically… what happened to Tolkachev was he was going to be Tolkachev's handler. So, he knew Tolkachev's identity.

But an interesting thing was, I guess it was on my third tour, I was about to go off to a tour in Scandinavia. And routinely, when a CIA officer goes from one station to another station, headquarters will do a counterintelligence profile to see where you have been exposed before. And so, to let the receiving station know that Jim Lawler has been exposed to this or that, you know, type of thing. Well, my write up said basically, betrayed by the traitor Ed Howard.

So that was my friend.

He betrayed me to the KGB.

And that explains why I could never get any of the Russians to go out with me because they knew I was nothing but trouble.

So, in essence, you couldn't deal with Russians anywhere, in any part of the world.

Well, they knew better than to get close to me because each Russian residentura has a line KR, their counterintelligence guy. I'm sure they said stay away from Lawler. I was getting really close to one Russian when we were in Scandinavia. I kept bugging him to go out to lunch with me.

A few weeks after I was attempting to do that, another large Russian came up to me at a cocktail party and he kind of leaned in and he just casually mentioned that they knew where my children went to school. Would you like somebody to say that? I mean, basically, the fuckhead was he was threatening my family. And I said, “just leave my family out of this”. But they were giving me a warning to stay away from their people, you know, by saying, we know that your children go to the French school, which they did. And I thought, you know, “asshole”. I reported it, you know.

Until you switched to WMDs, would you say that you went through a process of being a little bit scared about the first time you tried to recruit someone, then gaining confidence, getting more excited, getting to like the game, the challenge of reading people's minds and making them do things they wouldn't normally do?

Absolutely. You get more and more used to it. Just like, you know, nowadays you're a journalist. I'm sure the first time you contacted a potential source, you got butterflies in your stomach and you're thinking, “okay, how do I persuade this person to give me some really juicy information?” And it's very similar. In fact, our two professions of intelligence officer and journalist are very similar. A lot of journalists become intelligence officers because they know how to approach sources. They know how to write well. They know how to communicate well. And that's exactly a lot of the same.

How to protect sources.

How to protect sources. Exactly. When you get a really good source and you write a really good story, it makes you feel good. Well, the same thing for me. If I recruit a really good source and I write something, write an intelligence report that makes a difference in national security, it really makes you feel good. You get that rush because nobody else got this. You're the one who first got the information. And that to me is the same kind of endorphin kick that a good journalist gets. They get a good source. They get a wonderful story.

You mentioned writing reports and - a lot of people don't know this - but a lot of your time as an intelligence officer is spent writing reports that are going to be read by the higher ups. So, you must get to the point and analyze the situation and inform the people above you whether it's the chief of station or the people in headquarters about what's going on.

Oh, absolutely. In fact, I mean, if you don't write reports, what's the point of recruiting a spy? Anytime you have an intelligence operation, the weakest part is communications. And if you don't have communications between you and your spy, your asset, you don't have an operation. But it's worthless if you don't report the information to headquarters. And then, you know, we have analysts that then write these things up for either the National Security Council or for the President or whomever. And so, there's no point in running the operation if you don't produce any written intelligence.

Talking about Russians. One of your colleagues whom I spoke to a few weeks ago… I told him I was going to interview you. He said, “oh, he's our Victor Cherkashin”. . A legend. So, knowing you, I know that you are a low-key guy, you're not the kind of guy who boasts about things. But what do you have to say to that?

Well, I take that as a real compliment whoever said that about me, because I have only the greatest respect for Victor Cherkashin. Like you said, he was the KGB colonel who basically handled both Ames and Hanssen. He was a brilliant Russian KGB officer. And I still quote him occasionally because he made the point that “it takes a spy to basically find a spy”. In other words, you must recruit a spy to find a spy. You know, the reason we're able to catch spies is because we recruit a spy on the other side. And he saw that because if you look at the two cases he handled, Ames and Hanssen, they a lot of the Russians who were working for us.

Well, the Russians may not have found out who was working for us, had it not been for Cherkashin handling Hanssen and Ames. And so, I take it as a high compliment. And a lot of the counterintelligence things that we use are worthless. We really need a guy on the other side who says, “okay, your side has a problem and here's the problem's name, or here's what I know about the problem”, which allows us to narrow down, you know, who the suspects are.

I'm going to give you another compliment because as it happens, I've read Ursula Wilder's, one of the CIA’s most prominent clinical psychologists, original report . It's now been republished, partly redacted. A lot of the things that she's written about in her original 2003 paper echo what you tell me. And I wonder, did you ever feel that this kind of work, recruiting people, persuading people to betray their country, was kind of inherent in you, in terms of how you approach this, like you were meant to do that? Did you ever feel like this?

Well, came into this profession almost by accident, but I've always had the ability to communicate with people. And I have the greatest respect for Ursula Wilder. Strangely enough, I've never physically met the woman, but I know two of my very good friends, Dr. Kenneth Dekleva and Dr. David Charney, both of whom are forensic psychiatrists and both of whom are experts in the motivations for espionage. They have a lot of respect for Ursula Wilder. At some time, I really should meet the woman. But I think if I had not been a CIA case officer, I would have loved to have been either a psychologist or a psychiatrist, because I'm fascinated with the infinite variety of human motivations and human condition. And I think frequently I acted almost as a therapist for my assets. I had one asset once tell me, “Jim, when you're talking to me, it's as if my brain is in a warm waterbed”.

And so, I relaxed them. I got them to tell me everything that, you know, things they wouldn't tell their best friend or their spouse. And they also realized that I was not going to be judgmental and that I was never going to hurt them, that they could trust me. And so, I think I use a lot of the same techniques that my psychiatrist and psychologist friends use. But it just comes natural to me. I think one of my real rules in life is the golden rule that I treat other people as I would like them to treat me. And that comes across as sincere. And so, people do treat me.

Yeah, you can't fake that. That's true. While you were in the business of recruiting people for the agency you were always under diplomatic cover. Is that correct?

That's correct. Well, actually, 95% of the time. Occasionally, I would use commercial cover and an alias. I'd pose as a businessperson or something like that. But most of the time, I was under State Department cover, yes.

But when you didn't have a diplomatic passport, were you ever scared that something might happen, did it cross your mind? Because it's not for the faint of heart, right?

I think most case officers are basically adrenaline junkies. We like the thrill. If there was no thrill to it, it wouldn't be any fun. You know, if there was no risk to it. So having that extra little risk factor, I mean, I'm breaking people's laws. A lot of times, the countries I have been to, I was breaking their law by committing espionage or recruiting their people or something like that.

But it was the risk. The risk is what made it fun. And then figuring it out, how do I get to this person? How do I run this operation? Being resourceful, being creative, all of that, it was something that gave me a real thrill. So, I ever scared? No, not really. I mean, maybe I was being naive, but I wasn't particularly scared.

I mean, admittedly, I was rarely in an area that was dangerous or a war zone. Some of my colleagues risked their lives and have lost their lives in war zones. But, you know, typically I was going after, you know, white collar people that were in the same socioeconomic class as I was, persuading them to betray their countries and to commit espionage.

When you get there, when the show starts, the fear goes away and suddenly you feel like some sort of calmness in your mind, like you're in the zone or something. I don't know if that makes sense.

No, it does make sense. You become very focused. And whenever I was traveling to some of these countries in an operation, people have asked me if I went sightseeing or something. I said, “I'm not there to go sightseeing”. When I'm there in a country running an op, I'm not there to go sightseeing. I'm 100% focused on either going after somebody or meeting somebody, doing some operation, but you get in the zone or in the flow and then your nerves, you overcome that.

Right, and adrenaline is the most potent of substances.

Absolutely.

So, let's switch gears: How did you get involved with WMDs?

Well, I was posted to Switzerland and Switzerland has some of the best high technology in the world and it became apparent that some of the countries like Iran and Syria and some other countries were trying to get that high technology to either develop nuclear weapons programs or biological weapons programs. So, I started running a lot of operations against proliferators, people who were selling this high technology to countries like Iran and Syria.

And I had a lot of motivation to do this because I remembered reading a book when I was like about 14 years old called Hiroshima. And Hiroshima described the effects of the first atomic bomb. It was written by John Hersey, and it scared me because it totally obliterated the city, killed 140,000 people, and it cast shadows on a wall of three people who were basically in essence just disintegrated. It always stayed with me.

It motivated me to work against these countries that wanted to develop nuclear weapons. And I'm not against nuclear disarmament across the board because if the United States were to suddenly disarm, I guarantee you Russia and China would take advantage of it. But I largely abhor nuclear weapons. If I could push a button and every nuclear weapon on earth would disappear, I would do it. But that's not going to happen. So, I found a lot of motivation in working against WMD programs.

When you say WMDs, you not only mean nuclear weapons, but you also refer to nerve agents or other kinds of...

Biological weapons. Yeah, yeah. Chemical weapons are more weapons of local area destruction. They're not going to spread like biological weapons. But biological weapons are in many respects even scarier than nuclear weapons. Because for nuclear weapons, you always need either uranium 235 or plutonium 239, fissile material.

And a delivery device.

Right, right. And you need a lot of technology. But a biological weapon, the knowledge is really out there. And even somebody in a lab could develop a fairly effective biological weapon. We were all, the whole planet was a victim of a biological weapon when COVID hit.

I mean, that was in essence kind of a biological weapon. And you saw the millions of people that died and all the destruction that caused.

That's something to think about in the future because if you can create something like COVID, you can do worse things in the future as technology advances and AI gives you the tools to perform better research.

Right. I mean, with AI, AI could develop a deadly pathogen that we can't even dream of. So, it's very scary.

You did this kind of work, WMDs from 1994 until you retired, Jim?

Yes, that's correct. Well, actually, against WMDs from about 91 until I retired in 2005. Yes.

When was the first time that you became aware of the A.Q. Khan Network, the infamous Pakistani nuclear physicist who gave Pakistan the atomic bomb and proliferated the technology to other countries as well?

Well, he was known to the intelligence community as basically making possible Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

But what we didn't know until my team discovered it was that Dr. Khan took proliferation private.

So, when he offered to equip Libya with a nuclear weapons program, that did not involve the Pakistani government. It was strictly Dr. Khan and his network. He basically took proliferation private for money. And he was going to equip Muammar Gaddafi with a turn-key nuclear weapons program. He had the diagrams and everything. And my team discovered what he was doing. And then we ultimately brought him down and stopped it.

So, not only did you stop him potentially delivering a nuclear weapon capability to Gaddafi, but to other countries as well, even though those countries moved on and he found other sources to sell his services to. I believe he was involved in the North Korean program and the Iranian program early on. Is that correct?

That's correct. That is correct. He was a very dangerous man. And whatever North Korea and whatever Iran has, has its roots and assistance that they got from Dr. Khan. Yes.

This enters into classified territory. I'm not going to say or ask anything more about it. The story has been written. Praise has been given, deservedly so, to you and your team. You've been honored with the CIA's highest award, you and your team, the Trailblazer Award in 2007. And Director Tenet also gave you some very rare praise. How do you feel about that, by the way?

Well, I had a very good team working with me and for me. And I, no, I felt really good about it. It's just like when a journalist wins the Pulitzer Prize, you know, you're out there, you're developing your sources, you write a really great story. And I was fortunate; I was very fortunate. And I had a lot of support from the Seventh Floor, from Director Tenet. He was wonderful, best CIA director I ever worked for.

And he gave me a lot of leeway, a lot of room, and let me run that operation until we finally were able to bring these people down. And I think one of the nicest things I heard was a few years later after I'd retired, and it was during when Muammar Qaddafi was being overthrown in Libya. I think that was around 2012. One of the analysts came to me and he said, “Jim, did you ever think about the fact that if you had not stopped Muammar Qaddafi from having nuclear weapons, he would have used those on his own people and possibly against European countries as well as a diversion”.

And, you know, the weapon he had or wanted, the weapon he was going to develop that the A.Q. Khan network was giving him was the same yield as Little Boy that destroyed Hiroshima and killed 140,000 people. So, it was a proven weapon. The Pakistanis had tested it. It was a proven design. It would have worked. And I had not thought about that. So, when I feel good about that, I say this is psychologically righteous to stop a madman or some rogue country from having nuclear weapons. And that made me feel good. Yeah, it does make me feel good.

What can you tell us about the photo with you sitting on $1 billion in gold bullion.

I was posted to Switzerland. I was running a lot of things. I had some top-level contacts in some of the major Swiss banks. And one of my best contacts once asked me if there was anything, this is like two weeks before I was to leave, he says, “is there anything you haven't done in Switzerland yet that you would like to do?” And I said, “I would like to sit on a fortune of gold and have a cigar in my hands. And I'm going to put a put a caption that says, hell, I own this town”.

And the guy started laughing and he said, “I can make this happen”. And so, a few days later I was invited to visit this vault in which there were not billions, but trillions of dollars of gold. It's deep in the Alps. And I am sitting on one billion dollars in gold bullion. This gold bullion is what they call four nines pure, meaning it's nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of ten thousand pure gold. And so, the picture is me sitting on one billion dollars in gold. Recently I recalculated the value of the gold that I'm sitting on. And, you know, gold has appreciated in value. Well, today it would be worth twelve billion dollars. So, the picture is me sitting on twelve billion dollars in gold.

I'm going to ask you about what the former Deputy Director of Operations, Jack Devine, said. I don't recall exactly when that was, maybe 2016, 2015, somewhere in Europe. And I didn't know him back then. And for those who don't know who Jack Devine is, they should go to Amazon and have a look at a couple of his books. Anyway, he said that technology will never replace a human asset, mark my words. Do you think this is still valid? Because he said that before AI was a thing and all of that.

I agree with Jack. I have a lot of respect for Jack. He was Chief of Station in London when I was running my AQ Khan operation.

I wasn't going to reveal that because I thought it was still classified. (laughter)

Okay. I said it. I mean, he was chief in London. I think it's a well-known fact that we have very close relations with the British. But yes, I agree with that. In fact, about six months ago, I had a professor from Stanford University and a retired military, retired army general, ask me how AI would affect human recruiting.

And I said, “I thought that AI would be a wonderful targeting mechanism. If we could scoop up everything that is out there about somebody, their financial things, their employment records, their mental health records. If you had an AI tool that could suck all of that up and combine it with all our classified holdings, it could then suggest certain routes, certain ways that a case officer could go and make a recruitment pitch”.

The targeting officers would have to put it together and use the AI. But it would be, you're not going to see the AI tool or the AI pitch somebody. That requires a human case officer looking into the eyes of their target and then using the route, perhaps, that the AI tool has suggested. So, it would make targeting much more comprehensive if I know everything there is to know or everything that's out there about somebody

It gives you an edge.

Oh, a huge edge, huge, huge advantage. So yes, I see that helping, but Jack is right that technology is not going to replace a human. You need humans. And that also goes for the spies we recruit. If I recruit a spy, I can then know what the plans and intentions are, which may or may not be in their cyber networks or anything else. Or they could have plans that they know they really can't do, but they've written this plan just to satisfy their leadership as an aspiration, even if it's impossible.

I've written about that on The Cipher Brief, about HUMINT: if you don't have the capability, for example, to be inside the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, you can't know when something is going to happen. You need to know when President Xi is going to say, “okay, tomorrow we invade Taiwan at 06:00 hours”. You need someone to tell you in code or through a burst transmission or whatever, it's happening tomorrow at 6 AM or whatever.

That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

The human to me, human sources, sure. Cyber sources, SIGINT sources, overhead sources, those are all good. They're all what I call a blended operation. When I was running my A.Q. Khan operation, I had human assets, I had cyber assets, I had overhead, I had all these things. It was like being a conductor at a symphony. You have the brass, you have the woodwinds, you have the orchestra, the chorus. You have all these things, and you must know when to blend in the different parts.

Last questions. First, are we going to see a fourth book soon?

Yes. Yes. I'm working on one right now with a very talented co-author named Johanna McCloy. Her father was a deep cover, what we call a NOC, a non-official cover officer . She's the daughter of a NOC. We are writing it, we are alternating chapters to where I write my part from the point of view of a retired NOC officer, even though I wasn't a NOC, I was a handler. She writes it from the point of view of being a NOC's daughter. It's about this NOC. He's retired now for about a year and a half. He had some operations that never came to fruition the way he thought, and he calls them his loose threads. Well, suddenly the loose threads start to come together again, and it puts him and his daughter in great danger.

Sounds very interesting. I'm looking forward to that. I assume that by writing novels you don't miss the game much nowadays, do you?

Well, it's a substitute for the game. It's not as much fun, but that's one reason why I do it because I can't go out and recruit spies anymore, so I tell spy stories and create spy stories and delve into human motivations.

Exactly, and you educate people. When someone sees your resume, you've educated officers from almost every agency and every department that matters in the United States about this business. So, it's what you leave behind that matters.

I agree. I have a lot of students that still contact me and talk to me. I have taught thousands of people in CIA, DIA, FBI, Department of Defense, and I get a lot of satisfaction from doing that, and I still mentor a lot of young people who want to go into the intelligence community.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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### Global Intelligence Report for Tuesday, September 8, 2026

**Published:** September 8, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-tuesday-september-8-2026.md



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### Inside Trump’s Massive Venezuela Oil Deal

**Published:** September 8, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/inside-trumps-massive-venezuela-oil-deal.md

“A major oil agreement has been announced between the government of the United States and the regime of Delcy Rodriquez. I know what you are feeling, sadness, anger and that painful sense so familiar throughout our history that someone else is making decisions about what belongs to us in our name, without us. The true scope of this agreement is still unknown. Who is signing it? What exactly is being signed? Who is providing the funds? Who is offering the guarantees? How does this benefit Venezuelans? Quite rightly, this has sparked deep concern about its implications for our country's future.”

That was part of a statement to the Venezuelan people released last Thursday by María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician, activist, and prominent leader of the opposition to Venezuela’s interim-President Delcy Rodriguez. These were Machado’s first extended remarks about what President Trump has called “the biggest oil deal in world history.”

But as Machado so accurately observed, “We still do not know the true scope of this agreement,” nor, I will add, does anyone know if this deal will ever go into effect.

First, a bit of history, since I believe the Trump administration initial plan was described publicly back on January 9, when the President met with executives of 17 oil companies at the White House.

At that time, with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro locked in a New York City jail, President Trump said, “American companies will have the opportunity to rebuild Venezuela's rotting energy infrastructure and eventually increase oil production to levels never ever seen before.”

“Our giant oil companies,” Trump said, “will be spending at least $100 billion of their money, not the government's money. They don't need government money, but they need government protection and need government security that when they spend all this money, it's going to be there.”

He added, “Venezuela has also agreed that the United States will immediately begin refining and selling up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil, which will continue indefinitely.”

Trump then made his pitch saying, “All of the companies here today are going to be treasured partners in bringing the nation of Venezuela back to life, restoring its economy and generating…tremendous wealth for the companies that are going in.”

At that session, Mark Nelson, vice chairman of Chevron, when called upon said, “For more than a century, Chevron has been a part of Venezuela's past. We are certainly committed to its present. And we very much look forward, as a proud American company, to help it build a better future.”

However, when Trump asked ExxonMobile Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods to “say a few words,” the response was different.

Woods explained, “We have a very long history in Venezuela. In fact, we first got into Venezuela back in the 1940s. We've had our assets seized there twice. And so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we've historically seen here and what is currently the state.”

Apparently, over the past seven months more negotiations took place and on August 28, Trump announced on TruthSocial, “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY! At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer.”

Three days later, on August 31, the White House released a fact sheet with more details.

The fact sheet disclosed the Venezuelan interim government has granted a privately-held oil company, North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), 100-year concessions for 17 oil fields with proven reserves of approximately 65 billion barrels.

I should point out that Venezuela has some 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the largest in the world, with Saudi Arabia second with 287 billion barrels. On the other hand, as of this year, the U.S, has only some 46 billion barrels of proven reserves, although this country is one of the world’s largest oil producers.

NABEP, based in Barbados, already was Venezuela’s second-largest private oil producer run by Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López. According to press reports, the 46-year-old Betancourt has a checkered background, but nonetheless was used by the Trump team in planning the U.S operation that seized former-President Nicolas Maduro, and afterwards served as a liaison figure with Delcy Rodriguez.

The White House fact sheet also said, “At no cost to the American taxpayer, NABEP has granted the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) a 35% equity stake in its corporate parent, representing up to hundreds of billions in value and dividends for the United States.”

The OSC, started under the Biden administration, has up-to-now funded private companies developing certain needed military technologies. The Trump administration last year increased its legislative authority to support up to $200 billion in loans and loan guarantees, and recently has grown its staff to near 100 people.

But the OSC has never been prepared to deal with the role apparently to be required if, as the agreement apparently states, it would be a major stockholder in what could be one of the largest oil companies in the world.

Perhaps because of the proposed Venezuela deal, the OSC announced on August 17, it was going to establish “a panel of pre-qualified law firms (“Firms”) to act as its external transaction counsel.” The selected firms would then represent borrowers or others doing business with the OSC on a “Sponsor Pay Basis,” meaning that the legal fees and expenses of OSC for a transaction will be borne solely by the borrower or another third party and not by OSC, or any U.S. government entity.

An additional benefit from the deal to the U.S., according to the fact sheet is: “NABEP has also granted the U.S. State Department the right to purchase, at production cost, a guaranteed 20% of the off-take from all current and future fields NABEP will operate.” The State Department was also given “the right of first refusal to purchase the remaining 80% of its production,” according to the fact sheet.

It’s unclear why the State Department has this role other than Secretary Rubio was a negotiator of this deal and the State Department was named on Trump’s January 15, Executive Order to administer funds from current Venezuela oil sales being controlled at that time by the U.S.

As for NABEP -- the company itself -- the U.S. government was given “veto power over the appointment of any member of the board of directors,” plus “a majority of NABEP’s board of directors must be U.S. citizens,” the fact sheet said. Additional, according to the fact sheet, “the U.S. government’s agreement with NABEP is governed by U.S. law and is subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.”

Naturally, questions about whether this agreement ever goes through have been raised.

On September 1, The Atlantic Council pointed out that the Pentagon’s OSC “has never been leveraged for a program like this or the management of such a vast equity stake in a foreign country’s national assets (assets which that country’s own constitution forbids the sale of).”

The Atlantic Council further said, “As in Venezuela, it is entirely plausible that future U.S. governments may likewise look askance at this agreement -- particularly if…it is not resulting in the massive oil production increases that are presently hoped for.”

For example, interim-President Rodriguez said during an August 29 television interview that the agreement could generate about $209 billion in ⁠revenue for Venezuela, based on a $65 per barrel oil price where some $19 per barrel would flow directly to Venezuela, to boost government revenue.

But others have questioned whether the Venezuelan government would actually get $19 per barrel if the U.S. exercised its right to buy 20 percent of production at cost.

Then there is the political opposition in Venezuela where leaders such as Machado have argued, “The wealth beneath our soil does not belong to an illegitimate regime. It belongs to the Venezuelan people.”

Machado added, “Venezuelans know there can be no development without strong institutions and a government elected by popular vote. That is the only real guarantee of success and stability for any large-scale investment.”

Last Wednesday, both Trump and Rodríguez brushed off questions about when the next Venezuelan election might be held.

Trump told reporters, “You had a very powerful, very nasty dictatorship in Venezuela – and they’re just not going to be ready for it yet, but soon.” With Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who was visiting Caracas, Rodríguez told reporters, “I have worked tirelessly to ensure that Venezuela is ready and prepared when the time comes for its electoral process.”

Elliott Abrams, who served as U.S. special envoy to Venezuela during Trump’s first term, has told the New York Times, “If an election is to take place in Venezuela, a nine-month runway for preparation is likely to be expected. Within the time period, Abrams said, “Here’s my fear: It makes us Delcy’s partner, and gives the President a reason to want her to remain in power,” because she will do “whatever Trump tells her to do.”

Luis A. Pacheco, for 17 years an executive at Venezuela’s national oil company PDVSA and currently a nonresident fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, wrote last week in Americas Quarterly, “Little is known about how this deal will proceed, so important questions still need answers.”

Pacheco’s questions included, “Will NABEP sign this deal with PDVSA, the state oil company, making it more like a standard joint venture?...It’s still unclear whether NABEP can turn around and share ownership with the U.S. government, specifically with the Pentagon’s special unit originally designated as a counterpart to this pact. Beyond this critical aspect, there is also the question of NABEP’s financial and technical muscle. Will a firm that lacks these credentials be able to outsource to established oil companies to fulfill the contract’s scope?”

With experts raising such questions who can believe this “BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” is going forward as currently planned?

For example, back during his January 9 press conference with oil company leaders at the White House, Trump announced that Venezuela had already given the U.S. 30 million barrels of what had been previously-sanctioned oil that it had on hand.

“That's about $4 billion worth,” Trump announced back in January, adding, “And it's on our way to the United States right now. And we want to thank Venezuela for that. And we're working very well with them, obviously, or they wouldn't have been so generous.”

There has been no accounting that I know of for that first gift of $4 billion worth of Venezuelan oil.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### A Quarter-Century Reckoning With America's War On Terror

**Published:** September 8, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/a-quarter-century-reckoning-with-america-s-war-on-terror.md

BOOK REVIEW: ALL THE PRESIDENTS' WARS

By Peter Bergen / W. W. Norton & Company

Reviewed by: Joe Zacks

The Reviewer — Joe Zacks is the former Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA for Counterterrorism, the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Aardwolf Global Solutions and a Cipher Brief Subject Matter Expert.

REVIEW: Peter Bergen's All the Presidents' Wars is an excellent compendium of America's post-9/11 war on terror and the policy achievements and failures that mark this 25-year period.

Most of the accounts that Bergen includes—such as the history of 9/11, the escape of Osama Bin Laden from Tora Bora, the long war in Afghanistan and the subsequent U.S. retrograde, the rush to war in Iraq, and the rise of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and ISIS—are well known. There are many books that delve into each of these events individually, and this is a fine collective accounting and analysis of separate yet intertwined phases in the U.S.'s war on terror. Bergen focuses heavily on the style and policy consequences of presidential decision-making. He unmasks and discredits the cloaking of policy shortcomings as intelligence failures.

Bergen illustrates the dangers of Presidents' acting on their intuition. He portrays how President George W. Bush's instinct (ultimately wrong) that Iraq supported Bin Laden and had some culpability for 9/11 distracted his administration at pivotal moments during the early stages of the war in Afghanistan. According to Bergen, this in large part led to the missed opportunity to eliminate Bin Laden at Tora Bora. He also highlights the lack of a deliberative process among Bush's cabinet members in the decisions leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Compounding these initial mistakes was the de-Baathification policy after the ouster of Saddam Hussein that in many ways led to civil war in Iraq and the rise of both AQI and the Shia militias.

The author is highly critical of President Biden's decision-making that led to the catastrophic retrograde from Afghanistan. He notes that President Biden was largely driven by his longstanding antipathy toward America's involvement in Afghanistan and his gut feelings about the path toward winding down its involvement with the country. Building on the groundwork laid by the first Trump administration in its Doha agreement with the Taliban, Biden firmly insisted, against the arguably better judgment of his military leaders, on a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan in accordance with a very ambitious and publicly disseminated timeline. This ill-designed withdrawal ultimately led to the rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan and the Taliban's return to power. Bergen points out that the ramifications of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan extends well beyond the counterterrorism fight to depriving the U.S. of critically strategic basing rights in central Asia. Having control of the Bagram airfield was an important bulwark against China, Russia, and Iran. It is no wonder that President Trump has repeatedly insisted on a U.S. return to Bagram in exchange for normalized relations with the Taliban regime.

Bergen paints President Obama as likely the most deliberative, methodical, and process-driven post-9/11 President, although he demonstrates how his policies were also not without mistakes. President Obama comes across as disciplined, analytical, reasonable and able to course correct when the prospect of policy failure looms. This was clearest in his Iraq policies and recommitting U.S. troops to fight ISIS in 2014. While the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 may be viewed superficially as an Obama policy failure, the truth is more complicated. The withdrawal of troops was a Bush-era commitment that Obama was unable to forestall because of an inability to successfully renegotiate the Status of Forces (SOFA) agreement with the Iraqi government.

It should come as no surprise that Bergen characterizes President Trump's decision-making style as largely driven by instinct. He captures Trump's stylistic differences in policy formulation between his first and second administrations. In his first administration, Trump is characterized as being constrained by his advisors in acting on his impulses, but he is much less so in his second administration. Bergen delves into the lead-up to the current conflict with Iran, but he is careful not to draw too many conclusions about this as yet unresolved dispute.

While Bergen devotes many pages to detailed accounts of well-reported stories (quite a few of which are his own) such as the Abbottabad raid on Bin Laden or the operation against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, he falls short in providing details about other highly consequential events. He devotes less than half-a-page to the Biden-era killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. My guess is that, despite Bergen's prowess as an investigative journalist, he knows next to nothing about the details of this extremely important and complicated operation.

Of comfort in Bergen's tale is that America is better poised today to counter terrorist threats than it ever was pre-9/11. Our counterterrorism institutions are well developed and able to take on emerging challenges in the counterterrorism landscape such as artificial intelligence, drones, and online radicalization. This though will not shield the United States from poor presidential-led decision-making, inadequate policies, and ill-conceived and executed strategies. Policymakers will be well-served in digesting Bergen's survey of policy missteps and working toward measures to preclude such mishaps in the future.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

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### Global Intelligence Report for Monday, September 7, 2026

**Published:** September 7, 2026 | **Author:** Brad Christian | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-monday-september-7-2026.md



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### Dead Drop: September 6-12

**Published:** September 6, 2026 | **Author:** Suzanne Kelly | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dead-drop-september-6-12.md

RUSSIA PRACTICES CABLE-CUTTING, GETS CAUGHT MID-REHEARSAL: Russia's GUGI, a secretive Russian military unit whose entire job is apparently finding ways to tamper with the ocean floor, brought its homework to the Arctic this spring, and NATO reportedly caught them in the act. Reuters reports that British, Norwegian and U.S. forces tracked and confronted Russian submarines near Norway's Svalbard archipelago as they tested a new weapon that western officials believe was built to sever undersea fiber-optic cables without leaving a trace. The cables in question carry communications data between Svalbard and mainland Norway. According to the reporting, no cables were actually cut, and the Russian vessels eventually left the area. Britain and Norway previously disclosed a version of this story back in April, but the new reporting adds three details that weren't previously made public: the exact location, the existence of the untraceable sabotage technology itself, and the fact that U.S. forces were quietly part of the operation all along. This kind of fits with the whole Gray Zone argument that Moscow is testing capabilities today that it could use against NATO infrastructure tomorrow. This time, NATO just happened to be watching.

CITY OF DREAMS, RAF’S WORST NIGHTMARE — A sixteen-story luxury resort in Cyprus has a better sightline on NATO assets than most defense contractors. British and American officials are reportedly concerned about a Chinese-owned resort sitting roughly 4.5 miles from RAF Akrotiri, one of Britain’s most strategically important overseas bases. Called, “The City of Dreams Mediterranean,” the facility commands a panoramic view of the base. IntelNews reports that the RAF base is home to F-35s and U-2 “Dragon Lady” reconnaissance aircraft operated by the U.S. Air Force. (Starting to see a problem here?) According to the reporting, the resort belongs to Melco Resorts & Entertainment, which is run by Chinese-Canadian billionaire Lawrence Ho, who sits on China’s National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, part of Beijing’s United Front system. Melco has called espionage concerns “entirely unfounded.” British security officials reportedly plan counter-intelligence measures. We’re just not sure how you do that when it comes to a hotel with five-star reviews and views to die for.

ROBO-COP OUT: CHINA TRAINS THE BOTS: China's military is exploring humanoid robots for reconnaissance, logistics, hazardous missions and urban combat. According to Reuters, one project at the National University of Defense Technology has six robots working in two assault teams to clear buildings. The news agency reviewed more than 100 Chinese military procurement documents and papers, including one competition that simulated robots "infiltrating behind enemy lines." Here’s the rub here: China has the manufacturing edge. Its companies built about 95 percent of the world's humanoid robots that were shipped in 2025, and this news comes fresh off of the country’s ‘Robot Games’ where the machines danced, boxed and ran. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the technology isn't quite battle-ready just yet. Power drain, reliability issues and basic coordination still seem to trip the bots up.

LOOKING TO MAKE A COOL $10 MILLION? The State Department is offering $10 million for information on Amir Yaryab, the Iranian official whom the U.S. believes runs the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' cyber unit. Officials reportedly believe the unit includes some of Tehran’s greatest hacking crews, including CyberAv3ngers - the group believed to be behind the 2023 and 2024 attacks on American water utilities. (And don’t forget that officials believe Iran-linked hackers have breached more than 100 water entities since late July of this year.) According to reporting by The Record, Yaryab also oversees groups that stand accused of targeting shipping, energy, hotel, and telecom systems across the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. Now, there's a bit of déjà vu here because Washington issued an essentially identical $10 million reward for the same hacking operation last year. Nobody collected.

HOW DO YOU SAY ‘NO THANKS’ IN CHINESE? Turns out not every intelligence service pays U.S.-style bounties. While Washington was dangling $10 million for tips on Yaryab, prosecutors in Taiwan indicted a retired Taiwanese navy sergeant (who has only been identified by the surname Ma) for allegedly running a China-directed recruitment effort dating back to 2008. According to the reporting, the operation was trying to build a network covering Taiwan's military, maritime affairs, and coast guard. According to Taipei Times, Ma's biggest target was a retired major general, whom he allegedly tried to recruit with a payment of NT$42,100, or roughly $1,370. A second target reportedly got a phone and some cash for his trouble but then simply declined to cooperate.

WHO’S YOUR DADDY? Here’s an update to a story we told you about in a previous Dead Drop: you might remember that a University of Waterloo student was accused of taking $20-to-$30 photo assignments from a Chinese contact, and ended up snapping pictures of airplanes and FedEx facilities in Toronto and Chicago cashing in on somewhere between $74 and $500. Now, apparently, his sister has entered the chat. In a social media post cited by CBC News, the accused’s sibling offered a hypothesis: “If my brother is a Chinese spy, then I'm Trump's father.”

REPORTING FOR DUTY: Sometimes you can tell a lot about the future of Intelligence based on how governments are spending their money. Take for example, that the Defense Department is soliciting technology that uses AI-generated “personas” to create phone signals that can mimick real users. The goal here? We don’t know. Maybe it’s to confuse anyone who’s trying to track U.S. personnel through their devices. The problem though: “digital exhaust”. Reportedly, location data, device IDs, and other metadata that phones collect are constantly leaked and according to the solicitation, adversaries can use that exhaust to track daily routines. The fix: might be a “digital exhaust deception system.” Imagine AI personas that can generate realistic activity patterns that are intentionally designed to fool automated network analysis. The hardware for this solicitation needs to weigh less than two pounds and run for up to 36 hours. Military Times reports the system has to do more than spam fake signals though. It reportedly also needs a convincing “pattern of life” to beat increasingly sophisticated AI analysis. (What might make this feel really real is if the fake personas report for testosterone testing, eh?)

A NEW KIND OF FBI SPECIAL (AI) AGENT: FBI Director Kash Patel posted a video on X recently boasting that the FBI is putting “cutting-edge technology” into the hands of its agents. There’s just one problem: Apparently nobody put the cutting-edge technology into the hands of the person checking the AI’s work. As Gizmodo reports, the largely AI-generated video displays the FBI seal at about the 18-second mark, identifying the agency as the “Federal Bureal of Investigation.” And “Bureal” is hardly the only AI tell. The video also features an agent with apparently malformed hands, a photographer with no hands at all, a man whose eye appears to be looking somewhere other than at the document in front of him, and an agent frantically shoving mysteriously morphing pages into a binder. Patel’s narration touts AI as a way to help the FBI “move faster to keep up with 21st century criminals.” Judging from the video, the criminals shouldn’t be too hard to catch.

PROFESSOR OF PAYBACK: Ukraine has reportedly found a novel way to collect part of a $4.22 billion debt from Russia: take ownership of one of Moscow’s cruise ships. Norwegian authorities have seized the Russian-owned Professor Molchanov in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard at the request of Ukraine's state-owned energy company Naftogaz. As Reuters reports, Naftogaz won a $4.22 billion arbitration award over Russian seizures of Ukrainian energy assets following Moscow's 2014 (illegal) annexation of Crimea. Russia hasn't paid, so Naftogaz has been hunting for Russian assets abroad. Enter the former oceanographic research vessel now used for commercial expedition cruises. The ship now sits in the Arctic port of Barentsburg. News of the seizure caught the attention of the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin is now describing the move as "state terrorism," while Russia's ambassador to Norway called it both politically motivated and illegal. Sounds kinda like the whole Ukraine war thing that Moscow started, eh?

Got news to share? Drop us a note: Editor@thecipherbrief.com

Read more expert-driven national security insights exclusively in www.thecipherbrief.com.

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### A Former CIA Station Chief on Kyiv Under Drone Siege

**Published:** September 4, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/a-former-cia-station-chief-on-kyiv-under-drone-siege.md

Reporting live from Kyiv, Cipher Brief expert and former senior CIA officer Ralph Goff walks CEO and Publisher Suzanne Kelly through a drone strike that hit the SBU headquarters in the heart of the city today.

Ukraine’s SBU — the Security Service of Ukraine (Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy) — is best described as Ukraine’s principal domestic security and counterintelligence service, although its wartime role has become substantially broader and more operational.

The closest U.S. analogy would be a combination of responsibilities that are divided between the FBI, the CIA and specialized military/intelligence capabilities, here in the U.S. The SBU is responsible for counterintelligence, counterespionage, counterterrorism, protecting state secrets and investigating threats to Ukrainian national security. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, it has also become a significant wartime intelligence and covert-action organization.

Kelly talked with Goff about the impact of a Russian drone attack on the organization's headquarters and the surprising resilience of Kyiv residents in the strike's aftermath.

Kelly: You've been on the ground in Kyiv for a couple of days, but there was quite an incident this morning amid near-nonstop air raids that have lasted for more than a week now. Tell us about where you were and what you heard this morning near SBU Headquarters.

Goff: Today in Kyiv we had some air raid alerts overnight, then some in the morning, and a couple more during the day. But today was followed up with a couple of drone strikes right in the middle of Kyiv. Early this afternoon, one struck the headquarters of the Internal Security Service, the SBU, which seems like a very deliberate, targeted attack by the Russians. Unfortunately, there were some casualties, I don't think anyone was killed, but there were wounded, and some damage to the building. It was a very clear sign from the Russians that their jet-powered Geran drones are not only hard to intercept, but very accurate.

Kelly: The Cipher Brief has been in that area of Kyiv with you several times in the past, Ralph. That's essentially the inner circle, where the government operates. We've been wondering how long it would be before some of these significant targets got hit, given Ukraine's shortage of anti-missile systems. What's it been like on the ground since you arrived three or four days ago? Is there a heightened sense of anxiety?

Goff: There is, among parts of the population, but I'd say for most people it's more a heightened sense of annoyance. Here we had a drone strike right in the heart of Kyiv, at the SBU building, and most people's biggest concern afterward was how it messed up traffic downtown, it's a major artery, so there were traffic jams all around. History is replete with examples where so-called strategic bombing of civilian targets or major cities to break the will of an enemy has never worked, and I don't see that working here either.

I do think it's a clear sign that Ukraine has to find a way to close the gap and counter these new high-speed, high-performance drones. We hear reports of an 85 to 90 percent interception rate on conventional, piston-engine drones, the regular Shahed-type drones. But with the jet-powered drones, we've heard the interception rate drops to much lower figures, which I won't get into because I don't want to give the enemy that kind of data. And when it comes to missiles, the press has already reported that the Ukrainians are so low on counter-missile capabilities that they rarely intercept any ballistic missiles launched into Ukraine.

Kelly: When you're watching this war from afar, it's hard to get a clear sense of how much time is left before Kyiv, Lviv, and other major cities are in real trouble. Kyiv has always had the strongest air defenses. Is Kyiv running out of time?

Goff: I don't think they're running out of time so much as, I think they will close the gap, they will solve the technical issues and improve their defenses, but it will take time, and they'll suffer in the meantime. I'll say it's going to be a bad winter; I'm fairly certain of that. But the Russians didn't break the Ukrainian spirit last winter, and they won't break it this year either.

On the other hand, there's an interesting dichotomy of feelings and morale. At the front, I was talking to a friend who's been deeply involved in providing intelligence assistance to frontline units, a non-governmental source, and he said that for the first time since he's been here, every unit he visited had high morale. We're looking at a battlefield now where the casualty ratio is probably eight to one in favor of the Ukrainians. Eight to one, that's an astounding number. So you have this high morale at the front, where soldiers are saying, “we think we can pull this off.” And then in the cities, you have people increasingly concerned about the welfare of their families and children because of these blatantly terroristic attacks on civilian targets. There's a real dichotomy emerging in the middle of this war.

Kelly: On that eight-to-one figure, is that because so much of the fighting on the front lines now is essentially robot-on-robot, drone-on-drone combat? Or is something else driving that number?

Goff: That's a large part of it, but at the end of the day you still need soldiers fighting soldiers. What it comes down to is who has better mastery of the battlefield, and the Ukrainians have information dominance. On top of that, they're the defenders, they can dig in and weather the storm, whereas the Russians are still relying on high-cost, high-attrition tactics, sending soldiers out literally in ones and twos to try to infiltrate Ukrainian positions. But they're very vulnerable, because the battlefield has become so saturated with drone coverage and surveillance, what we call ISR, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The Ukrainians have really mastered that, and it's given them a huge advantage. That could change, the Russians aren't sitting back, they're innovating too, but for now the Ukrainians have an edge, and they're going to keep innovating to maintain it.

Kelly: There have been a lot of headlines about domestic issues that President Zelensky is dealing with this week in Kyiv, even as he wages this war, including the departure of Minister Fedorov, who's been pushing forward on defense technology and made some announcements this week here in the U.S. about that. What's different now in terms of the strength, stability, and unity of the government? We know the unity of the people is hard to break, but how are you looking at this through the government lens?

Goff: The big difference now is that the innovation and technical advances made by the Ukrainians don't depend on one person. This isn't some technological breakthrough that depends on one minister or one ministry, it's government-wide, across the various ministries and different commands. It's a multi-echelon effort where technological innovation isn't just pushed down to the lowest levels, it's driven by the lowest levels. It runs from top to bottom and bottom to top. So whether you change a minister or change a commander, like the change from Syrskyi to Drapatyi, that doesn't change. The innovation has reached all levels, and it's here to stay.

Kelly: I'm jealous The Cipher Brief isn't there with you right now, we usually are, and we like being there because you're attending a number of interesting and enlightening meetings while in Kyiv. Has anything surprised you this time, or really stuck with you, from this round of meetings?

Goff: Nothing ever really surprises me here. I think one of the reasons I come is for my own benefit, I always leave more inspired than when I arrived. A good example: we had this horrendous drone strike in the middle of the city, and within minutes people were just going about their daily lives. The emergency response was there, I watched ambulances flowing to the scene, first responders arriving. I actually marveled at that, because my initial instinct was to stay away, given the Russian penchant for the “double tap”, hit the target, wait a few minutes until first responders arrive, then hit it again. Even knowing that's a Russian tactic, the first responders were there within minutes.

As I continued on to my next meeting, people were going about their lives, doing their shopping, going to work, going to the grocery store. They weren't deterred by the event. And while that doesn't surprise me, it does inspire me.

Kelly: What about the significance of the SBU? A lot of people may not understand exactly what it does, it's similar to our own intelligence gathering but with other functions too, almost a combination of the CIA and FBI if we're relating it to the U.S. Tell us about some of its operations and why it's an important organization in Ukraine.

Goff: It's an important organization because, yes, they have the primary mandate for internal security in Ukraine, but they're also involved in long-range strikes into Russia. If you see press reporting on some sort of assassination attempt, like the Russian air force general who was shot the other day, that's pretty much the SBU, showing they have a long reach into Russia. So they're playing on multiple levels, and they're an important player. This is a sign that Russia knows who they are and where they are.

But taking out the SBU headquarters is probably inconvenient for some time, and there will be losses. The Ukrainians have decentralized much the same way they've decentralized the structure of their military intelligence community, they've decentralized command and control. So if you take out the SBU headquarters, I'm sure within minutes there's a backup headquarters and contingency plans in place. The Ukrainians are well aware of Russia's capability to strike their headquarters.

Kelly: It's been a little while since you were working as a CIA station chief, you held six different postings in that role. If you were filing something back to the United States today, what's the most important thing you'd want people to understand about what you're seeing there?

Goff: That the war is entering a different phase. And if the war is entering a different phase, it means the Ukrainians are going to have to react differently, which means their allies are going to have to react differently, which means those of us in the intelligence community are also going to have to change our game and adjust. We're going to have to be prepared to support the Ukrainian effort to defend themselves, and if that means an active defense against the Russians, that would be my recommendation.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### The New Economics of Warfare: David vs Goliath

**Published:** September 4, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-new-economics-of-warfare-david-vs-goliath.md

The most important lesson emerging from the Iran conflict may not actually be about Iran. It is about the changing economics of warfare and what happens when autonomy, artificial intelligence, commercial technology and inexpensive mass begin eroding advantages once reserved almost exclusively for major powers.

In many ways, modern warfare is increasingly becoming a story of David versus Goliath. The difference is that today’s David is armed with drones, software, commercial sensors, open-source intelligence and rapidly adaptable technology. Goliath still has overwhelming advantages in scale, firepower and resources, but the sling has become far more sophisticated — and far cheaper.

For most of the modern era, advanced military power belonged overwhelmingly to countries capable of spending billions of dollars on sophisticated aircraft, warships, missiles, sensors and command-and-control infrastructure. That advantage is not disappearing. Aircraft carriers, submarines, advanced fighters, bombers and integrated missile defenses remain essential instruments of national power. But the economics beneath them are changing as autonomy, AI, inexpensive sensors, commercial communications, advanced manufacturing and widely available components lower the cost of creating meaningful military effects.

Ukraine provided the first large-scale demonstration of this shift. A materially weaker “David” used drones, software, commercial technology, open-source intelligence and rapid battlefield innovation to impose extraordinary costs on a much larger Russian “Goliath.” Ukraine did not eliminate Russia’s advantages in manpower, missiles, aircraft or industrial capacity. It showed that technology could narrow the gap without matching a stronger adversary platform for platform.

Iran is now demonstrating another version of the same problem. Tehran cannot compete with the United States carrier for carrier, fighter for fighter or missile-defense battery for missile-defense battery, but it does not need to. Iran has spent decades investing in missiles, drones, proxies, cyber capabilities, maritime harassment, information warfare and strategic geography precisely because those tools allow a materially weaker power to impose disproportionate costs on a stronger one.

That is the economic logic of asymmetric warfare. An inexpensive autonomous aircraft does not need to outperform an F-35, and a small unmanned surface vessel does not need to defeat a destroyer in a traditional naval engagement. It only needs to create enough risk that the defender is forced to respond. When one side can repeatedly spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and compel the other to spend hundreds of thousands or millions, the exchange ratio eventually becomes strategically significant.

The United States cannot build a sustainable long-term strategy around answering every inexpensive drone with a multimillion-dollar interceptor or every maritime threat with another billion-dollar warship. That does not mean exquisite platforms are obsolete. It means using exquisite platforms to solve every problem eventually becomes economically unsustainable.

The more useful debate is not whether a drone can replace a fighter or whether an autonomous vessel can replace a destroyer. They cannot. The better question is how many missions currently concentrated aboard expensive crewed platforms can migrate toward cheaper autonomous systems: surveillance, reconnaissance, communications relay, target detection, electronic sensing, mine detection, logistics, persistent maritime presence, decoys and distributed weapons carriage.

Technology disruption rarely begins by replacing an incumbent system outright. It begins by stripping away individual functions. Instead of asking whether one autonomous vessel can replace a destroyer, military planners should be asking what happens when dozens of autonomous vessels operate around that destroyer, extending its sensing range, complicating enemy targeting, absorbing risk, providing persistent presence and allowing the crewed combatant to operate farther from danger. The destroyer remains essential, but its role changes.

Artificial intelligence accelerates this transition because it changes the manpower economics of military mass. Traditional military power is extraordinarily manpower intensive. Every additional aircraft, ship or vehicle generally requires crews, training, maintenance and support personnel. Software scales differently. As autonomous systems become more capable of navigating, sensing, classifying targets and coordinating with one another, fewer operators may eventually supervise far larger numbers of assets.

The strategic value is therefore not simply removing a sailor or pilot from danger. It is changing the relationship between manpower, mass and military capability. Ukraine has also shown how quickly this cycle can evolve: operators identify a battlefield problem, engineers modify hardware or software, the adversary develops a countermeasure, and the system changes again. That cycle can occur in weeks while traditional acquisition processes often operate in years. The widening gap between those timelines is becoming a national-security vulnerability.

Iran also demonstrates why the economics of modern warfare extend far beyond the price of a missile or drone. Consider the Strait of Hormuz. Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. Navy in a traditional fleet engagement to create a strategic crisis. It needs only to generate enough uncertainty around one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints to affect shipping behavior, insurance premiums, energy markets, naval deployments and political calculations thousands of miles from the battlefield.

A drone does not necessarily need to sink a tanker to be successful. If it forces commercial vessels to reroute, raises insurance premiums, pushes energy prices higher, requires additional naval escorts and generates political pressure in Washington or allied capitals, it may have produced a strategic return far beyond its acquisition cost. The Strait of Hormuz is therefore not merely geography; it is economic leverage.

The same logic applies to the Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea and other maritime chokepoints. Protecting those spaces exclusively with crewed ships and aircraft is extraordinarily expensive. Autonomous maritime systems offer another model by providing persistent surveillance, distributed sensing, electronic warfare, communications relay, logistics and eventually additional defensive or offensive capacity without the manpower burden of conventional warships.

The future fleet will almost certainly be hybrid. Submarines, destroyers, carriers and advanced aircraft will remain critical, but they will increasingly operate inside larger networks of autonomous systems. The same principle applies to the defense industrial base. The United States is not going to replace traditional primes with startups, nor should it. The engineering, manufacturing and systems-integration capabilities required to build submarines, bombers and complex weapons remain indispensable.

But the traditional model cannot remain the only model. Modern warfare increasingly rewards an ecosystem that combines established defense companies with emerging technology firms, commercial manufacturers, software companies, universities, private capital and government laboratories. The industrial challenge is no longer simply building the most sophisticated weapon. It is building sophisticated weapons while also producing enough affordable systems to create mass, replace losses and adapt faster than the adversary.

Quantity is not a substitute for quality, but quality alone is not enough if an adversary can manufacture threats faster and more cheaply than the defender can respond to them. A weapons system that performs extraordinarily well but cannot be produced in sufficient quantities or replaced during a prolonged conflict carries its own strategic vulnerability.

There is another cost curve collapsing alongside hardware: information. Artificial intelligence and social media are dramatically reducing the cost of conducting information and cognitive warfare. An inexpensive drone can force an expensive military response, while an AI-generated video, manipulated image or coordinated social-media campaign can create political effects at almost no marginal distribution cost.

Iran, Russia and China understand that these domains reinforce one another. A tanker is attacked, insurance rates rise, energy markets react, images spread across social media, and AI-enabled narratives amplify fear or confusion. Physical warfare, economic warfare and cognitive warfare increasingly operate as parts of the same system. A missile can therefore be intercepted and still produce strategic effect if it forces millions of dollars in defensive spending, disrupts commerce, dominates media coverage and creates the perception that an adversary controls the pace of escalation.

That is why modern warfare can no longer be measured exclusively through targets destroyed or territory captured. Costs can be military, but they can also be economic, political and psychological. The United States still possesses extraordinary technological and military advantages; the greater danger is economic rigidity.

America and its allies cannot allow adversaries to consistently dictate exchange ratios in which cheap systems consume expensive defenses, small attacks produce major commercial disruptions and rapidly evolving technologies are answered by procurement processes that take years. The answer is not abandoning exquisite weapons, but building a broader force architecture around them: autonomous mass, distributed sensors, AI-enabled command and control, resilient manufacturing, commercial intelligence, lower-cost interceptors, modular payloads and systems capable of evolving at something closer to software speed.

Cold War 2.0 will therefore not be determined solely by which country builds the best fighter, submarine, missile or autonomous system. It will also be determined by which side can manufacture capability faster, distribute it more broadly, replace it more cheaply, adapt it more quickly and impose greater costs on an adversary than it absorbs itself.

Ukraine demonstrated how a modern-day David can use technology to challenge a much larger conventional Goliath. Iran is showing how a materially weaker state can use technology, geography and irregular warfare to impose disproportionate costs on a superpower. China is watching both.

The competition underway is increasingly a competition between military-economic systems. Goliath still matters, but the battlefield is changing in ways that increasingly empower David. The side that prevails may not be the one that builds the most exquisite individual weapon, but the one that can keep adapting, producing and fighting after the other discovers that it cannot.

This keeps the David-versus-Goliath analogy as a recurring frame rather than a gimmick—once near the opening, concretely through Ukraine, and again in the conclusion.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Friday, September 4, 2026

**Published:** September 4, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-friday-september-4-2026.md



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### The Nuclear Umbrella is Bent, Not Broken

**Published:** September 3, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-nuclear-umbrella-is-bent-not-broken.md

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Still Matters

Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press make a compelling argument in a recent article about the future willingness of the United States to provide extended nuclear deterrence, sometimes referred to as the “nuclear umbrella” to over 30 allies. Since the early days of the Cold War, the U.S. made a commitment to defend Europe against Soviet aggression, and under extreme conditions, included the use of nuclear weapons. Similar assurances were made to Japan, South Korea and Australia. The protection provided by this nuclear umbrella has been a hallmark of international order for decades as allies trusted the U.S. would protect them and therefore had no reason to develop their own nuclear weapon capabilities. Lind and Press rightly point out the security environment has changed dramatically, and the “order” created by the United States during the Cold War no longer exists. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lind and Press argue Russia’s nuclear threat on a global scale is much diminished with Russia focused on its boundaries with eastern Europe and less concerned with “the global balance of power”. Similarly, Lind and Press view North Korea’s nuclear weapons development as a regional security issue with Kim Jong Un more interested in regime survival than peninsular conquest. They further argue conflicts today are largely regional in nature and question the commitment of the United States to engage in a nuclear conflict on behalf of an ally thousands of miles away. Thus, they claim the “nuclear umbrella” is broken.

The Nuclear Umbrella Still Exists

On the surface, it’s easy to believe this argument. The first Trump administration clearly stated an intent to put “America First” in 2017 and the second Trump administration signaled skepticism toward alliance commitments and their associated costs. Abroad, there is potential that this signaling from Washington also includes the commitment to extended nuclear deterrence. President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) published in 2025 does not mention extended nuclear deterrence or the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Similarly, the 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) does not “explicitly mention extended deterrence” and instead places the “primary responsibility” for their own defense on them with limited support from the U.S. And lastly, the current Trump administration has not and most likely will not issue a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The first NPR was released in 1994 every subsequent administration has issued one until President Trump took office again in 2024. The NPR is a blueprint which describes the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy. This document contains critical messaging on the capabilities, numbers, and modernization efforts of nuclear weapons and under what conditions the U.S. potentially would or would not use nuclear weapons. To be sure, the absence of explicit language on extended nuclear deterrence in the NSS and NDS and the lack of an NPR are departures from the U.S.’s historical stance providing nuclear top cover and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

Allies and partners of the U.S. have obviously taken notice and started conversations on how to proceed especially given continued Russian aggression, Chinese and North Korean nuclear weapons development, and what they might perceive as uncertainty of the U.S. as a nuclear deterrent backstop.

The United Kingdom and France recently pledged increased cooperation with nuclear weapons with the signing of the Northwood Declaration in 2025. French President Macron also rolled out a policy of “advanced deterrence” aimed at potentially providing nuclear forces to various European allies. Additionally, Japan, South Korea and Australia are all deeply concerned about nuclear weapons development in both China and North Korea. As a result from the proximate threat, some Japanese and South Korean officials have publicly discussed nuclear weapons, a topic previously considered taboo.

However, there is also plenty of evidence to support the fact that while the nuclear umbrella is bent and tattered, it’s not broken.

Although the current NSS and NDS do not explicitly mention extended nuclear deterrence, they do not explicitly eschew the notion either. In fact, the NDS states Europe should take “primary responsibility for its own conventional defense…” making a clear distinction between conventional and nuclear forces. Despite much talk of NATO needing to pull more of its own weight regarding security, the U.S. remains committed to the alliance. Since 1954, the U.S. pledged to protect NATO members and currently has around 100 air-delivered nuclear weapons deployed to various bases in Europe. In addressing the NATO Defense Ministerial, Under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby, stated, “Thus, for the United States, our responsibility is to be clear, candid and consistent. We will continue to provide the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent.” Additionally, the U.S. continues to be active in the NATO Nuclear Planning Group, the senior policy body for NATO nuclear issues. Despite U.S. signaling a “scaling back” of conventional support to NATO, there is no plan to remove any of these nuclear weapons from Europe.

There are similar extended nuclear deterrence concerns from Japan and South Korea, especially the suggestion that both should take on more of the financial burden for their defense, the U.S. commitment to both is bit clearer. In February of last year, the U.S. Secretary of State met with the Foreign Minister of Japan and the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea to “reaffirm the unshakable trilateral partnership” between the three countries. This meeting underscored the historical commitment of the U.S. to the defense Japan and South Korea to include extended nuclear deterrence.

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Matters

What’s missing in many of the arguments concerning U.S. extended nuclear deterrence is how it has underwritten the concept of nuclear nonproliferation for decades. In 1968, the U.S. pledged cooperation in limiting the spread of nuclear technology as one of the first signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Though limited and certainly not perfect, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) is widely considered one of the most successful arms control treaties ever written by limiting the spread of nuclear weapons while aiding risk reduction of nuclear weapons use. As mentioned earlier, dozens of countries have chosen not to pursue development of nuclear weapons (and pledged not do so as signatories of the NPT) because they determined the extended nuclear deterrent guarantee provided by the U.S. to be reliable and most importantly, credible. Additionally, any country who may feel abandoned by the nuclear umbrella provided by the U.S. and may choose to pursue development of their own nuclear weapon faces myriad challenges. First, many are bound by the NPT and even if they were not, often lack the resources to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Second, all states, even those with the technical know-how to proceed with a nuclear weapons program, would introduce into the nuclear “club” another independent launch authority, more command-and-control systems with varying levels of capability, unknown decision-making processes during crises, and more opportunities for proliferation, miscalculation, and accidents. Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the one thing the international community could agree upon was developing a strong prohibition against the use of nuclear weapons. Many resolved crises throughout history where nuclear weapons loomed in the background reinforced the idea that the use of nuclear weapons was unthinkable. The spread of nuclear weapons to more independent states does not simply mean we live in a world with more of them, it substantially increases the number of situations where they become increasingly integrated into routine statecraft and thus, their potential use more thinkable.

The Strategic Consequences

Despite concerns about the credibility of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence that have emerged in some allied capitals, the United States should not become resigned to the prospect of allies leaving the nuclear umbrella. Doing so would weaken the nonproliferation regime, increase incentives for independent nuclear programs, and ultimately leave the United States confronting a more dangerous strategic environment. The U.S. should continue to signal that the credibility of extended nuclear deterrence rests upon strong conventional capabilities and even stronger, unmistakable political resolve with our allies while keeping nuclear use as the final safeguard. Increased proliferation of nuclear weapons does not achieve that objective.

The United States is unique among states that possess nuclear weapons because it has used the world’s most capable nuclear weapons arsenal to prevent nuclear proliferation rather than encourage it. Thus, extended nuclear deterrence and nuclear nonproliferation are inseparable. The enduring contribution to international security by the United States has been and should continue to be the guarantee of nuclear extended deterrence to uphold nonproliferation and preserve the longstanding objective of nuclear non-use.

In no uncertain terms should the U.S. become “comfortable” with more states acquiring their own nuclear weapons resulting from of a lack of confidence that Washington will continue to be the nuclear guarantor. Despite periodic political signals that make some allies nervous, Washington has been remarkably consistent, across multiple administrations, in its policy toward extended nuclear deterrence. States that question U.S. commitment should consider whether other alternatives would enhance their security. The answer is almost certainly no.

The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Debut Spy Thriller Short On Tradecraft — Long On Thrills

**Published:** September 3, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/debut-spy-thriller-short-on-tradecraft-long-on-thrills.md

BOOK REVIEW: BEYOND HONOR

By K.B. Brodsky / Atria Emily Bestler Books

Reviewed by: Anne and Jay Gruner

The Reviewers: Anne and Jay Gruner were career CIA officers in analysis and operations, respectively. Formerly Deputy Director of WINPAC and a practicing lawyer, Anne, a Pushcart-nominee, writes poetry, short stories, and creative non-fiction which have appeared in over two dozen print and on-line publications. Jay served as Chief of Station in multiple countries, as an area division chief, and founded J.K. Gruner Associates, a business intelligence consultancy. Anne and Jay live in McLean, Virginia with their two golden retrievers.

REVIEW: "Beyond Honor," by “K.B. Brodsky,” a debut novel by husband and wife team Bill and Karen Brodsky, is an intriguing novel illustrating the lengths a modern day entrepreneur might have to go to maintain his profit. The story combines sexpionage, military special operations, and political fiction in a fast-paced novel that moves around Washington D.C., New York City, and Moscow, with excursions to Iran, Syria, East Berlin, and Siberia. Seemingly unconnected characters come together into a spider web of trouble for a newly elected American president.

The story is triggered in the first chapter when CIA loses contact with Daniel Komoroff, codenamed Python, a CIA officer under non-official cover (NOC) who has been working in Russia as an employee of a Belarus-based financial systems support firm. Komoroff's covert job has been to secretly install cyber spyware into the electronic systems of Russian banks, in particular the OFAC-sanctioned Alta Bank in Moscow, known as Putin's laundromat. The Deputy Director of Operations (DDO) orders the CIA's "operations center" to be "cleared" in order to discuss the cessation of Python's communications. CIA readers will find this venue for such a sensitive discussion implausible since the "ops center," inter alia, continuously monitors worldwide activities, and is never "cleared" and would not be used for such a sensitive discussion. It also is curious that the DDO does not know who the officer is who handles a critical "agent" like Python. The DDO refers to other CIA officers as "agents" and "technicians," which sounds a bit disparaging and might make an informed reader wonder if the DDO is a new political appointee.

Python's sudden curtailment of communications prompts the DDO to ask if Python has defected. The Deputy Director of the Russian desk assures him that is not the case because he personally recruited Komoroff straight out of Yale and had him training in a class at "The Farm" within months of his graduation. Moreover, Komoroff, who grew up speaking Russian in his family, had been posted to U.S. Embassies around the region in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and "other stans" to "get his feet wet" before his assignment in Russia.

The conflation of CIA "officer" and "agent" nomenclature and missions, starting in Chapter One, is a fundamental flaw, which along with others permeate the book and form the basis of the plot. With intelligence officers conducting missions more appropriate for agents, the plot resembles that of a TV show rather than a serious espionage novel.

Along the same lines, the tradecraft and overseas activities portrayed by other officers are divorced from reality, such as during a 1986 Cold War flashback, when two female CIA officers using counterfeit West German identity papers drive an East German vehicle through the Berlin Wall checkpoints into East Berlin to meet an agent/asset in a bar. Similar criticism of tradecraft can be levied regarding SVR activities portrayed in the book, including having a high profile undercover SVR officer become the very public girlfriend of the American president's best friend. These reviewers have confidence that British intelligence, when they were asked by the CIA about this alleged British financial expert, would have "outed" the SVR official before things advanced this far. Finally, the "wet work" activity attributed to the SVR in the story is more typically carried out by the GRU and using more subtle techniques.

These are a few of the misconceptions that might bother readers with an intelligence background who are looking to read a realistic spy novel. Readers unfamiliar with operational tradecraft, intelligence nomenclature, rules, and procedures, however, may well be captivated by the unfolding action-packed plot.

Tradecraft aside, the story cleverly integrates paramilitary operations into the plot, such as that of a CIA "direct-action unit" from its Special Activities Division that conducts an Osama bin Laden-type raid 100 miles within Iranian territory to extract the brother of a valuable target who has been funding ISIS. The operation is exciting and well-written though again it is unlikely that CIA uses its own special forces officers in a Delta or Seal-like team, especially on a regular "rinse and repeat" basis to conduct routine extractions and gunfights. The detailed description of the military equipment, helpfully defined in a glossary at the end, may seem excessive to some. It is during this improbable special ops mission that the readers meet the two charismatic main protagonists of the story, Whitney Skyler, a CIA analyst, and Kevin Rhoads, a member of CIA's "Omega" strike force team.

Perhaps more realistic by today's standards, is Peter Michaels, a twice-divorced, over-leveraged real estate developer from New York City who is meeting with a Russian Alta Bank manager in the bar of the National Hotel in Moscow to discuss an $800 million loan he needs to pay off his debt in New York, which no American bank will provide. To Michaels' surprise, a beautiful woman with a British accent shows up and introduces herself as Lillian Montgomery from the UK. The SVR — the Russian civilian foreign intelligence service — has had Michaels under surveillance and arranged for him to meet one of their best "swallows," who is a highly skilled SVR "officer," Anya Pestova. Curiously, Pestova appears to be the same "Anya" mentioned in the book's prologue, whose father was Ilya Magnitsky, a tax lawyer and confidant of Alexei Navalny, both of whom were murdered by the regime. In the prologue, Anya as a teenager in 2011 was strongly anti-Putin and dedicated to opposing him at that time. The subsequent story provides no explanation how or why "Anya" transitioned from a strong-willed regime opponent to a star SVR officer accomplishing nefarious missions on Putin's behalf. Perhaps her story will surface in a sequel. The similarity of the Ilya Magnitsky in the prologue to the real life Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who exposed Russian corruption and died in custody, may cause some head scratching.

We later learn that Michaels is the best friend of Phil Kemp, a former businessman and current Senator from New York who wears a red tie and blue suit and is running for President on an energy independence, border security, and deregulation platform. This will be plausible and even familiar to many readers. Michaels runs one of Kemp's PACs that provides a significant amount of money to his campaign, which sets the stage for future problems.

The story is easy to read, well written, and moves apace with characters thoughtfully developed, vibrant descriptions, and page-turning action scenes portraying kinetic extractions in Iran and Siberia, and a stake out and pursuit in Damascus. It's refreshing to see a strong role for women intelligence professionals in "Beyond Honor," including Whitney Skyler, an analyst who gets much operational action and opportunity to shine as well as by two senior CIA females, one of whom is a former operations officer and the Director of CIA.

Despite its misunderstanding of CIA functions and operational tradecraft, "Beyond Honor" is a fun read with a surprising ending, which some intelligence officers may find unlikely, if not slightly repugnant. For those who may feel this way, remember it's fiction. And given today's world, many say political fiction has a hard time competing with reality.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

The views, opinions, and characterizations expressed in this review are those of the reviewers and do not represent the official views, opinions, or positions of the Central Intelligence Agency, any other agency of the U.S. Government, or The Cipher Brief.

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### The Cost of Squandering America’s Reputation

**Published:** September 3, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-cost-of-squandering-americas-reputation.md

Make no mistake: the United States is weaker today than it was yesterday, and the day before that.

Many of our closest allies have moved from fear to confused unease, to evasive dismissal and even defiance in their dealings with Washington. Regardless of how often President Trump claims that “the United States is more respected today than ever before,” the evidence points in the opposite direction.

We are seeing the steady and accelerating diminution of our reputation as “the shining city on the hill,” by an administration that clearly values what it can do over what it should do. When “we have the right” or “I can do whatever I want” supersedes “we have the responsibility to…,” something has gone terribly wrong. This applies both in domestic and foreign affairs.

A reputation is painstakingly difficult to build and very easy to lose, especially in foreign policy. This is particularly true for a superpower like the United States, which is involved in so many issues and hotspots worldwide: sometimes invited, sometimes not, and often at odds with the interests of local players. Even when we stumble – think Iraq – we have usually been able to draw upon a relatively deep reservoir of goodwill, a kind of accumulated equity, based on the understanding by many that our intentions, at least, were good. Or at least not bad. That reservoir has pulled us through several unpleasant situations. It appears the U.S. is no longer receiving this “benefit of the doubt.”

Let me be clear: any U.S. administration’s first duty is to protect and advance the interests of the American people.

But the current administration’s simple, albeit shortsighted, claim of promoting “America First” relies primarily on a toxic combination of instant gratification fortified by largely ego-driven, knee-jerk coercion. This reveals a stark misperception of how the United States came to be what it is today, fielding the most powerful military in history, with the largest, most vibrant, and influential economy in the world. This did not happen by accident, or through simply dominating and bullying others economically or militarily, either of which the U.S. can employ at any time; yes, there are exceptions, but they are exceptions considering the decades it took to get where we are. The United States’ unprecedented influence occurred through a carefully crafted and painstakingly curated long-term strategy of strategic cooperation and collaboration, and selective give and take.

Bottom line: The dirty little secret is that the policy of every U.S. administration has always been one of “America First.”

A Superpower in Transition

So how did we become the most powerful, wealthy nation on Earth? It’s simple. Well… not really all that simple. There are numerous factors beyond our military or our economy, some obvious, many nuanced. But we have an overriding advantage. One, as I point out, that the above strategy has consistently built upon for decades. It is real but also ephemeral: our reputation. This is not about anyone liking or following us on social media. Or simple, advantageous transactional dealings. It is about the raw strategic calculation that working with the U.S. is more likely to be in the overall interest of your country, its government, and people than not. A considerable amount of this is derived from the realization that, heretofore at least, the United States is not predatory or for sale. Not solely out for itself, and that under most circumstances, it will take into account the policies and interests of its partners, and sometimes even its enemies in its dealings.

This distinction matters because the issue is not whether America should pursue its own interests. It most certainly should and does. The question is whether it pursues those interests in a manner that preserves the hard-won trust, access, and cooperation that make American power truly effective, or in a way that burns through them for short-term advantage.

Our reputation has afforded the U.S. government and its representatives – of which I was one – a level of access, trust, and tacit consideration, among both friends and sometimes not-so-friends, that can be hard to quantify.

Reputation is not merely a sentimental asset. It is hard-nosed operational leverage. It determines whether allies will take political risks for us, whether partners move quickly when time matters, and whether adversaries believe our threats or assurances. Once that leverage erodes, or disappears altogether, every request becomes harder, slower, and more expensive.

I saw this firsthand. When I was the CIA Chief of Station (COS) in a certain Middle Eastern country, I received direction via a NIACT, or night action, cable from CIA headquarters in October 2001 to approach my local intelligence counterparts with an extremely urgent request. The U.S. needed a facility located in close proximity to Afghanistan from which it could operate armed and/or surveillance drones, a critical asset in the GWOT. With winter fast approaching, the location then being used would not allow for continued operations for much longer. My country’s leadership controlled a suitable facility. I was tasked with communicating the request and advising as soon as possible if permission was likely to be forthcoming, or if it would be necessary to look elsewhere.

I knew that this was a big ask. A Muslim country, the leadership was extremely sensitive to drawing the ire of Al Qaeda, and I knew this request would require consultation among multiple individuals at the very highest level. There was a process and protocol, and it was typically cumbersome. I immediately met with my primary intelligence liaison contact and laid out the details of the request to him, including its importance, asking that he bring this to the immediate attention of his superiors so it could be considered by the country’s leadership. I expected the process could take several days.

Later that same day, I received notification that the Director of the intelligence service would meet me that very evening (at the local horse racetrack).

When we met, I laid out the request in full. After a brief pause, he said, “Yes. You may use it for as long as you require.”

He asked for no payment or quid pro quo, simply that we “not publicize its use.”

Frankly, I was incredulous, expecting at best a hedge, or “we need time to consider this,” type of response. Common interest? Certainly. Common risk? Not so much. But then I realized that our reputation had tipped the balance, overriding any doubts or fears they might harbor, which they almost certainly did. It was the United States asking. And they were answering.

Iranian D-Day Sanctions

And now we have another big ask: Iran and the just announced D-Day sanctions regime. Washington is requiring that friends and allies endure considerable economic and potentially political pain, along with the not inconsiderable risk of military retaliation from the Iranian regime. And it is doing so after not bothering to consult with them before going to war with Iran, and then failing to protect them from Iranian counterstrikes.

But more important than asking our allies for help is expecting our strategic foes, China and Russia in particular, to ignore not only their own economic (Iranian oil for China) and military (Iranian cooperation against Ukraine) interests but to pass on an opportunity to diminish a strategic rival. For what? Promises of a great relationship with the President of the United States? Unlikely. This is a fallacy that President Trump has long touted: neither Putin nor Xi is a friend; rather, they are cynically leveraging the President’s legendary malleability for their own individual ends. Threats? Also, unlikely given the U.S.’s current weakness. In the end, what do we have to offer them? Little that I can discern. And what would they require in return? I shudder to think.

Lastly, the United States initiated hostilities against Iran without a clear understanding of its opponent or a coherent plan on how to win. Yet another significant blow to the reputation of the world’s preeminent superpower.

The success of economic sanctions on the scale Washington is proposing requires an impenetrable wall. Without active compliance from both China and Russia, it is virtually certain to fail.

The administration speaks about “quiet diplomacy”, but for its friends at least, it is clear they will not hesitate to employ coercion to convince those who hesitate to comply. This should not be necessary, but this is where our diminished reputation leaves us.

When Rhetoric Crashes on the Shores of Reality

The administration and Iran are once more engaged in the verbal back and forth of what I call hyperbolating. Claims by the U.S. of economic D-Day met with Iranian threats of defiance and retaliation. So far, mostly words. But concrete actions are sure to follow.

Given the U.S. Treasury Secretary’s claim that these so far undisclosed new sanctions will collapse Iran’s economy, they no doubt see this as a potential existential threat to the regime. And they should, given the United States’ economic reach. But Iran has built a ‘resistance economy’ for a reason: to absorb and deflect decades of sanctions aimed at cowing the Islamic regime. Previous efforts have met with occasional, partial success, but never enough to force genuine change inside Iran. Iran’s leadership no doubt realizes that the effectiveness of this latest U.S. sanctions regime will hinge on the active cooperation of Russia and China, and they have actual cards to play with each. The U.S., on the other hand, appears to have few, counting instead on goodwill mixed with threats, and a hefty dose of bravado.

In the end, it remains to be seen whether President Trump will stay the course in what is clearly a test of wills. If past is prologue, this is unlikely.

This article was originally published on Mark's Substack, you can find more of his writing here.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Thursday, September 3, 2026

**Published:** September 3, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-thursday-september-3-2026.md



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### Blowing up Boats: The Numbing Effect of Repetitive Illegality

**Published:** September 2, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/blowing-up-boats-the-numbing-effect-of-repetitive-illegality.md

Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. campaign against alleged drug trafficking small boats off the coast of several South American nations, continues unabated. But while both the public and politicians seem to have become numb to this campaign – or perhaps distracted by the seemingly endless Iran debacle - a few things have remained constant. First, U.S. military forces are killing boat crews without any effort to apprehend them. Second, this practice lacks, as it has from inception, any credible legal justification.

President Trump bragged that his administration has reduced by more than 90% illegal drug importation by sea. Like so many other bombastic or mendacious claims made by the President, there was no data or methodology provided to corroborate this alleged statistic, which is wildly exaggerated. What is more concrete is the human toll this ongoing campaign has inflicted to date. According to a recent report, at least 233 people have been killed in these strikes on 67 boats, all part of a campaign.

Even if the President’s exaggerated assertions of efficacy were accepted, and even assuming these attacks are coordinated with coastal countries like Ecuador, the inherent illegality is in no way altered. Why? Because interdicting the flow of illegal narcotics – even when the importation operation is controlled by criminal gangs – is not a war and does not justify invocation of wartime authority. It is, instead, a law enforcement problem. More specifically, the authority to attack ‘enemy’ personnel and resources with lethal combat power may be justifiably invoked only in situations of armed conflict. When the United States chose to address that problem through the lens of wartime attack authority, it forfeited any claim of legal justification.

The administration knows that, as a matter of international law, the United States may designate individuals as enemy belligerents and attack them with lethal combat power only in the context of an armed conflict. This is why from inception it has emphasized the gravity of harm to Americans resulting from illegal narcotics smuggled into the nation. Proponents of this campaign have emphasized that more Americans are killed every year by illegal drugs than were killed by the September 11th terrorist attacks. No one questions the tragic consequences of this problem. But every harm to the nation or its people does not ipso facto indicate the existence of an armed conflict. Instead, it is why and how that harm is inflicted that are decisive.

Thus, it is obvious why supporters of this campaign consistently claim the harm caused by illegal drugs means we are at war with drug traffickers: because they seek to justify invoking wartime authority to attack these boats and occupants. Doing so avoids the pesky challenge of apprehension and criminal prosecution – the normal and legally presumptive method for disabling criminal threats: the very modality used by the U.S. prior to this invalid assertion of armed conflict (and apparently one that was more effective). More fundamentally – and problematically – it seeks to validate what by any objective measure is the invalid campaign that is employs lethal force as a measure of first resort based not on the imminent threat posed by the target of attack, but instead on the assertion that target is a member of an enemy group.

The loss of 233 enemy combatants in a war – what international law calls an armed conflict – might be expected. Enemy casualties in the ongoing armed conflict with Iran are undoubtedly more substantial. But it is the context of armed conflict that makes such loss of life unremarkable. This is because in that context the customary international law principle of military necessity justifies targeting enemy personnel – members of the enemy organized armed group – with lethal force as a measure of first resort. And, unlike a law enforcement use of force, the objective of such attacks is not limited to eliminating an individual threat, but instead to bring about the submission of the enemy as a whole.

This is an exceptional use of force authority invoked by States precisely because armed conflict is considered an exceptional situation. Unlike peacetime, armed conflict involves a contest – hostilities – between the State and armed groups operating at the direction of enemy leadership. More fundamentally, the objective of that enemy group would have to be to inflict harm on the U.S. or its assets. It is that motive and conduct that distinguished the September 11th attacks from criminal gangs smuggling illegal drugs into the United States. Unlike al Qaeda, these groups do not operate with the objective of inflicting harm on the United States (it would be an odd drug dealer who wants to kill his customers) nor do they engage in hostile attacks against the U.S. or its interest abroad.

This is why State invocation of this exceptional power is supposed to be limited to situations of genuine threats to the nation from groups organized for that purpose. It is justified only when a state is challenged by the military forces of another state or by a non-state organized armed group capable of engaging in sustained combat operations. Absent such a situation, state security forces must respond to what is a criminal threat with law enforcement type rules for the use of force. Whether police, Coast Guard, or regular military forces are utilized, lethal force is justified only as a measure of last resort and only when reasonably assessed that the individual subjected to that use of force presents a threat of death or great bodily harm.

This binary use of force construct is reflected in ‘peacetime’ versus ‘wartime’ rules of engagement: use of force control measures utilized by U.S. commanders to align authority with mission requirements. During the many military operations outside the context of armed conflict – including military support to law enforcement – deadly force is authorized only in response to an actual or imminent deadly threat, the same use of force authority applicable to law enforcement officers. That means that it is the conduct of the ‘target’ offering a direct threat that triggers any use of deadly force in response. In contrast, wartime ROE authorize use of deadly force as a first resort against individuals identified as members of the enemy armed group (unless they have surrendered or been disabled by wounds or sickness). Unlike a conduct-based use of force decision, this authority is triggered by a determination of enemy status.

This shift in lethal force authority is perhaps the most significant consequence flowing from a situation of armed conflict. It is also why the existence of armed conflict is not left to arbitrary assertions but is based on widely accepted objective conditions – the so-called conflict classification test that looks at issues like the intensity of the violence, the degree of organization of the group and its ability to carry out sustained operations. That test is pragmatic and, as noted above, covers both state and non-state threats. But it is not so elastic as to allow a state to bypass the peacetime use of force constraints by simply characterizing a threat posed by criminals as an armed conflict.

Yet that is exactly what the U.S. has done to justify lethal targeting of small boats. These boats may indeed be trafficking in illegal narcotics, and the occupants may indeed be members of criminal syndicates or gangs (although there has been scant information provided to validate these claims). And those drugs may indeed be destined for the United States. But none of this indicates the existence of an armed conflict.

Sadly, the continuation of this campaign seems to have numbed the public and Member of Congress to the perpetuation of this illegality. Yet this is also a reminder of an historic legal maxim: the repetition of an illegal act shall not make it legal. When committed under the authority of the United States, it does, however, stain our national reputation and undermine our claim to stand for the rule of law.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### The Vatican’s Quiet Intelligence Diplomacy

**Published:** September 2, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-vaticans-quiet-intelligence-diplomacy.md

Last week all eyes were focused on the secret, first-ever trip of CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Moscow, flying on a C-17 Globemaster (the modern version of the C-141 Starlifter, which CIA Director William Casey used to travel on during his overseas trips during the Reagan administration), where he met with his Russian intelligence counterparts, and where, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “of course, President Putin informed of everything.” Media reports noted that Ratcliffe discussed warnings to Russia regarding its threats toward NATO members. In this sense, Ratcliffe’s trip bore similarity to then CIA Director William Burns’ November 2021 trip to Moscow, in which he warned President Putin not to invade Ukraine. Ratcliffe’s recent trip to Moscow (as well as his trip earlier this year to Havana, where he met with senior Cuban officials) like that of his predecessor William Burns, highlights a tradition of American reliance upon ‘intelligence diplomacy,’ which can serve to reassure both allies and adversaries of America’s that today’s complex wars and conflicts – Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, and others – require the sophisticated use of professional diplomats and intelligence officers at the highest levels.

What many observers missed, and which media coverage of Ratcliffe’s trip overshadowed, was the Vatican visit to Moscow by Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the second-highest ranking Vatican diplomat and Secretary for Relations with States and International Organizations, who met with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, senior national security advisor Yuri Ushakov (also a former Russian Ambassador to the US), a senior representative of the Patriarchate of Russia’s Orthodox Church, and with local Catholics. At a news conference with Lavrov, Archbishop Gallagher (who bears a striking resemblance to Cardinal Kevin Kearns in the famed TV series ‘Blue Bloods’) recalled Pope Leo XIV’s appeal to end hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, and that they might begin “genuine negotiations” with the support of the Holy See and the international community. He proceeded to emphatically state (in Russia, where calling its’ ‘special military operation’ a ‘war’ can lead to a prison sentence), “to be clear, this war must end.” He also stated, “the Holy See will continue to provide strong spiritual, diplomatic, and humanitarian support by contributing to and offering a space for dialogue.” This trip followed Gallagher’s earlier trip this year to Kyiv, where he had met with Ukrainian President Zelensky, as well as other trips to Moscow – and Pope Leo IV’s three prior meetings with President Zelensky during 2025, and the dispatch of Cardinal Matteo Zuppi to Moscow to deal with humanitarian efforts.

Archbishop Gallagher’s visit to Moscow recalls past Vatican diplomatic initiatives such as the late Pope John Paul II’s ‘Holy Alliance’ during the Reagan administration to help defeat the USSR in the Cold War, as well as the late Pope Francis’ involvement in facilitating restoration of diplomatic relations between America and Cuba in 2014. The Holy See has long been an exquisite purveyor of ‘intelligence diplomacy’ for many centuries, so this is hardly new.

What is new however, is Pope Leo XIV’s recent personal involvement in Vatican diplomacy, making it a cornerstone of his papal mission and gospel of peace - even so early in his papacy - as not only the Vicar of Christ, but as a true citizen of the world (https://www.thecipherbrief.com/pope-leo-xiv-a-citizen-of-the-world). In dispatching Archbishop Gallagher to Moscow – independently of CIA Director Ratcliffe’s secret trip – Pope Leo XIV is signaling to Russia (as well as other adversaries such as Iran and Cuba), that the Holy See can be a powerful, neutral, and moral force for peace in today’s complex world. It could be said that Pope Leo XIV, in doing so, has already begin to define his (and the Holy See’s) mission and his legacy in today’s papacy. Unlike other current purveyors of track 3 and other third-party diplomacy in today’s wars and conflicts – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Switzerland, Egypt, the UAE, and Oman come to mind – the Vatican is not beholden to traditional international relations or transactional interests. As was pointed out by a senior Vatican spokesperson (in response to US Ambassador Brian Burch’s NYT interview in July 2026), “any glorification or exaggeration of the Pope’s role as head of state … is therefore misleading because it comes at the expense of his one true mission as Universal Shepherd.”

The Vatican’s recent diplomacy in Moscow will be very closely watched by Iran. Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly called for peace in the Middle East, emphasizing diplomacy as the only solution to the US-Iran war. The Holy See and Iran have had close relations for decades, and during 2021, a senior Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Arafi met with the late Pope Francis in Rome. More recently, the Holy See gave a diplomatic award to Iran’s Ambassador to the Holy See, another signal of the value placed upon diplomacy. The Iranian government has surely considered Pope Leo XIV’s interest in inter-religious dialogue between Catholicism and Islam, noting that his first foreign trip was to Turkey. During the war, Iranian government officials have sent formal correspondence to Pope Leo XIV, requesting his intercession in stopping the war.

Since his return to the presidency in 2025, President Trump had hoped to – aided by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – spearhead his own personal, transactional, and aspirational diplomacy to end wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and now, Iran. Given that these efforts have stalled, proving more difficult than President Trump had imagined, even sophisticated third parties – regarding the Iran war – have faltered, and President Trump has recently stated that negotiations with Iran are no longer occurring. The situation is similar in Ukraine, where negotiations between the warring parties are non-existent, while the risks of expanding conflict and casualties have expanded. In such circumstances, The Holy See’s outreach to Russia should surprise nobody, as it, like the rest of the world, can ill afford to wait for 2029, when a new US President is inaugurated. Nor should it surprise observers if Iran were to request that Archbishop Gallagher visit Tehran soon. But whom he would meet with as interlocutors would be very intriguing.

Lastly, Ukraine’s President Zelensky has already invited Pope Leo XIV to visit Kyiv. Doing so would – given the Vatican’s role as a neutral arbiter – necessitate, due to reciprocity, the Pope’s visit to Moscow. Such ‘intelligence diplomacy’ by Pope Leo XIV could help mediate an end to that long-standing, genocidal conflict, and provide Russia’s President Putin (and Russia) a diplomatic off-ramp and solution to a war that he started but appears unable to end. It’s a beautiful irony --- that of an American-born Pope, Christ’s Vicar, and a citizen of the world, inspiring others to hope and to make peace in the world’s most kinetic, unforgiving conflicts.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Wednesday, September 2, 2026

**Published:** September 2, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-wednesday-september-2-2026.md



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### America Is Buying an Army It Cannot Command

**Published:** September 1, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/america-is-buying-an-army-it-cannot-command.md

The U.S. Army has committed to a million small drones by 2028. The Department of Defense has not decided who will authorize how they fire.

That is not a materiel gap. The volume is on order; Nvidia’s latest earnings guidance says the compute to run it is on the way. It is a governance gap, and it is now the single largest exposure in the American national security posture entering the fourth quarter of 2026.

Consider what landed inside a seventy-two-hour window this week. On Tuesday, Nvidia posted $96.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, with $89 billion of it in the data-center segment and guided to $108 billion in the September quarter — an annualized run rate through American hyperscalers of more than $400 billion, the largest defense-adjacent capital cycle in modern history. The same day, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and RTX filed their responses to the Deputy Defense Secretary’s twenty-one-day production ultimatum on accelerated interceptor delivery. Nine days earlier, the Pentagon had opened the vendor portal for the $185 billion Golden Dome missile-defense program.

The chips are being funded. The primes are being pushed. The perimeter is being paid for. None of it tells you who decides when a fielded drone force pushes beyond its vendor’s safety rails during a live engagement.

That is not a hypothetical. Since March, the Department of Defense has formally designated Anthropic — the American AI lab whose Claude model is in active use within U.S. Defense environments — a “supply chain risk.” The two sides opened arguments in DC court over the blacklisting on May 19. In May, the Department expanded its classified AI work to eight companies, explicitly excluding Anthropic. On February 28, OpenAI took the other side of the same question, signing a deal to run its models on a Pentagon classified network. The day before, more than 580 Google employees, including DeepMind researchers, signed an open letter urging Google’s CEO to refuse the same kind of arrangement.

The industrial base of American artificial intelligence is not aligned on whether it will perform the classified work the drone doctrine assumes. The Pentagon’s response has been to fund compute, sign one lab, blacklist a second, and litigate.

Picture April 2027. A deployed American drone force is airborne over a contested Indo-Pacific corridor. A vendor safety guardrail on the targeting AI refuses a strike within a sixty-second window. The commander needs an override. No office at the Department of Defense — including the Chief Digital and AI Officer — holds explicit arbitration authority between the vendor’s guardrail and the commander’s judgment at operational tempo. The decision will be made ad hoc, by whichever lawyer or flag officer picks up the phone.

That is the arbitration gap. It is not the debt-service bill. It is not the interceptor shortfall. It is not even the shipbuilding backlog. It is the fact that the United States is standing up the largest defense-adjacent capital cycle in modern history — Golden Dome’s $185 billion, a million-drone target by 2028, and $1 billion for 340,000 attritable systems by 2027 — with no institutional authority designated to arbitrate how any of it fires. It is a supervisory function no institution has yet been chartered to perform, and no doctrine has yet been written to describe it.

Beijing runs the inverse problem. Paul Scharre laid out the industrial-base half of this argument in “Losing the War of the Future,” published in Foreign Affairs on June 23. What his piece understates is the demand side: even if the United States builds the drones, the doctrine and civil-military arbitration required to employ them do not yet exist at scale. The People’s Liberation Army’s answer is on the record. Three PLA researchers — Lieutenant Colonels Li Hengrui and Wang Haiyuan and Senior Colonel Cheng Jinming — published “all-domain megacity incapacitation warfare” in Military Art, the Central Military Commission’s restricted journal, in March 2025. Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga and Andrew Wang brought the article into the English-language conversation this summer in “Total War on Taipei,” published in War on the Rocks. The concept identifies the operational meaning of Xi Jinping’s “national total war” as an integrated arbitration architecture that fuses military, civilian, media, and party assets under a single narrative apparatus.

The PLA may struggle to execute it. The Central Military Commission, which began this term with seven members, has been reduced to two, hollowed out by disciplinary investigations. But the design is on the page. The American design is not.

Three signals will indicate by year-end whether the gap is closing or widening.

First, does the CDAO’s office designate a named override authority for wartime AI lab guardrails? Second, is the Anthropic-DoD blacklisting resolved into a joint framework for classified use, or does the litigation calcify? Third, does the FY27 defense-authorization conference name a joint force to operate Golden Dome, or fund the program without operator language? As of this week, all three are moving the wrong way.

The next war will not be lost because America bought the wrong drone. It will be lost because America bought the right one and never decided who could tell it to fire.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Tuesday, September 1, 2026

**Published:** September 1, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-tuesday-september-1-2026.md



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### The Cultural Roots of Strategic Surprise and Resilience: the Israeli case of October 2023

**Published:** September 1, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-cultural-roots-of-strategic-surprise-and-resilience-the-israeli-case-of-october-2023.md

October 7th, 2023, 06:29 AM. Probably the most tragic day in Israel’s history. A surprise attack conducted by Hamas from the Gaza Strip caught Israel completely off guard. Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing more than 1200 Israelis and abducting more than 250 individuals into the Gaza Strip. They exercised mass murder and rape, effectively conquering parts of Israel’s Western Negev for several hours. This was a colossal military and intelligence failure, more dramatic than that of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It was also, of course, a policy failure. The core foundations of Israel’s security doctrine – defense, early warning, and deterrence – completely shattered.

How could this happen to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), one of the best militaries in the world, and to one of the best intelligence communities in the world? For me, as a brigadier general in the Israeli Defense Intelligence (IDI) reserves with decades of practical experience, and as a scholar of Israeli strategic culture and intelligence culture, this was a puzzle. Almost inconceivable. I was surprised by the magnitude of Israel’s surprise. How could Israel’s security establishments reach October 7th with their “eyes wide shut” about Hamas intentions and capabilities?

But as the regional war which followed October 2023 commenced, I recognized another interesting puzzle. Israeli security establishments have, writ large, recovered from the failure of October 2023, with Israel fighting for almost three years in several fronts, from the Gaza Strip to Iran. Although not gaining “total victory”, these establishments reached impressive operational achievements. They dismantled most of Hamas’ military and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and eliminated most of Hamas leadership in the Middle East; dismantled most of Hizballah assets in Lebanon, while also eliminating Hizballah leader Nasrallah, and demoralizing Hizballah in the famous pagers operation; destroyed many of the Houthi assets in Yemen; and in June 2025 and March 2026, conducted unprecedented attacks in Iran, including the elimination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and most of Iran’s military leadership, and degrading Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities.

How could the same establishments, which colossally failed to prevent the Hamas attack in October 2023, reach such achievements during 2024 and 2025? How could an intelligence system completely surprised by Hamas allow Israel to completely surprise Iran, the regional super-power? How could Israel “turn the tides” of the war after October 2023, and then, like the Phoenix from Greek mythology, “rise from the ashes” and conduct phenomenal strikes in Iran?

These are the topics I discuss in my new book, which reveals the cultural roots of Israel’s strategic surprise in October 2023, and of Israeli resilience following October 2023. The book knowingly focuses on Israel’s security establishments, and not on Israeli policy makers. Its scope is limited, and its conclusions will naturally be debated.

I open the book by acknowledging that some of my previous insights, which characterized Israeli intelligence culture prior to October 2023, were wrong. For instance, I assessed that this culture relies on professional norms and values of critical thinking, a sense of individual responsibility, and moral courage in the face of hierarchy. October 7th, unfortunately, showed that some of these remained aspirational norms rather than realized behavior in Israel’s security establishments.

Several typical facets of Israeli strategic and intelligence cultures account for both failure and success. For instance, the Israeli typical focus on operational, tactical, and targeting intelligence prior to October 7th resulted in an under-appreciation for strategic analysis, military analysis, and strategic early warning from war. The low quality of these disciplines was one of the factors for the October 7th failure. But the inclination towards targeting intelligence, and the close integration of intelligence into decision-making and operations, also enabled Israel to conduct ground-breaking overt and covert operations across the Middle East, relying on high-resolution and real-time targeting intelligence. Many more examples are discussed in the book.

However, the book stresses that strategic culture and intelligence culture are not unitary in essence, nor are they fixed in time. Changes in these cultures can be caused by trauma, or by competition for dominance between sub-cultures. For instance, in the years prior to October 7th, hubris evolved in Israeli security establishments, which not just underestimated Hamas, but also overestimated their own military and intelligence capabilities. October 7th, naturally, created a post-traumatic effect. Israeli deterrence-oriented security doctrine, which was dominant prior to October 7th, became heavily oriented towards prevention after October 7th, not just regarding adversary nuclear projects. This “move between extremes”, or “over-adaptation”, is for itself typical of Israeli strategic culture.

In conclusion, the book applies the frameworks of strategic culture and intelligence culture to a real-world case of security performance. This perspective does not only apply to Israel. In the US, for instance, it can allow critical introspection of the recent conflict with Iran, including the repeated experienced surprise the US seems to be experiencing. Furthermore, understanding partners’ and allies’ cultures, and not just adversary ones, is an imperative. Especially for American scholars and practitioners. The book makes an important contribution to this perspective. At the end of the day, national security is all about people. Society and culture play a major role.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### The Growing Cost of Keeping U.S. Submarines Idle

**Published:** September 1, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-growing-cost-of-keeping-u-s-submarines-idle.md

“Inactive idle time describes when a attack submarine designated for decommissioning cannot be inducted into a dry dock in a shipyard. As a result, the submarine and its crew must remain pier-side until a shipyard has the capacity in a dry dock to defuel their nuclear reactor.”

That’s a quote from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last Thursday titled, Actions Needed to Address Costly Attack Submarine Maintenance Challenges, which describes lost operational days for the Navy’s 44 nuclear attack submarines (20 Los Angeles class and 24 Virginia class), including those spent awaiting depot maintenance or what’s called active idle time.

The Navy, according to the GAO report, said that as of fiscal year 2025, its 44 attack submarines “provide the United States an asymmetric advantage to gather intelligence undetected and attack enemy targets, among other missions. These capabilities make attack submarines some of the most requested assets by the global combatant commanders.”

However, the GAO found, “Over the last 10 years, the U.S. Navy has lost more than 15,000 operational days due to maintenance delays and idle time on active attack submarines. These delays resulted in an estimated $3.4 billion in costs to sustain crews and submarines that provided no operational capability.”

Along with the inactive idle time illustrated earlier, active idle time is a period when an attack submarine and its crew must remain pier-side because they cannot be taken in by a shipyard for maintenance and are no longer certified to conduct normal underwater operations.

Attack submarines follow the Fleet Response Training Plan which calls for a 12-month training and then a complex certification process that leads to deployment. Deployments are normally six months, although one could be longer, but the result is generally an 18-month cycle.

Thereafter, a nuclear attack sub goes through three or four operational cycles – around six years of operations – before the next major overhaul.

“From fiscal years 2016 through 2025, “ the GAO report said, “the U.S. Navy incurred 8,906 days of active idle time for active attack submarines, hitting its peak in fiscal year 2022 with 1,518 days. Since this peak, the U.S. Navy reduced active idle time to 166 days in fiscal year 2025.”

From fiscal years 2021 through 2025, according to the GAO report, the average depot-level maintenance period was 809 days. “Further, the U.S. Navy only completed about 11 percent of attack submarine depot maintenance on time at the public shipyards, from fiscal years 2016 through 2025,” the GAO report added.

For Los Angeles-class subs, active idle time is costing almost $220,000 per day for the entire group. For the Virginia-class, that figure is more than $237,000 per day.

Los Angeles class attack submarines have an expected life of 30 to 33 years, while the planned life for the newer Virginia class is 33 years.

According to the GAO, only U.S. public naval shipyards -- Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard -- provide depot maintenance for attack submarines, along with two private shipyards -- General Dynamics Electric Boat at Groton, Connecticut and Huntington Ingalls Industries Newport News Shipbuilding at Newport News, Virginia.

Inactive idle time for older Los Angeles class attack submarines is a growing problem.

This period, when an attack submarine designated for decommissioning cannot be taken into a dry dock in a qualified shipyard, requires that its crew must remain pier-side, according to the GAO report. That’s because “those required to maintain and supervise the nuclear reactor…must wait until a shipyard has the capacity in a dry dock to defuel their nuclear reactor,” the report said.

The decommissioning attack submarines “take limited dry dock space away from the operational fleet,” the GAO said, but added, “For most fiscal years prior , one or two attack submarines entered inactive idle time each year. However, without mitigation, the U.S. Navy projects a significant increase of inactive idle time through fiscal year 2030.”

In fact, over the past five fiscal years, the Navy has had seven attack submarines waiting to decommission and has “incurred 2,216 days of idle time resulting in more than $480 million in operating and support costs,” according to the GAO.

“As of January 2026,” the GAO report added, “without mitigation, the U.S. Navy projects that 15 more attack submarines and their crews will enter inactive idle time from fiscal years 2026 through 2030.” That could see the Navy incurring “more than 14,000 days of inactive idle time and $3.1 billion in operating and support costs, according to our analysis.”

Perhaps the worst example of inactive idle time, according to the GAO report, is the Los Angeles-class submarine USS Pasadena, which became inactive in January 2025, but is not expected to enter Norfolk Naval Shipyard for decommissioning until November 2028.

During this inactive idle time, which could run nearly four years, the Pasadena remains fully crewed and is being utilized by the Navy as a training platform. The inactive Pasadena has also been used in videos – in November 2024 for a promotional video for the 2024 Army-Navy Game, and in February 2025 for the Netflix TV series The Recruit.

A small group from the Pasadena crew remains on the submarine at all times to monitor security, nuclear reactor status, and safety systems. These crew members sleep in the submarine's cramped quarters during their off-watch hours, while on duty. The remainder of off-duty crew members may live on a tender ship, a submarine base barracks, or at their own off-base homes rather than on the submarine.

According to the GAO, the Navy “has not fully evaluated or established plans for implementing…alternative options for decommissioning attack submarines more efficiently and optimizing shipyard capacity for the operational fleet.”

For example, what about pier-side nuclear reactor defueling of inactive attack submarines which would not require now-limited dry dock space?

According to the GAO, “Navy officials stated pier-side defueling of the Los Angeles-class attack submarine nuclear reactors is not cost effective,” but those “officials were unable to provide documentation of detailed analyses conducted on the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of this option.” However, pier-side defueling is under study when it comes to the new Ohio-class strategic nuclear submarines, according to the GAO.

Another defueling option would be using floating dry docks, which the Navy officials told the GAO “requires additional study.”

Also under study by the Navy is to release a portion of the inactive attack submarine crew back to the operational fleet “over three phases: (1) the first month during system turnover to the public shipyard; (2) the first 6 months when idle conditions begin; and (3) nuclear reactor defueling once a dry dock is available.”

This approach has been used for two out of 18 Los Angeles-class subs set for decommissioning between 2014 and 2025, and, according to Navy officials, only “a limited number of attack submarines are planned to use this construct in the next five years.”

Asked why, “Navy officials cited public shipyard pier capacity constraints,” but again “did not provide documentation on any analyses conducted to reach this conclusion,” according to the GAO.

The Navy is studying whether the service life of two of its attack submarines by shifting, shortening or removing idle times. “As of September 2025, the U.S. Navy projected that it can reduce inactive idle time by 1,715 days for fiscal years 2026 through 2029 for two attack submarines. However, these service life extensions are still pending approval,” the GAO said.

The GAO after this study concluded in its report, “While the U.S. Navy has recently made some progress in reducing attack submarine active idle time, inactive idle time has grown and will continue to grow with the impending wave of Los Angeles-class inactivations over the next 5 years.”

It then recommended the obvious: “The Secretary of the Navy should ensure that the Chief of Naval Operations directs the Naval Sea Systems Command to fully evaluate alternative options for decommissioning attack submarines more efficiently to optimize shipyard capacity for the operational fleet. Such options may include, but are not limited to, defueling outside of dry docks and reducing crewing for attack submarines awaiting decommissioning.”

I agree.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### From Ground Zero to Grace — A Journey Through Trauma to Service

**Published:** September 1, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/from-ground-zero-to-grace-a-journey-through-trauma-to-service.md

BOOK REVIEW: THE GREATEST LOVE

By Tim Brown / Convergent Books

Reviewed by: Joe Zacks

The Reviewer — Joe Zacks is the former Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA for Counterterrorism, the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Aardwolf Global Solutions and a Cipher Brief Subject Matter Expert.

REVIEW: Let me start this review by thanking The Cipher Brief for allowing me to review Tim Brown’s special book The Greatest Love. Tim Brown is a good friend of mine and Cipher Brief generally does not allow friends of authors to review their books – but as you will read this is a special book and circumstances.

The Greatest Love is authored by one of the most courageous and selfless men I am honored to know. Tim Brown is a highly dedicated and decorated former New York Fire Department (FDNY) firefighter who just barely survived the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11. His book is an homage to the heroic firefighters and first responders who perished that fateful day as well as an eye-opening first-hand account of battling PTSD, dealing with grief, finding help, and giving back through helping others.

Tim visited CIA’s Counterterrorism Mission Center a few years ago to recount his Ground Zero tale of 9/11 to Agency officers who have been at the forefront of the nation’s on-going efforts to bring justice to the perpetrators of that dastardly act. I was among the officers who attended his mesmerizing presentation, and we developed an enduring friendship.

Tim’s life has in many ways been defined by 9/11 and the days and years after. In addition to having undergone the trauma of being amongst the first responders at the site of this horrific devastation, he suffered from survivor’s guilt. This feeling ultimately manifested itself in PTSD, and in Part II of his book, Tim writes candidly of this pain and his efforts to treat it. His chapters on handling grief and refusing isolation are particularly powerful and a must read for both people working to overcome PTSD and those trying to help family and friends suffering from PTSD. He provides a checklist of what to do and not do when struggling with this affliction.

Tim’s life is about service, and in Parts I and III he focuses on the meaning of service and its value both to self and others. While providing incredible examples of service and heroism by the FDNY, he explains how serving others is not only the purview of first responders and the military. He illustrates the meaningful ways each of us can be of service to others and the richness that serving others adds to one’s life. In addition, Tim includes his call to service with the religiosity that is core to his life.

At the end of each chapter, Tim pays special tribute to one heroic FDNY firefighter who died at Ground Zero. These were his friends and brothers. It is the strength of brotherhood and blind trust in one’s compadres that propels firefighters to rush into a building engulfed in flames to protect and save lives. This same brotherhood exists in the military and other high-risk jobs where team performance and unflinching trust in one’s partner is critical for mission success.

There may be those who find it hard to relate to Tim’s book because it is too distant from their lives. That may be one’s good fortune, and he is okay with that. He is far from judgmental. He has penned a very personal story, and in doing so he offers us an opportunity to reflect on how others deal with pain and grief, how we can help those who suffer, and how we can more broadly serve our communities and make our lives richer.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

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### Ukraine Is No Longer the Country Russia Thought It Was

**Published:** August 31, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/ukraine-is-no-longer-the-country-russia-thought-it-was.md

Understanding a country's strategic culture helps assess how it will react to crisis, negotiation, and national security events. Strategic culture generally is static and when it evolves, it happens slowly, as history, events, and culture accumulate over generations. In 2021, the prevailing view of Ukraine’s strategic culture was that it was a country focused on securing its national identity and sovereignty apart from Russia and it was a country prone to rely on negotiations and diplomacy. The balance between these two themes was about even with Ukraine leaning toward diplomacy and multilaterism over sovereignty when pushed by the international community. Most students of strategic culture did not assess that Ukraine would react to a Russian invasion with the military force that it has. Now students of strategic culture see the theme of independence and sovereignty as the key aspect of Ukraine’s strategic culture with a growing theme of being modern day military experts. The rapid transformation of the assessment of Ukrainian strategic culture is astounding. Either strategic culture academics got Ukraine wrong, or the Russian invasion changed Ukraine cataclysmically. I suspect it is a bit of both.

Strategic Culture

Strategic culture refers to a nation's shared beliefs, assumptions, and habitual behaviors regarding the use of force and the pursuit of security objectives. Jack L. Snyder introduced the term in 1977, arguing that a state's behavior cannot be explained by material capabilities or geography alone, but by those factors combined with history, cultural norms, and shared societal beliefs. Strategic culture is generally resistant to change. While it is often invoked to explain Russia's decision to invade Ukraine — its relevance to Ukraine's response has been comparatively overlooked.

Ukraine's Early Strategic Culture

Ukraine's strategic culture has been shaped by centuries of foreign domination and by its Soviet legacy. Early studies of strategic culture in independent Ukraine identified securing a national identity separate from Russia as the paramount objective. Those same early studies concluded that Ukraine favored diplomatic engagement, multilateral cooperation, and alliance-building over military action — pointing to Ukraine's surrender of its nuclear arsenal after the Soviet collapse and its acquiescence to Russia's 2014 seizure of Crimea as evidence. But this reading likely mistook constraint for preference. Ukraine was a newly independent state with a fledgling security establishment and military; it lacked the structure and capacity to stand up to either the United States or Russia, both of which pressed it toward disarmament and restraint. And, while significant events, neither of those two events were an immediate threat to Ukrainian independence. What looked like a cultural preference for negotiation may have been the best available option available for a young, under-resourced state. This misreading of Ukrainian resolve and strategic culture set Russia up for a catastrophic miscalculation that has cost over a million lives and will take decades for both countries to recover from.

The first principle of Ukraine’s strategic culture — safeguarding a distinct national identity — endures today. But the second focus on diplomacy and multinationalism-- has changed. If successful, the Russian invasion would have meant that this first principle would have to be abrogated and Ukrainian identity would once again have been subsumed by Moscow. Ukraine could not tolerate that: fighting for independence and Ukrainian identity outweighs alliance-building and negotiations as the organizing goal of its strategic culture. Today, Kyiv increasingly foot stomps aspects of Ukrainian identity that were suppressed under Soviet rule, and its foreign policy has grown more assertive, favoring offensive posture over purely defensive behavior. What has emerged is a culture that balances patience for international negotiation with adaptability and a hardened determination not to be conquered again, at any cost.

Two Defining Characteristics

Two characteristics of Ukrainian strategic culture stand out as key to explaining Ukrainian resistance to Russia:

Ukraine's growing emphasis on its Cossack heritage appears designed to construct a new state myth and reshape national self-perception from one of victimhood to one of warrior. Invoking the Cossacks — a self-governing, democratic, and militarily capable community prone to raids and revolt — underscores both Ukraine's independence and its capacity for military action. Domestically, images of the great hetmans now appear more prominently on currency and in textbooks.

Ukrainian strategic culture rests on the primacy of sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity — values Russia has threatened or dismissed both historically and in the present. Language has become a central tool of this identity claim: early post-independence legislation established the primacy of Ukrainian language to rebuild a cohesive national identity, and that legislative push accelerated around the outbreak of armed conflict in 2014, alongside a marked cooling toward proposals to formalize Russian as a second official language. For Ukrainians, language is intrinsic to national identity. I recall being tutored in Ukrainian by an émigré in the late 1980s; he was a tough teacher, and he would grow angry whenever I mistakenly lapsed into Russian even though it was our common language and at times the only language in which we could communicate.

Ukrainian Strategic Culture Today

Ukraine's strategic culture now manifests as an asymmetrical, creative approach to security — one that offsets comparatively limited military resources with international partnerships, novel approaches to warfare, and disciplined strategic messaging. It emphasizes flexibility, resilience, gray-zone tactics, and pragmatic decision-making. Increasingly, we are seeing Ukraine promoting its tactics and military resources internationally.

Ukraine's strategic norms are still evolving, but the trajectory since independence is clear: independence and ingenuity have become the paramount, defining components of Ukrainian strategic culture, expressed through firm state priorities. A lasting orientation toward the West, paired with renewed emphasis on Slavic and Cossack roots, matters too, if somewhat less centrally. Above all, a study of modern day Ukrainian strategic culture tells us that Ukraine will do what it must to preserve its hard-won independence — while still maintaining its position as a respected leader within the global community.

Recently, the new Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Yevhenii Khmara, said

”Ukraine has always seen tragedy. Its history is a long inventory of it. What separates this generation from all the ones before is that it has a real chance to defeat the enemy.”

This tells you a lot about the mindset of senior Ukrainian decision makers and how they are messaging their people and the international community.

Why it Matters

Understanding Ukrainian strategic culture helps us to determine what approach to take to help end the war in Ukraine. Paramount for the country is ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. For Ukraine, that is nonnegotiable. Any negotiating concepts that leave room for other nations to impose themselves on Ukrainian decision making is a nonstarter for Kyiv. Recognizing Ukraine’s sacrifices not only in the last four years but the tragic historical road they have been on with pre Soviet Russia and the Soviets will go far in any negotiations. Finally, acknowledging and highlighting how well Ukraine has out played Russia would also go a long way. Next, I will present Russian strategic culture and then discuss where the two clash.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Former NSA Cyber Chief Rob Joyce: AI Is Moving Cyberattacks to Machine Speed

**Published:** August 31, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/former-nsa-cyber-chief-rob-joyce-ai-is-moving-cyberattacks-to-machine-speed.md



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### CIA Director's Moscow Mission: What Was The Message to Putin?

**Published:** August 31, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/cia-director-s-moscow-mission-what-was-the-message-to-putin.md



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### Held Hostage by Iran: What Emad Shargi Wants America to Understand

**Published:** August 31, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/held-hostage-by-iran-what-emad-shargi-wants-america-to-understand-2677798909.md



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### What Six Years as an Iran Hostage Taught Me About the Regime

**Published:** August 31, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/what-six-years-as-an-iran-hostage-taught-me-about-the-regime.md

Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, I have watched and listened to nearly every piece of news coverage and analysis from U.S. policymakers, pundits, and the media. What continues to puzzle me is how often the Islamic Republic is treated as a rational government operating under conventional norms. The Islamic Republic is a cult, not a predictable government.

We hear constant talk of engaging or “negotiating” with its current leadership, distinguishing between “moderates” and “hardliners,” using intermediaries such as Pakistan, and sending American negotiators to Islamabad to meet with representatives of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The problem is that much of this analysis misunderstands the worldview of those who actually wield power in Iran.

I learned something about that worldview during the nearly six years (2018 – 2023) I spent as an American hostage in Iran.

The lesson began almost immediately. At around 2:00 a.m. one morning, after agents of the IRGC Intelligence Organization dragged me from my bed, I was taken to the office of a friend, a place I had visited many times. The agents began ransacking it.

At one point, I asked to use the bathroom. Two armed guards accompanied me. I used a urinal, and they escorted me back to the office. A few minutes later, I overheard one of them telling another agent, with apparent astonishment: “These guys piss in a sink against the wall!” An intelligence officer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had apparently never seen a urinal.

It was a small, almost comical moment in what was otherwise a terrifying first night of what turned out to be 1975 nights of torture, fear, and uncertainty. But it stayed with me because it was my first indication that the men holding me inhabited a world very different not only from mine but also from those of the West.

During my imprisonment in Evin, I encountered regime insiders, arrested by the very regime they had helped bring to power and sustain, who gave me further insight into the skewed world they inhabited and the prism through which they viewed the rest of the world.

In Section 2A, the IRGC’s maximum interrogation facility, we sometimes used newspapers as makeshift placemats to eat our meals on the floor. A cellmate of mine, a former IRGC Quds Force member imprisoned on alleged espionage charges, warned me that eating off a newspaper could unintentionally constitute blasphemy. Somewhere in that edition, he explained, the word “Allah” might be printed. By placing food on the paper, I could unknowingly desecrate the name of God.

Another cellmate offered an even more revealing window into this worldview. He was the former head of security at the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a real insider in the regime. Haji, as they all want to be called, explained to me that the universe consisted of seven floors. The seventh and highest floor, he said, was where God placed his prophets, their closest disciples, and those who had lived truly pious lives. Haji was an interesting messenger for this particular theology. He had also served as a corrupt facilitator for a “businessman” who obtained a €500 million unsecured loan from Iran’s Central Bank and then wired nearly all of the money overseas—with Haji’s assistance. Now Haji was my cellmate in Section 2A.

Out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to understand how far Haji’s worldview extended, I asked him, “On which floor would someone like Alexander Fleming end up?” Haji looked at me blankly. “Who is he?” I explained that Fleming discovered penicillin, one of the most consequential medical discoveries in human history, and that his work had saved countless lives around the world—including countless Muslims.

Haji did not hesitate. “He would go to Hell,” he said. “He was not a Muslim.”

His answer gave me vertigo. Here was a man who believed deeply in a moral universe divided into seven levels, with eternal salvation reserved for the properly devout, yet who had himself been a corrupt conduit in a massive financial theft from the people of Iran. And in his moral accounting, a man whose discovery had saved millions was nevertheless condemned to eternal damnation because he belonged to the wrong faith.

These experiences may sound anecdotal, even bizarre. But they matter because ideology is not an abstraction in the Islamic Republic. It shapes how the regime’s insiders understand morality, diplomacy, legitimacy, the West—and even the value of human life. And it is what makes the regime a cult rather than a traditional government.

Now consider the people who have risen—and continue to rise—through this system. One of the most important is Mohsen Rezaee, whose career spans virtually the entire history of the Islamic Republic. Rezaee joined the newly created Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the 1979 revolution. In 1981, at just 27, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the IRGC. When Rezaee finally left command of the IRGC in 1997, he did not leave the regime’s inner circle. He became secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council, a powerful institution that advises the Supreme Leader and arbitrates disputes within the Islamic Republic.

And now Rezaee is back at the very center of power. A few weeks ago, he was appointed secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and named Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s representative on that body. The council sits at the heart of Iranian decision-making on national security, war, and foreign policy.

His appointment matters because Rezaee has never been particularly shy about sharing his views with the world. In 2015, while discussing the possibility of an American military attack on Iran, Rezaee proposed an extraordinary solution to Iran’s economic problems: take at least 1,000 Americans hostage and demand billions of dollars for their release. Years later, in 2021, while running for president, he again spoke openly about taking Americans hostage.

For someone who spent nearly six years as an American hostage of the Islamic Republic, I find such statements especially hard to dismiss as mere rhetoric. They reveal something fundamental and odious about the system. In most governments, suggesting that the kidnapping of anyone could become an instrument of economic or foreign policy might end a political career. In the Islamic Republic, it did not prevent Rezaee from continuing his ascent through the highest levels of the state. Today, the former IRGC commander who publicly entertained the idea of taking Americans hostage sits at the center of Iran’s national-security establishment.

Then there is Hossein Taeb, a hardline cleric and longtime intelligence operative whose career offers another revealing glimpse into how power actually works within the Islamic Republic. Taeb commanded the Basij paramilitary organization during the violent suppression of the 2009 Green Movement, when millions of Iranians took to the streets after the disputed presidential election. He was subsequently promoted to become the first head of the expanded IRGC Intelligence Organization, the most powerful intelligence apparatus operating alongside—and often in competition with—Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. He remained in that position for nearly thirteen years.

But Taeb’s significance extends beyond the offices he has held. For decades, he has been closely associated with Mojtaba Khamenei. Their relationship dates to the Iran-Iraq War, when both served in the IRGC. Over the years, Taeb became a key figure in the security and intelligence network around Mojtaba, and their names repeatedly appeared together in accounts of the regime’s efforts to suppress internal opposition. Today, that relationship matters more than ever. Mojtaba Khamenei is now Supreme Leader, and Taeb has once again been placed in command of the Basij—the enormous paramilitary organization the Islamic Republic has long relied on to maintain internal control and suppress unrest.

This is not merely history to me. According to one of my interrogators, Taeb (AKA Haj Maysam) was present at two of my most brutal interrogation sessions in April 2018, including my mock execution. I remember him not as a name in an intelligence report or a photograph in a newspaper article, but as a man who stood within the machinery that held me hostage.

Today, both men are once again at the center of that machinery. Rezaee holds one of the Islamic Republic’s most important national-security posts. Taeb has returned to lead the Basij. Mojtaba Khamenei, with whom both men have longstanding ties, now sits at the apex of the system.

These are not rogue actors operating on the margins of the Islamic Republic. Nor are they relics of an earlier revolutionary era that Iran has gradually moved beyond. They are the system, and they are once again being entrusted with its protection.

Yet the clearest lesson I received about that system’s worldview came not from a senior official but from one of the men who interrogated me. Several months after my arrest, after I had endured hundreds of hours of brutal questioning, my lead interrogator had seemingly run out of questions, and I had run out of answers. We were both exhausted by the madness of it all. We sat in silence in the interrogation room. He pulled a phone from his pocket. On the screen was a photograph of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He swiped the image away, tapped the phone, and Koranic verses in Arabic began to play. He sat about a yard from me, across a small metal table that separated us. He was in his mid-thirties. By then, I had learned that he was married and had children.

Several minutes passed. Then I noticed tears sliding down his cheeks. For a moment, I wondered if something had happened to one of his kids. Finally, I asked if he was all right. He looked up at me and said: “I can’t wait to become a martyr.” I had no response and was completely dumbfounded. That moment has stayed with me ever since.

In Washington, it is tempting to dismiss rhetoric about martyrdom, religious purity, and the “Great Satan” as political theater—a vocabulary meant for domestic consumption while supposedly pragmatic men conduct the real business of diplomacy behind closed doors.

My experience taught me otherwise. That does not mean every Iranian official thinks the same way, nor does it mean diplomacy should never be attempted. It does mean that American policymakers should stop assuming that the men who dominate the Islamic Republic weigh costs and benefits, compromise, and survival exactly as Western officials do.

For decades, Washington has repeatedly sought the elusive Islamic Republic’s “moderates” who are supposed to transform the regime from within. Analysts construct elaborate theories about factions and personalities, sometimes overlooking the core ideology that binds the system together.

Rivalries certainly exist within the Islamic Republic. Disagreements over tactics, money, power, and personalities persist. But tactical disagreement should not be mistaken for fundamental ideological divisions or moderation. Nor should we assume that because a particular course of action appears irrational or self-destructive to us, the men making decisions in Tehran will necessarily see it the same way.

The Iranian people understand this distinction better than many outsiders. They have lived under this system for nearly half a century and have repeatedly risked their lives to challenge it. American policymakers should listen more carefully to them. They should also remember something else when sitting across the negotiating table from representatives of the Islamic Republic.

I once sat three feet from one of those men in a locked interrogation room in Section 2A of Evin prison. He had a wife. He had children. He had a career. He had a life waiting for him outside those walls. And what brought tears to his eyes was the joy of giving it all up. He could not wait to become a martyr.

Emad Shargi,

American Businessman

Hostage of the Islamic Republic (2018 – 2023)

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Monday, August 31, 2026

**Published:** August 31, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-monday-august-31-2026.md



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### Dead Drop: August 30 - September 5

**Published:** August 30, 2026 | **Author:** Suzanne Kelly | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dead-drop-august-30-november-5.md

AD-VERSARY DENIED: Per Reuters, the Air Force has disabled advertising identifiers on military computers and mobile phones, while U.S. Special Operations Command has done the same on Windows devices. The Army says it disabled mobile advertising IDs earlier this year after reports that commercially available location data has been used to track (and target) U.S. forces in the Middle East. Apparently, there’s a booming industry for data brokers who collect location information from phones and apps and then sell it (no pun intended, of course).

THE SPY WHO GAMED TOO MUCH: Russian intelligence is apparently trolling for recruits in Denmark. It's looking for people who spend time on social media and gaming platforms. According to Reuters, Denmark's intelligence service, PET, says Russian operatives are recruiting ordinary Danes for reconnaissance missions, including taking photos of defense companies and infrastructure. PET says those pictures could be used to plan sabotage operations against Danish defense firms with ties to Ukraine. Some of the recruiting is happening through gaming platforms. In other words, which tells us that Moscow seems to have figured out that if you want somebody to photograph a sensitive facility, you don't necessarily need a trained spy. You need somebody who owns a phone and spends too much time online. PET says it is "extremely serious" when ordinary Danes assist Russian intelligence, whether deliberately or unwittingly. Russia's ambassador to Denmark denies the allegations and instead accused Copenhagen of creating security risks by supporting Ukraine. Hmmm. Still, it seems like vetting new friends online is a little more important than we once thought.

SPYING ON THE CHEAP: If Beijing is outsourcing espionage to college students, it may not pay very well. According to CBC News, a University of Waterloo undergraduate student is accused of taking assignments from a mysterious Chinese contact to photograph specific airplanes and FedEx facilities in Toronto and Chicago. The alleged pay: $20 to $30 per accepted photo, with the student telling investigators that he'd made somewhere around $500 total over 18 months (accounts vary on the exact figure, and a couple put it closer to $74). At Chicago's O'Hare Airport in April, security cameras allegedly caught him hanging around a FedEx employee lot, photographing aircraft, trying to open a delivery truck and shipping container, and climbing onto a forklift to get a better camera angle. Prosecutors say he initially told U.S. border officials that he was simply an aviation enthusiast taking pictures for a flight-tracking website. After several rounds of questioning, prosecutors say he admitted that a Chinese contact had assigned him specific planes and tail numbers, and that he suspected the man worked for a Chinese security service. But he later allegedly told the FBI that the plane photos were a cover story his handler gave him. The actual assignment: interior photos of the FedEx facility itself, along with details on freight logistics, bus routes, and train schedules. The student has been charged not with espionage but with making false statements to federal officials. At a court hearing on Tuesday, he agreed to remain in custody and hasn’t yet entered a plea of guilty or not guilty. If any of this is proven in court to be true, it seems that Beijing got a pretty good deal.

FREIGHT, MEET SIGINT: The shipping giant COSCO is not to be confused with the Kirkland-hawking warehouse chain. According to Reuters, two senior Trump administration officials say the Chinese state-owned firm has been quietly outfitting its container ships with concealed signals-intelligence gear, hoovering up military communications and encryption data near the coasts of the U.S. and other target countries. All the while, the same vessels haul sneakers and refrigerators into American ports on a completely legitimate commercial schedule. COSCO didn't respond to Reuters requests for comment. China's embassy called the claims "totally baseless" and said they would NEVER ask any company or individual to “collect or private data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws.” The Pentagon flagged COSCO as a Chinese military company in January 2025. The designation doesn't impose sanctions, although it does bar the company from doing business with the Defense Department and its contractors. COSCO's commercial operations, meanwhile, have continued. So apparently, if one wanted to, one could be barred from doing business with the Pentagon while also sailing into American ports collecting intelligence on the Pentagon. That’s if one wanted to, of course. That sounds like a pretty good deal. Better than a $1.50 Costco hot dog.

THE CIA'S DRONE DOOR-OPENER: Want to break into the U.S. defense market? It looks like it helps to have a CIA-connected venture capitalist backing you. Reuters is sharing the story of a German drone maker that got an early foothold in the United States with help from In-Q-Tel (IQT) - the investment firm created by the intelligence community. Quantum Systems co-CEO Sven Kruck says IQT and other U.S. investors helped the company open doors in Washington and land work with both the CIA and the FBI. That work reportedly didn't make Quantum Systems flush with funds by itself, but according to the reporting, it did deliver credibility and connections in the world's biggest defense market. The German company is now valued at roughly $8 billion and is one of Europe's biggest defense startups, supplying reconnaissance drones to Germany, Ukraine and others. If Europe is now on the cutting edge of drone technology, it seems the U.S. is still on the cutting edge of cash.

YOU CAN CALL THIS A LAKE EFFECT – With the stroke of a pen just a few days ago, President Trump renamed Lake Ontario "Lake America," and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has dutifully complied, filing the change into its Geographic Names Server — which NGA's own release describes as the official U.S. repository for foreign geographic names. The Interior Department separately updated the domestic database, meaning it took two federal agencies and two different databases to relabel one lake that sits mostly in New York. Social media ran with bogus claims that Canadian customs was turning away boats with "Lake America" on their paperwork. Turns out, it wasn’t quite that juicy. The Washington Post found a Toronto charter captain shrugging that it's "a nonissue for us, other than watching the memes and enjoying the humor." Ontario Premier Doug Ford answered with a two-story sign reading "Lake Ontario. Now and Always." The new name is on the books in Washington. Everywhere else, it doesn’t seem to be holding much water.

THEY’LL LET ANYBODY IN THESE DAYS: The FBI has reportedly loosened some of its requirements for new applicants. CBS News reports that a June internal memo said background checks would no longer automatically disqualify applicants for things like: hiring sex workers; stealing from an employer; or committing bestiality. Yeah, you read that right. The new bar: no more than two instances of soliciting prostitution and none within the last decade, and theft older than three years is forgivable. Bestiality gets a pass, too — but only if it happened before the age 18 because kids will be kids, eh? The Bureau says the changes are intended to help better evaluate “the whole person.” Critics, though, might call it evaluating a shrinking applicant pool. Former officials note that the FBI lost more than 1,100 special agents last year and say recruiting has failed to keep pace. Director Kash Patel insists that standards are rising, not falling. We don’t really know but we imagine polygraph operators are probably developing a whole new set of pet questions.

THE INSIDER THREAT DIVISION HAD AN INSIDE MAN: Nathan Vilas Laatsch, 29, of Alexandria, Virginia, spent his DIA career in the agency's Insider Threat Division, the office whose entire job is catching people - well - like him. According to the Justice Department, Laatsch, who was arrested last year, pleaded guilty last week to transmission of national defense information to a foreign government. The FBI reportedly learned in March of 2025 that he'd offered classified material to a foreign government (still unnamed in court filings), then started corresponding with who he thought was a "foreign official" but was really an undercover FBI agent. Officials believe that Laatsch transcribed classified documents by hand at his desk over three days. ABC News previously reported that surveillance video caught him folding the notes into squares and stuffing them in his socks. A coworker separately spotted him tucking notebook pages into the bottom of his lunchbox. Laatsch eventually dropped a thumb drive at a public park in northern Virginia, telling his contact he'd packed in "a decent sample size" to show off "the range of types of products" he could access. The key to Laatsch’s betrayal wasn't cash, he said he wasn't "opposed to other compensation" but said he didn't need money; what he wanted was citizenship. A month later, he came back for round two, hid a fresh batch of notes in his clothing again, and was arrested at the handoff. He faces up to life at his sentencing hearing in January. That’s a long time. He’d better pack a lunchbox.

WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM FOR A WORD FROM OUR STATE SPONSOR OF MISCHIEF: CIA Director John Ratcliffe's now-well-known (but once secret) trip to Moscow produced the usual pileup of denials, non-denials and "semi-routine" dismissals. It also apparently gave Russia's most reliably monotonous piece of Cold War hardware a workout. UVB-76, Moscow’s shortwave numbers station nicknamed "Doomsday Radio," reportedly broke its trademark buzz at least 25 times the day after Ratcliffe left town, according to Ynetnews, citing The Moscow Times. Among the coded transmissions: the words "waitress," "spray" and "existence" — presumably meaningful to someone, somewhere. It was reportedly the station's busiest day since the last time Trump and Putin spoke by phone, which is either a coincidence or the closest thing Russian signals intelligence has to a mood ring. The Kremlin, meanwhile, decided this was the week to explain why it doesn't explain itself. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said intelligence services traditionally "work quietly," but diplomats are "obliged to say something" — which we interpret as either candor or the most Russian possible way of saying "no comment."

DIGGING UP SOME OLD SPY STORIES: Soviet spy Donald Maclean apparently didn't need a handler to protect him on his way out the door. He had his wife. That’s according to a story in The Telegraph, which gives juicy details about the Cambridge Five saga - just one of the stories in The MI5 Archive, a new book by British National Archives specialists Mark Dunton and Stephen Twigge. The book draws on MI5's declassified files from its 1909 founding through the mid-1970s. Among the newly released files: more details from the frantic days before Maclean and fellow Cambridge Five member Guy Burgess fled to Moscow in 1951. After Maclean vanished, MI5 reportedly questioned his heavily pregnant wife, Melinda, who was due with the couple's third child within a fortnight. She explained his sudden departure as ordinary domestic chaos: two kids down with measles, and relatives due that weekend. It worked. Her interviewer, Jim Skardon, the officer who'd wrung a confession out of atomic spy Klaus Fuchs a year earlier, took her account at face value. Dunton suggests MI5 may have underestimated her simply because she was a housewife, not a suspected operative. What Skardon didn't know was that Melinda had long been aware of her husband's espionage. The book is due to be published in the UK September 3 and in the U.S. on November 17.

Got news to share? Drop us a note: Editor@thecipherbrief.com

Read more expert-driven national security insights exclusively in www.thecipherbrief.com.

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### Lebanon’s Hezbollah Finance Crackdown May Be Designed to Fail

**Published:** August 28, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/lebanons-hezbollah-finance-crackdown-may-be-designed-to-fail.md

Lebanon’s campaign against Hezbollah’s finances may be designed to look tougher than it is. Under pressure from Washington and international regulators, Beirut has done enough to claim progress by tightening the regulated financial sector against Hezbollah-linked entities, but without seriously threatening Hezbollah’s parallel financial apparatus, which operates largely outside it. This raises the troubling possibility that Lebanon is not merely failing to impose meaningful pressure but deliberately choosing measures that stop short of actually harming, and therefore provoking, Hezbollah. Lebanese leaders have repeatedly warned that directly confronting the group risks renewed internal conflict. A serious assault on Hezbollah’s finances would strike at the resources sustaining its organization and could invite precisely that confrontation. If so, Beirut has found a politically useful middle ground: cosmetically satisfying foreign demands to preserve the domestic status quo.

Iran remains Hezbollah’s main external source of money. Secretary-General Naim Qassem has acknowledged Iranian funding for postwar relief and reconstruction. In November 2025, the U.S. Treasury said Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps-Quds Force, its foreign-operations arm, had transferred more than $1 billion to Hezbollah since the beginning of that year, mostly through money exchange companies. Iran and Hezbollah have also used gold to move funds. Qassem has acknowledged smaller contributions from the Iraqi state, Shiite religious authorities and shrines, Iran-aligned Shiite militias, and Iraqi citizens. The Houthis raised funds directly for Hezbollah in 2019 and later for its Lebanese support base. Hezbollah has used cryptocurrency too, though the scale remains unclear.

Hezbollah also generates revenue through ostensibly legitimate businesses and commercial networks that conceal the group’s involvement behind nominal owners. Treasury says a commercial network run by financier Alaa Hamieh diverted more than $100 million to Hezbollah since 2020, while Hamieh allegedly used his state investment post to steer millions toward Hezbollah-linked projects.

Hezbollah-controlled and affiliated entities then manage and move the money. Its Central Finance Unit controls income and spending, Bayt al-Mal serves as its treasury, and Al-Qard al-Hassan (AQAH) provides bank-like services and holds cash and gold. AQAH officials have used personal “shadow” accounts to disguise transactions and move more than $500 million through Lebanese banks. AQAH-backed Jood SARL converts gold into cash, while Hezbollah-linked money-service businesses like CTEX have supplied dollars to Hezbollah institutions and recruited sympathetic money changers. WaTaawanou, a crowdfunding charity officially outside Hezbollah’s formal hierarchy, raises donations for needy Lebanese but directs much of the resulting spending to Hezbollah-run or -linked hospitals and businesses. These funds support personnel, weapons procurement, social programs, compensation, housing, and post-war reconstruction.

Lebanese measures have so far done little to disrupt this diversified financial ecosystem. AQAH’s liquidity problems do not demonstrate otherwise because they predated Beirut’s principal financial restrictions. It began delaying compensation checks in January 2025 and froze them on June 23, after nearly $500 million had already been disbursed. The Lebanese Central Bank did not issue Circular 170 until July 14. That measure bars regulated financial institutions from dealing with AQAH and related sanctioned, unlicensed entities, but does not close AQAH or seize its assets.

AQAH therefore remains operational. It retained branches that survived Israeli strikes, while Treasury said in February 2026 that Hezbollah continued using the institution and that AQAH officials had created Jood to ease its liquidity pressure. The Interior Ministry later withheld AQAH’s annual 2026 certificate of good legal standing pending investigations, but left its underlying association registration intact. An-Nahar reported would require a Cabinet decision to revoke. But, on June 18, Justice Minister Adel Nassar said the government had not even placed the AQAH file on the Cabinet agenda. Stripping a core Hezbollah institution of its legal status would mark a far more direct confrontation with the group, one the government appears unlikely to invite amid the current standoff over Hezbollah’s disarmament.

Judicial action has likewise stopped short of disrupting AQAH’s operations. Nassar referred AQAH and Jood to the public prosecutor in June for investigation. Yet by July 21, An-Nahar reported that the case remained dormant. Prosecutors were waiting for the Central Bank to provide documents establishing financial violations but had not themselves requested them.

Lebanon’s Central Bank also issued Intermediate Circular 761 on May 4, 2026, effective June 30, requiring regulated nonbank financial institutions—including exchange houses, finance companies, specialized lenders, and electronic-payment providers—to identify customers and report cash transactions of $1,000 or more, while flagging repeated transactions apparently structured to evade the threshold. But those requirements can still be bypassed through unlicensed or informal hawala networks, where a sender pays a broker abroad and a partner in Lebanon pays the recipient locally, without the original money passing through a bank or regulated Lebanese institution.

Lebanon’s restrictions have therefore changed Hezbollah’s methods more than its access to money. After Beirut tightened airport controls, Iran reportedly shifted to more couriers carrying smaller amounts of cash or jewelry while moving hundreds of millions of dollars through Dubai. When Whish Money, a Lebanese transfer company, closed WaTaawanou’s donation account in October 2025, the charity directed donors to AQAH and other transfer firms. Hezbollah also reportedly planned a new AQAH branch in Tyre without signage. Treasury has meanwhile documented Hezbollah financiers transferring companies to relatives or associates and creating new entities amid sanctions pressure.

Many of the steps required for real financial pressure already overlap with obligations Lebanon accepted under its FATF action plan, including more terrorist-financing investigations and prosecutions, better identification of true owners, seizure of illicit cross-border currency and precious metals, and stronger targeted financial sanctions. Applied to Hezbollah, that means closing AQAH, prosecuting officials who move its money through personal accounts, shutting Jood and replacement companies, seizing Hezbollah-bound cash and gold, revoking the licenses of financial firms that facilitate the group, and cutting Hezbollah-linked businesses off from state contracts, licenses, and institutions. Claims that Lebanon has clamped down on Hezbollah’s finances, or gone as far as it reasonably can, should be judged against such outcomes—not regulations, administrative measures, or assurances of progress that do not produce measurable, real-world impact.

David Daoud is senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) focused on Israel, Hezbollah, and Lebanon affairs. Ahmad Sharawi is a senior research analyst at FDD focused on Syria and Iranian intervention in Arab affairs and the Levant. Follow David on X @Davidadaoud. Follow Ahmad on X @AhmadA_Sharawi.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Friday, August 28, 2026

**Published:** August 28, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-friday-august-28-2026.md



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### Global Intelligence Report for Thursday, August 27, 2026

**Published:** August 27, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-thursday-august-27-2026.md



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### Old Spies, Old Flames, New Bodies

**Published:** August 27, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/old-spies-old-flames-new-bodies.md

BOOK REVIEW: THE SHADOW FRIENDS

By Tess Gerritsen / Thomas & Mercer

Reviewed by: Susan Gorgioski

The Reviewer — Susan Gorgioski is a writer who has worked in law and publishing in Australia. She is currently researching a novel set in WWII Shanghai.

REVIEW:

The Russians have been a mainstay of spy thrillers and they are always worthy adversaries. Tess Gerritsen's The Shadow Friends continues with the tradition. Gerritsen has a fine pedigree as a thriller writer. Her early novels produced some gripping and creepy stories. She is also the creator of the very successful Rizzoli and Isles series. She returns to the genre with the Martini Club thrillers, which are arguably part of that rediscovered subgenre: Cosy Crime.

The Martini Club is composed of Maggie, Declan, Ingrid, Ben and Lloyd, a retired quintet from the secret world of clandestine operations and strategies known as the Agency. Ingrid's husband, Lloyd, however, was an analyst and not an operative, a distinction that is important in this novel.

In this novel the friends attend a conference on Global Affairs that is being chaired by Ingrid. During the conference a world-renowned disease expert and Russian defector dies in mysterious circumstances. The gang is drawn into the investigation because Maggie unwittingly becomes part of the investigation.

Ingrid is disturbed for other reasons when a waitress at the hotel is found dead in graphic and eerily similar circumstances to a mission that went wrong thirty years ago. The novel begins with this disastrous mission, and it is a finely written piece of memory, violence and nostalgia — the strongest scene in the novel.

A ghost from Ingrid's past appears at this time. He is her former partner and lover who survived that long ago mission with her. Lloyd is understandably concerned at the appearance of this handsome, roguish man from Ingrid's past, and this tension is carried through the novel.

Ingrid joins her former partner against her better judgement, and travels to Europe to pursue the killer who eluded them thirty years ago.

Ingrid's decision has a devastating impact on her husband Lloyd. Married for many years, Lloyd is heartbroken by Ingrid's disappearance and decision to exclude him. He and Maggie and the rest of their friends undertake their own investigation to find the killer. Maggie and Lloyd make a good team: one a seasoned operative and the other a talented analyst.

They follow a series of clever clues that leads them to Amsterdam, Spain and back to Purity, Maine. Although retired, Lloyd is quite savvy with new technologies.

These parallel investigations are filled with tension and surprises as their enemies come into focus. As the two strands unite, the mystery behind the killings in Ingrid's past and present worlds is explained with dire consequences.

Gerritsen is a very accomplished and dependable writer and this ensemble of geriatric spooks is likeable and competent. There are many ghosts leftover from the Cold War, and the people who fought this war of shadows, sleights and feints carry the scars and memories. Ingrid is motivated by thoughts of the woman she couldn't protect, and Lloyd is determined to save the love of his life.

There are enough turns and twists in the narrative to keep the reader engaged, and the ending is a surprise. The Russians are involved, but this is more a story about old allegiances and loves.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

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### Foreign Spies Don’t Need to Hack You Anymore

**Published:** August 26, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/foreign-spies-dont-need-to-hack-you-anymore.md

Andy Burnham was a few weeks into the job as the new Prime Minister of the UK when he found himself exchanging messages with someone claiming to be Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff. The exchange, first reported by Politico last week, was brief and apparently trivial. Burnham grew suspicious, stopped replying and told the right people; the British embassy in Washington quietly informed the White House, which confirmed that Wiles’s own devices hadn’t been touched. No harm done, officially.

Embarrassments like this are becoming more common. The FBI warned last year about impostors using AI to mimic senior officials, after someone posing as Wiles contacted senior Republicans and business figures. The State Department later chased a fake Marco Rubio who reached three foreign ministers. And every one of these approaches lands on a habit “Signalgate” already exposed: when one wrong contact card could add a journalist to a strike-planning thread, the name on the screen was the only authentication in the room. If you want to see what this security weakness looks like run as a nation-state campaign look at a case that closed quietly in Taipei last month.

In July, prosecutors in Taipei’s Shilin district wrapped up proceedings against two local businessmen, Li Hualun and Chen Mengsen, who had spent months registering accounts on LINE (the messaging app nearly everyone in Taiwan uses), each tied to a real Taiwanese phone number. They leased the accounts to Xiamen Empress Information Technology, a mainland firm Taiwanese investigators say works under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party’s cyber forces. The going rate was about 1,100 RMB per account, call it $160.

A working exploit for a major platform costs millions on the gray market. A trusted local identity cost less than a decent dinner, and it did something no technical exploit can do.

The operators used the fake accounts to become journalists. In the approach that eventually unraveled the scheme, one of them even dressed up a leased account in the name and photo of Chen Yishan, editor-in-chief of CommonWealth Magazine, and began courting an aide in a legislator’s office. Interview requests, invitations to contribute articles, the ordinary traffic of political journalism followed.

There was no malicious link in the first message, or the tenth. Investigators found the operators worked on targets for months, sometimes close to a year. Any counterintelligence officer would recognize the rhythm. It was the patient cultivation and recruitment of an agent run through a chat app.

The eventual ask was small and reasonable-sounding. Journalists use encrypted tools to protect their sources, so would the contact mind installing a secure communication app to keep talking? The app was in fact malware. The MO turns a decade of good security advice inside out. The more someone knew about how careful reporters actually operate, the more normal the request looked.

Researchers at Citizen Lab and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, whose reporting the Taiwanese prosecution now corroborates, counted more than a hundred malicious domains behind the wider campaign, and found errors in the phishing messages suggesting the attackers were using AI to draft them and to pick targets. The people on the receiving end were lawmakers and their staffs, defense think tanks, semiconductor companies, dissidents at home and abroad. Taiwanese media reported that even the island’s overseas missions were probed.

Through all of it, nothing technical failed. The networks held and the patches were current. The attackers went around the security stack entirely, and the thing they spent, their actual operational currency, was the credibility of a free press. Every fake interview request makes the real ones a little harder. This cost never shows up in an incident report.

The two men who supplied the accounts got deferred prosecutions and payments totaling a bit under $6,000. That is the current legal price, in a frontline democracy, for renting identity infrastructure to a foreign intelligence service. It isn’t a deterrent. It’s barely a business expense.

Which brings us back to Downing Street. A prime minister with the full apparatus of British intelligence behind him replied to a stranger because the name on the screen looked right. Nothing in either story depends on LINE, or Taiwan, or Westminster.

Swap in WhatsApp or LinkedIn; swap the fake editor for a fake recruiter or a fake chief of staff. Aged, locally registered accounts are already a commodity in criminal markets. All the model requires is a person who handles something worth stealing and a persona they have no fast way to check.

That last part is fixable, though not by the security team alone. Organizations that handle sensitive work should treat identity verification as a counterintelligence habit. Platforms need to treat the account-rental trade Taiwan uncovered as the national security problem it has become rather than a terms-of-service nuisance. And legislatures need to punish collaboration with foreign intelligence services at something above a traffic ticket.

Mostly, though, the people likeliest to be approached — the legislative staffer, the fab engineer, the think-tank fellow, the human rights activist, apparently the occasional head of government — need to become more educated on how foreign intelligence cultivation and targeting actually works: slowly, warmly, and with no suspicious link in sight until the very end. The adversary in this case looked at hardened networks and vigilant software and made a rational choice. Building a fake trusted persona was cheaper — $160 a head – than spending millions on a sophisticated cyber exploit. We need to start defending the credibility of verified, trusted identifies the way we defend our networks: as the attack surface it already is.The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Wednesday, August 26, 2026

**Published:** August 26, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-wednesday-august-26-2026.md



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### Held Hostage by Iran: What Emad Shargi Wants America to Understand

**Published:** August 25, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/held-hostage-by-iran-what-emad-shargi-wants-america-to-understand.md

Iranian-American businessman Emad Shargi spent more than five years detained in Iran, enduring solitary confinement, brutal interrogations, a mock execution and a 10-year prison sentence after being accused of cooperating with the United States.

Now, Shargi joins The Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly to tell the extraordinary story of his arrest, imprisonment, attempted escape from Iran and eventual release — and to offer a stark warning about how the Iranian regime operates.

Shargi describes the night IRGC intelligence agents raided his family’s home in Tehran, his detention inside the notorious Evin Prison and the pressure he faced to falsely confess to being a CIA spy.

He also recounts an attempted escape from Iran after being sentenced to a decade in prison — an effort that ended when he was captured near the Iraqi Kurdistan border and returned to IRGC custody.

But this conversation goes beyond his years in prison.

Drawing on his firsthand experience with the Iranian security apparatus, Shargi explains why he believes Washington must fundamentally rethink how it deals with Tehran, the role economic pressure can play in weakening the regime and why he believes the Iranian people ultimately have the will to demand change.

“You cannot negotiate with a cult of death,” Shargi tells The Cipher Brief.

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### A Life To Improbable For Fiction

**Published:** August 25, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/a-life-to-improbable-for-fiction.md

BOOK REVIEW: ORTIZ'S WAR: THE ALLIES' SECRET WEAPON AGAINST THE NAZIS IN FRANCE

By Nicholas Reynolds and Katie S. Sanders / Harper Horizon

Reviewed by: Bill Harlow

The Reviewer — Bill Harlow is The Cipher Brief's senior book editor and a former CIA Director of Public Affairs.

REVIEW: Some lives sound made up. Peter Ortiz's does. He left a comfortable upbringing to join the French Foreign Legion as a teenager, fought in North Africa, escaped a German prison camp, and joined the U.S. Marine Corps after Pearl Harbor. He parachuted twice into occupied France as an intelligence operative, was a highly successful OSS operator, earned two of the Marine Corps' highest decorations for valor, sat out a second stretch as a German prisoner, and later found an odd second act advising on and appearing in Hollywood films. Ortiz's War gives that life the serious, sourced biography it deserves.

The book's greatest strength is its research. Reynolds and Sanders worked through military and government archives, family papers, and firsthand accounts, and it shows on every page. The operational detail is specific and well-sourced, and the authors take care to separate Ortiz's own postwar recollections from what the documentary record actually confirms. Readers who care whether a wartime intelligence story rests on solid ground, rather than secondhand legend, will find this one clears that bar.

That care doesn't slow the book down. Structured chronologically and paced like a thriller, it moves briskly through Ortiz's restless youth, his service behind enemy lines, and the missions that followed. Reynolds and Sanders have an eye for the telling detail, and they let those small moments — a human beat amid a tense standoff, an act of quiet endurance during a long captivity — carry the weight on their own, without pausing to explain what they mean.

One of the book's pleasures is how accessible it makes Ortiz, and how vivid it makes the people around him. Reynolds and Sanders skip the org-chart detail and focus instead on what drove Ortiz, how he earned the trust of the resistance fighters and civilians who risked everything alongside him, and why people still spoke of him with admiration decades later. The authors are upfront that intelligence and special operations are rarely solo work, and they give real credit to the lesser-known people who made Ortiz's missions possible. The book ends up nearly as much a tribute to them as to him.

The authors' partnership helps too. Reynolds brings the credentials of a veteran CIA officer, Marine and career military historian. Sanders brings her skills as a journalist, plus something more personal: one of the airmen Ortiz helped rescue was a relative of hers. It's a well-documented book that occasionally lets Sanders' personal stake show through, and the authors don't lean on that connection any harder than they need to.

Ortiz defied the odds and found enormous success in nearly every chapter of his life — except one. In Hollywood, after the war, he mostly landed work only as an extra or bit player.

Ortiz's War is engaging and well-researched, and it reads fast for a book this carefully sourced. Peter Ortiz deserves to be better known, and Reynolds and Sanders have rescued an extraordinary, underdocumented life from the margins of history. Readers who follow the history of wartime intelligence and resistance operations will find plenty here. So will anyone who just wants a well-told true story.

One footnote for readers planning their fall reading list: a second full-length Ortiz biography, from a different publisher, is due out roughly six weeks after this one. It's called “The Phantom: The Untold Story of the American Marine the Nazis Could Not Kill,” by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. Two major publishing houses landing on the same overdue OSS Marine within weeks of each other is an interesting coincidence. Proof perhaps this this is a story worth telling twice. The Cipher Brief will review that second book later this fall. In the meantime, read this one.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

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### Modernizing the Aircraft Carrier—By Returning to 20th-Century Technology?

**Published:** August 25, 2026 | **Author:** Brad Christian | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/electromagnetic-catapult.md

“During its 11-month deployment which ended in May, and was the longest for an carrier since the Vietnam War, the USS Gerald R. Ford conducted more than 11,000 aircraft carrier launches using electromagnetic catapults, more than carriers with steam systems could achieve…But perhaps the biggest benefit of the electromagnetic catapults are their lower cost and lighter personnel requirements. With the Navy running out of operating funds, and retention likely to plummet in the aftermath of the war with Iran, the fleet needs to make the most of every dollar and sailor.”

Writing that opinion piece in The Washington Post last Wednesday was Bryan Clark, a former Navy officer who at one time served as Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations and Director of his Commander’s Action Group. Currently, Clark is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute.

I am using Clark’s article because it provides information that challenges a recent military step contained in an August 13, Presidential Memorandum which ordered “the Secretary of War, in consultation with the Secretary of the Navy, shall provide to the President… a plan on the required measures to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Weapons Elevators with steam and hydraulic systems for the construction of CVN-81, including timelines and resourcing requirements.”

Electromagnetic catapult systems accelerate aircraft more smoothly and gradually, thus putting less stress on airframes. They also recharge faster than steam catapults which need to pressurize gases and they eliminate the need for boilers and other plumbing equipment needed to create steam.

Trump, who never served in the military, has been obsessed for years with the way that steam propels fighter jets off the decks of carriers and where a carrier’s tower structure or “island” is located.

I will point out, according to former Defense Department officials the Navy designers moved the island from the middle of the carriers to the back of the vessel to make more space for moving jet fighter aircraft around on the flight deck, in order to increase the number of flights or “sorties” that the carrier could generate.

These Trump aircraft carrier views apparently first came to him less than two months after he took office based on a March 2, 2017, tour he had on the then-under-construction USS Gerald Ford being built at the Newport News shipyard in Virginia.

Two months later, in a May 8, 2017 wide-ranging, 100-minute interview with Time Magazine editors and reporters, Trump at one point apparently brought up his visit to the Gerald Ford at Newport News where he was shown the catapult system for launching aircraft from the deck.

According to TIME, the conversation went, “Sir, this is our digital catapult system…we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern . I said, ‘You don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, Ah, how is it working? Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.’”

The TIME transcript then has Trump saying, “It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said -- and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to buy -- Sir, we’re staying with digital. I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”

I should note, at the time Trump visited and for months thereafter, there were issues with the new electromagnetic catapults, but fixes were made, although not in Trump’s mind.

Before I continue with Trump, let’s turn back to Hudson’s Bryan Clark, a real Navy expert, who wrote, “The biggest benefit of the electromagnetic catapults are their lower cost and lighter personnel requirements.”

Clark also noted, “The Ford’s crew is about 500 sailors smaller than its predecessors, largely because it is an all-electric ship outside of the engine room. Because they needed steam for catapults, older carriers also used steam for a variety of other functions throughout the ship — such as cooking equipment and water purification…And the steam catapults have so many moving parts and failure modes that they require about 10 more sailors per catapult — there are four catapults on a modern carrier — than electromagnetic systems.”

A Navy February press release said preliminary reports from the Sortie Generation Rate test program for aircraft show that the flight deck design in conjunction with electromagnetic systems and arresting gear “have contributed to an increased sortie generation rate compared to that of a Nimitz-class carrier.”

However, Trump over the years has kept calling for a return to steam catapults and retelling the story of his 2017 visit to the Gerald Ford.

For example, at a November 2, 2023 campaign rally in Houston, Texas, Trump was talking about shipbuilding and veered off to tell about a ship that was “in trouble” because “it was $10 billion over budget, and I wanted to go and see this ship that was costing so much money.”

At that Houston rally, Trump went on, “And I landed with a helicopter on top of this massive, incredible ship being made in Newport News. And I said to the people…I want to meet the catapult people, the people that have done the catapulting.”

Trump continued, “I want to find out what the hell happened because the catapults weren't working. So for 50 years, we used steam more. And that beautiful scene, that steam goes off, and that plane gets thrown the hell off, the power, beautiful, and it's cheap.”

Trump said he asked a sailor “Which is better, steam or electric? ‘Steam, sir.’ I said why did they design electric? ‘Because it can keep going like this all day long, but it takes us 59 seconds to reload a plane. And when we reload the plane, the steam builds up, and it's all set, sir. It's perfect. It works so well. And we can fix it with a blowtorch if something happens. And if a wave hits it, it actually cools us down, sir. We love the waves hitting us. If a wave hits the electric , we're out of business, sir. We might -- we'll die with this thing.’"

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Last July 15, at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., Trump again was talking about shipbuilding and switched saying, “I went to the ship , because I came into office and the ship was way over budget, built in Newport News, unfortunately, was way over budget.”

Trump went on, “I said, I want to meet the ‘catapultier’ and a man came over, along with four of his assistants. And I said, what's better, electric catapult or steam? He's been there for 25 years. He said, ‘Steam is better, sir. We can fix it with a hammer and a blowtorch. When the electric goes bad, I have to send to MIT to get geniuses over here’…But I said, so you're saying we spend billions of dollars extra to build electric catapults instead of using steam.”

Bryan Clark concluded his Post article saying, “Steam power was cutting-edge technology in the 19th century. It is the wrong choice for a Pentagon that is leaning into artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. The Navy should stay the course with electromagnetic catapults to keep the carrier fleet strong and deliver more firepower. It could use the savings to help refill the fleet’s weapons magazines.”

Clark told CNN the cost of changing catapults on the USS Doris Miller, already under construction, “will probably be into the billions” and it could delay the carrier — which was expected to be in service around 2034 — “until the end of the next decade.”

Clark also Clark said, “Nobody builds them anymore. There’s no steam catapult manufacturers in the…U.S. anymore so they’d have to restart that production line, which would cost tens of millions of dollars to get going and that’ll be, it’ll take years to start that up again and build the first catapult.”

To add insult to injury, various recent news reports have said Navy senior staffers are reviewing the name USS Doris Miller for CV-81.

Named on January 20, 2020 -- during the Trump first administration -- by then-Acting Navy Secretary Thomas B. Modly during a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day ceremony, it honors African-American Mess Attendant Third Class Doris “Dorie” Miller, who received the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism during the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, where he manned an anti-aircraft machine gun without prior training and aided wounded crewmates.

In giving the new aircraft carrier Miller’s name, acting-Navy Secretary Modly said, “In selecting this name, we honor the contributions of all our enlisted ranks, past and present, men and women, of every race, religion and background.”

One name said to be under study to replace Miller’s is that of President Trump.

---

### Global Intelligence Report for Tuesday, August 25, 2026

**Published:** August 25, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-tuesday-august-25-2026.md



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### General David Petraeus: U.S. Must Prepare for a Revolution in Warfare Iran, Ukraine, China & Drones

**Published:** August 24, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/general-david-petraeus-u-s-must-prepare-for-a-revolution-in-warfare-iran-ukraine-china-drones.md



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### Global Intelligence Report for Monday, August 24, 2026

**Published:** August 24, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-monday-august-24-2026.md



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### Hyping Nuclear Threats Is Counterproductive

**Published:** August 24, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/hyping-nuclear-threats-is-counterproductive.md

Hyping threats of nuclear proliferation to justify war undermines legitimate counter-proliferation policies and paradoxically incentivizes proliferation. The Trump administration’s effort to justify the Iran war as a means of saving the world from a nuclear armed Iran rings as hollow as George W. Bush’s similar claims about Iraq a quarter century ago.

Both threats were real, until the United States and the international community reduced them. The 1990 Gulf War and the ensuing inspection regime ended Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions. A little over a decade later, the George W. Bush administration justified its war in Iraq with claims about Saddam’s supposed nuclear (and chemical and biological) weapons. Addressing questions about the veracity of those claims, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice argued at the time, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN, “…the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction” Inspectors scoured Iraq in search of those weapons and found none, but the war dragged on at huge cost in lives and money.

The nuclear threat from Iran was and remains real, and like Iraq’s was also contained. Like Iraq, Iran signed the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) but played cat and mouse games with its compliance for decades. Iran’s covert enrichment program received a boost in the 1980s when Tehran acquired centrifuges from Pakistan. Iran pursued a two-track strategy of building its civilian atomic energy program, which was open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a parallel covert program focused on nuclear weapons. For years Iran routinely denied access to IAEA inspectors who compiled extensive evidence of undeclared, weapon-related activities, which Iran denied. US and UN sanctions weakened Iran’s economy, but did not persuade Iran’s leaders to change course. The June 2025 US-Israel strikes severely damaged the critical facilities essential for Iran’s nuclear program.

At the very least, Iran’s enriched uranium and its centrifuges are buried under tons of rubble, unreachable and readily monitored. Iran’s path from buried canisters of 60% enriched gas to a usable weapon is difficult, time consuming, and depends on the very facilities and equipment that were reportedly destroyed. The threat of an Iranian bomb has been degraded, at least for now. The initial strikes, if as effective as claimed, have bought the international community time.

Buying time is a legitimate nonproliferation strategy. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015 relied on this strategy. Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to a number of key limitations. Enrichment was restricted to low enriched uranium (LEU, below 3%), there were caps on the number and types of centrifuges, limits on centrifuge production and LEU stockpiles, canceling a plutonium project, and unfettered access to international inspectors. The deal was to last for 15 years.

Critics argued that the deal ignored the full range of Iran’s bad behavior. It shelved the IAEA’s list of unresolved issues related to nuclear weapons-related activities and did not eliminate Iran’s latent technical capabilities to build a bomb. The knowledge never goes away. Moreover, the international community lifted sanctions and Iran was allowed access to $1.7 billion of its own money that was seized because of sanctions, plus $400 million from a longstanding dispute over military sales.

The JCPOA was imperfect. It did not address the regime’s support for terrorism, but it was not designed to. It was designed to restrain the most important aspects of Iran’s nuclear program, its ability to produce weapons-usable materials, without which there would be no Iranian bomb. Had the Iranian regime abandoned the JCPOA, the United States and other backers of the agreement (the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, Germany, the EU and the UN) were poised to reinstate sanctions and take other actions as necessary to bring Iran into compliance.

That never happened because the Trump administration repudiated the JCPOA in 2018. That reversal freed Iran to expel the international inspectors, ramp up its enrichment program, and reignite fears of a hidden nuclear danger. Bombing the facilities in 2026 achieved similar goals as the JCPOA, but at a much higher price in blood and treasure. The nuclear threat has been contained. Yet, the war continues and the Trump administration continues to cite the Iranian nuclear threat as its chief war aim.

We should assume that the Iranian regime remains committed to obtaining nuclear weapons. The JCPOA would have delayed the realization of this ambition by 15 years. The 2025-26 bombings also delayed realization, although it is unclear for how long. Hyping nuclear threats, however, is counterproductive, because it persuades others of a degree of nuclear danger that does not currently exist, and incentivizes others, like Saudi Arabia, that they too must pursue a weapon, if only to deter Iran.

The United States may have other reasons for continuing the war with Iran, but they should be clearly articulated along with the price that Americans will pay to achieve them.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### Dead Drop: August 23 - 29

**Published:** August 23, 2026 | **Author:** Suzanne Kelly | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dead-drop-august-23-29.md

A NOT-SO-SECRET REUNION -- The NSA is reportedly calling some of its former top hackers back to Fort Meade tomorrow — both a reunion and recruiting push. The Record reports the gathering will bring together alumni of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the highly secretive unit that penetrates foreign computer networks for U.S. intelligence operations. (Truth be told, we hear they are the best of the best hackers in the world). Deputy Director Tim Kosiba, himself a TAO veteran, is reportedly driving an effort to strengthen the unit and persuade former talent to return. In an ironic twist, some alumni have questioned the security of the outreach after hundreds of former operators gathered in a private Signal chat to reconnect ahead of the event.

AI ON OFFENSE, BUT WHO’S ON DEFENSE? The Justice Department and FBI announced Wednesday that they had seized the domains of two hacking platforms operated by a Chinese group that officials say provided cyber services to China’s Ministry of State Security and People’s Liberation Army. According to the Justice Department, the outfit known as QTFY’s QScan tool hunted for vulnerable computers and internet-connected devices, while QTRouter helped hackers hide where their attacks were coming from. Among the targets: NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Senate and several federal departments. The FBI seized the domains that the malware needed to communicate, effectively pulling the plug. Former Director of Cybersecurity for the National Security Agency Rob Joyce (who we’re told has some impressive skills of his own in cyber), told The Cipher Brief this week that he’s concerned about how much AI is turbocharging the hunt for system vulnerabilities and how defense using AI just hasn’t caught up yet. “There will be a dark period,” Joyce told The Cipher Brief.

RATCLIFFE'S RIDE TO MOSCOW WASN'T EXACTLY SUBTLE: CIA Director John Ratcliffe made his first known trip to Moscow this week, and next to the mystery of what was discussed – was the question of how he got there. Press accounts say he arrived aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, a 282,500-pound cargo hauler built for tanks and troops, not exactly the diplomatic equivalent of a black sedan. The Washington Post reports the aircraft flew from Joint Base Andrews to Riga, Latvia, then on to Moscow, where it sat for about eight hours. The plane was also stripped of its usual markings under a 2023 Air Force policy meant to keep high-priority flights (relatively) inconspicuous. But some reports say there was also a C-40B, landing beside it in Riga. Public tracking data never shows that plane continuing to Moscow, though The Aviationist notes that is a more comfortable type of aircraft used to move senior officials — suggesting Ratcliffe swapped planes in Riga rather than riding the cargo hauler the whole way. (No word on whether Ratcliffe might have transferred between planes via a catering truck - sorry, our naughty side couldn’t help but say it.) Another hint though - Washington also reportedly asked Ukraine to hold off on drone strikes against Moscow and St. Petersburg while Ratcliffe was in the country, according to the Kyiv Independent. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later told CBS News that Ratcliffe met with Russian intelligence officials, but not Vladimir Putin. Whatever the agenda, it just goes to show how hard it can be to fly low-profile anymore.

GERMANY'S SPY AGENCY LEVELS UP ITS RECRUITING GAME: Forget trench coats: Germany's foreign intelligence service wants gamers. The BND is heading to Gamescom, the world's largest video game expo, opening this week in Cologne, to hunt for "technically skilled secret agents," according to The Telegraph. The pitch: a stealth-and-hacking title the agency built in-house, "BND Legenden: Operation Blackbox," meant to lure players sharp enough to survive a five-stage vetting process testing real cybersecurity and hacking skills. BND spokesperson Julia Linner made the sales pitch plain: "We see significant overlap between gamers and the key specialists we seek: they understand technology, enjoy taking on different roles..." The playful pitch masks a serious mission: the BND wants more cyber muscle to counter Russian hackers accused of probing German critical infrastructure. As previously mentioned in the Dead Drop, Germany's intelligence services recently won cabinet approval for a "security revolution" expanding their hacking and disruption powers. Fair warning to applicants: the BND's version of the game does not come with a pause button.

CALL AN EXPERT -- it seems like everyone needs good advice these days when it comes to understanding and navigating the complex global environment and rumor has it that former Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, Gen. Paul Nakasone (Ret.) (who also served as NSA Director) is launching his own consulting firm along with former director of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, Brett Goldstein. Aptly named The Nakasone Group, the boutique firm will focus on cyber defense, cyber-enabled fraud and understanding the risks associated with today’s fast-paced world. For a fantastic overview of what that world looks like, check out The Cipher Brief’s State Secrets Podcast with Gen. Nakasone when host Suzanne Kelly asked if the general thinks the U.S. is ready for AI-Enabled Warfare. His answer may surprise you. You can find the State Secrets Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts or watch the conversation on The Cipher Brief’s YouTube Channel.

VANDENBERG NOT QUITE READY FOR THE MOMENT: Last week, base security at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California invited members of the press to attend a golden shovel groundbreaking for a new 160,000 square foot missile training facility. The down side of the gala came when base security officers mistook the invited media convoy for a group of gate runners and pulling weapons them and their two military escorts. It’s a little hard to understand the confusion because Stars and Stripes reported that the military escorts were handcuffed and placed in government vehicles, while reporters sat curbside contemplating the finer points of the base’s public relations strategy. Everyone was eventually released without charges, but the ceremony went on without them. A spokesperson described the episode as a coordination gap that resulted in a media convoy proceeding before the credentialing process was fully completed. The spokesperson (presumably not the one in handcuffs) added that the base takes installation security and its responsibility to media guests very seriously. Sentinel, the weapon system the visitors were there to celebrate, is itself famously behind schedule and over budget, so maybe base security was just staying on theme: at Vandenberg this week, nobody was quite ready for the moment.

WHAT A FEW MONTHS LOOKS LIKE IN PENTAGON YEARS - Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is expected to step down by the end of the year, The Hill reports, citing months of tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that appears to have boiled over into a slow motion purge of nearly everyone in Driscoll's orbit. Driscoll, a former Army Ranger and Iraq War veteran who took office in February 2025 and counts Vice President JD Vance as a longtime friend, was reportedly viewed by Hegseth as a rival for his own job, and administration officials tell reporters that Hegseth has been going after people perceived as close to Driscoll ever since. Now, this is a gossip column, so we can’t prove it but still, Exhibit A: the April firing of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, a Driscoll ally, reportedly after George and Driscoll refused to strip two Black officers and two female officers from a one star general promotion list. Worth remembering: back in April, Driscoll publicly insisted he wasn’t going anywhere despite the reported friction, but four months is an awfully long time in Pentagon years.

DEAD DROP IN DEUTSCHLAND: German authorities reportedly found two handguns and ammunition buried in a professionally concealed cache in a forest outside Berlin last October. Seems interesting enough. But Germany’s domestic intelligence service now believes the weapons may have been intended for Russian agents who were possibly awaiting orders from Moscow. After finding the guns, investigators did something straight out of a spy thriller. They rendered the weapons dysfunctional and fitted them with GPS trackers but left them in their hiding place and watched the site, hoping some nefarious agent would collect them. The case surfaced publicly on Friday when Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt confirmed that federal prosecutors are investigating a suspect who is now being held in Romania. Officials say the man is suspected of espionage and preparing a serious crime threatening national security. Dobrindt called him a “low-level agent” and said the case showed Germany was operating under a “high threat level.” German officials have not publicly identified a target or confirmed that Russia ordered the operation. But German media report that the domestic intelligence service believes the cache was connected to Russian intelligence and possible assassination operations. Moscow denies such allegations.

EUROPE’S GREAT MUSEUM GIVEAWAY: Two men reportedly bought tickets to Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts Thursday, smashed a display case in broad daylight and walked off with a platinum necklace featuring more than 600 diamonds—apparently proving that even multimillion-dollar heists now come with general admission. The $4 million piece, once worn by Egyptian Queen Nazli, joins a growing haul of treasures recently lifted from museums in Paris, Parma, Sicily and Spain, raising uncomfortable questions about Europe’s ability to protect its cultural crown jewels. Europol says museum thefts are becoming more aggressive and may involve new criminal networks. The Dead Drop wonders whether European security officials should spend less time reviewing their carefully prepared protocols—and more time watching Ocean’s Eleven and The Italian Job. The thieves certainly appear to have.

Got news to share? Drop us a note: Editor@thecipherbrief.com

Read more expert-driven national security insights exclusively in www.thecipherbrief.com.

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### It’s Time to Reengage North Korea

**Published:** August 21, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/its-time-to-reengage-north-korea.md

The U.S. and South Korea have their annual joint military drills (Ulchi Freedom Shield) from August 17-27, focusing on countering the threat from North Korea of drones and cyber-attacks. President Trump said on Sunday that he had ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea, according to the New York Times.

North Korea said these military exercises “are more serious, provocative and dangerous than last year.”

Although North Korea routinely criticizes these joint military exercises, this year North Korea went on to say that the U.S. is pursuing a new nuclear strategy that lowers the threshold of using nuclear weapons that pushes global security “to the brink of a nuclear war.”

North Korea’s usual response to these annual joint military exercises is the launching of short-range ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan. This year there was no surprise when North Korea launched two ballistic missiles, saying the U.S. – South Korea drills were a “rehearsal for an aggressive war.” What was different was North Korea’s statement that the U.S. and South Korea and Japan formed a “nuclear alliance” that North Korea would respond to by building a new and higher level of nuclear deterrence.

This comes at a time when North Korea is providing Russia with combat troops, artillery shells and ballistic missiles for their war with Ukraine, while enhancing their relationship with China. The money North Korea receives from Russia is in the billions, with likely Russian assistance to North Korea’s nuclear, missile, and satellite programs.

Although North Korea has refrained from a seventh nuclear test – probably at the urging of China – they are building more nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver nuclear and conventional warheads. Recently, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, displayed to the world a new uranium enrichment facility with cascades of apparent new centrifuges to enrich uranium. This was in addition to the new uranium enrichment facility at North Korea’s nuclear complex in Yongbyon.

It was the issue of North Korea’s non-declared uranium enrichment sites that led to the failure of the 2019 Hanoi Summit. When Kim Jong Un offered to halt activities at Yongbyon, in return for the lifting of sanctions imposed on and after 2016, and President Trump responded with the request that North Korea declare “all” nuclear sites. Mr. Kim refused and that ended the Hanoi Summit.

Prior to and after the Hanoi Summit, North Korea has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in any conflict with South Korea. This is reminiscent of Russia’s President Vadimir Putin threat to use nuclear weapons in its invasion of and war with Ukraine. A war that North Korea joined, as an ally of Russia, with a recent Mutual Defense Treaty.

Hopefully, Ukraine will continue to receive the military support they need from the U.S. and NATO to protect its people and country from a revanchist Russian Federation that’s receiving significant military support from North Korea.

Messrs. Kim’s and Putin’s refrain of using nuclear weapons, with North Korea’s emphasis on building even more nuclear weapons, is concerning. Any use of nuclear weapons would be tragic for the world.

South Korea’s President, Lee Jae Myung, continues to reach out to North Korea, for talks that would lead to peaceful coexistence between the two Koreas. To date, North Korea’s response has been disappointing. But President Lee persists, knowing that an emboldened North Korea, now aligned with Russia, could incite conflict on the Korean Peninsula. Conflict that could cause instability on the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia.

Having negotiated with North Korea for over ten years, it is apparent to me that North Korea wants a normal relationship with the U.S. A relationship that would give North Korea international legitimacy and access to financial institutions.

Now would be the time for President Trump to meet with Kim Jong Un. Such a meeting would deescalate North Korea’s tension with South Korea and the U.S. It would also give the U.S. the opportunity to move in a different direction with North Korea, with the goal of getting North Korea to halt its nuclear and missile programs, in return for the easing and lifting of sanctions and a dialogue to normalize bilateral relations.

North Korea is a defacto nuclear weapons state and recognizing them as such should not be too difficult. Getting North Korea to implement a moratorium on its nuclear and weapons programs would be progress. Sanctions relief and a path to a normal relationship with the U.S. could convince Kim Jong un that a mortarium would be in North Korea’s interest, while aligning with a revanchist and fickle Vladimir Putin is not in North Korea’s interest.

Our goal should continue to be the complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, realizing that this could take years to achieve. Getting North Korea to halt its nuclear and missile programs and refraining from fomenting conflict with South Korea are immediate goals that are achievable, assuming a willingness to be flexible on sanctions relief and a dialogue on normalizing relations.

It is in the interest of world peace that the U.S. reengage with North Korea.

The author is a former Associate Director of National Intelligence. All statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### China’s Research Espionage Threat Is Hiding in Plain Sight

**Published:** August 21, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/chinas-research-espionage-threat-is-hiding-in-plain-sight.md

Western universities and laboratories are on the frontlines of a battle over talent and technology. This assertion may seem like scaremongering, but when cold hard facts are considered, it is unfortunately true. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is undertaking an unprecedented assault to obtain scientific and technical research from the west. The broad CCP assault requires an equally broad response that must now include vetting for insider threats at universities and laboratories to bolster research security.

Spies Among Friends

In the present context, insider threats can be most usefully understood as existing on a spectrum, from fully paid-up agents (a spy in popular parlance) to research collaboration that could benefit a hostile foreign power.

There is a long history of hostile states exploiting academic freedoms at western universities. A hundred years ago, because the Soviet government had few diplomatic relations with foreign governments, it relied on intelligence officers without diplomatic cover, known as illegals. One of the earliest known illegals entered MIT as a student in 1938, Semyon Markovich Semyonov (codename TVEN). He was tasked with collecting scientific and technical research. It was, however, in the other Cambridge, in England, where Soviet intelligence had its greatest success. The Cambridge Five – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald McClain, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross – were all recruited at or soon after leaving Cambridge University in the 1930s. The Cambridge Spies were each motived by communist ideology, shaped by their intellectual discussions at Cambridge. During World War II, they became hugely damaging Soviet agents inside the British government. Some of the most important intelligence they gave to Moscow was the activities of codebreakers at Britian’s Bletchley Park.

The greatest Soviet insider threats occurred at an American top secret wartime laboratory to build the world’s first atomic bomb. The MANHATTAN Project was fully penetrated by Soviet agents. The Soviet agent, Klaus Fuchs, a brilliant physicist working at Los Alamos National Lab, provided Moscow blueprints and calculations for the atomic bomb. He was motivated by his communist ideology and the belief that nuclear weapons should not be held by one power alone. Fuchs later said that he divided his mind into two compartments: one for his friends and colleagues, the other for his communist beliefs, with the latter always superseding the former. It was, Fuchs said, a kind of controlled schizophrenia which allowed him to betray his friends and colleagues. Soviet espionage at the MANHATTAN Project accelerated Soviet development of Moscow’s own atomic bomb. Accelerating research and development is the essence of what espionage can achieve. The intelligence provided by Fuchs and other agents at Los Alamos meant that when the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, in 1949, it was an exact replica of the weapon the US dropped on Nagasaki four years earlier.

After the end of the Cold War, in the 1990s, Chinese espionage replaced Soviet intelligence at Los Alamos. At the end of that decade, Chinese intelligence was discovered to have obtained nuclear secrets from the New Mexico laboratory. 9/11 interrupted and distracted the US response to Chinese intelligence at Los Alamos.

Vetting

The penetration of the Cambridge Spies and agents like Klaus Fuchs, represented one of the greatest failures of western security in modern time. They were able to inflict their damage thanks to inadequate vetting by the British government. At the time, British vetting relied on a cross check on MI5 records. There were no proactive investigations into applicants’ backgrounds. The obvious flaw in the system was that if a candidate distanced himself or herself from communist associations there would be no traces in MI5 records. The Soviet recruiters of the Cambridge Five skillfully got them to do exactly that: breakaway from all communist groups. Thus, the Cambridge Five were able to slip through the British security net. Only later did MI5 obtain records of the Cambridge University socialist club, which contained names of the Cambridge Five and which could have provided important clues to their true motivation.

After the identification of the Cambridge Spies, beginning in 1951, the British government belatedly introduced positive vetting – in which there were intrusive investigations into a candidate’s background. Today the process is known as Developed Vetting. As the recent scandal of Lord Mandelson’s appointment to British Ambassador in Washington shows, the process of Developed Vetting is purely advisory. The decision to employ an applicant is up to the employing body itself.

In the CCP Crosshairs

The CCP has a strategy to exploit western research and development. The CCP has instigated a number of talent programs, by which Chinese researchers are sent to western institutions, but are then required to return to China, bringing the fruits of their research with them. A variant of CCP talent programs is to exploit Chinese diaspora scientists at western institutions, often by blackmailing them through family members and China itself. Such talent programs are part of the CCP’s national rejuvenation program by which it seeks to replace the United States as the world’s leading economic and military power. The CCP demands that any research and development that cannot be delivered from homegrown talent must be obtained from overseas. As well as talent programs, the CCP also exploits research collaboration with western universities and laboratories. There is in principle nothing wrong with this, as long as such western institutions appreciate that the CCP will try to steal any intellectual property produced by such collaborations. The problem arises when western scientists hide their connections to Chinese entities, as was the case with former Harvard professor of chemistry, Charles Lieber.

Frequently Chinese researchers are not forthcoming about their continued affiliation with the Chinese military. For example, open-source data obtained and analyzed by a private sector strategic intelligence firm, Strider Technologies, shows that since 2020 over 8,000 STEM publications have involved collaboration between Chinese military entities and more than 100 UK institutions. The Chinese – UK research collaboration includes dual use technology – those with civilian and military application – such as hypersonics and antijamming communications.

Russia is also pursuing research collaborations with western institutions, with the aim of obtaining dual use technologies .

A new approach

There will always be a need for traditional vetting for sensitive positions in western governments involving national security. It would, however, be mistaken to think that such vetting is comprehensive.

In the past, vetting required full state-backed resources. Today, that is no longer the case. Private sector companies are now able to use AI driven open-source data to reveal insider threats which, in some cases, western governments have missed. In 2022, for example it was revealed that a group of Chinese scientists working at none other than Los Alamos returned to China bringing with them research into defense technologies like hypersonics. The perversity of this situation cannot be overstated: US national defense research was benefiting the principal US adversary.

Bold action is needed. Western governments would be well advised to establish oversight bodies to identify vulnerabilities in research with military or dual use application. All such research positions can and should be vetted by open-source private sector providers. A subset of academics and civil libertarians will inevitably denounce this as unduly invasive. The fact that such vetting would be based on open-source data should, however, ameliorate those concerns. Furthermore, incase there are concerns about racial profiling, the vetting would pertain to the research positions not researchers themselves.

Ultimately the issue at stake is about western economic security – the intellectual property that will provide western economic prosperity. Think of western AI frontier laboratories. The question is whether the west is prepared to allow the secrets of this century’s technologies to be transferred to the west’s principal strategic adversaries, China and Russia.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### Beyond Military Interoperability: The Coalition Challenge of Limited War

**Published:** August 21, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/beyond-military-interoperability-the-coalition-challenge-of-limited-war.md

In our last two articles for The Cipher Brief, Sami Omari and I explained why modern limited wars are so challenging for democracies.

We argued that military superiority is necessary but not sufficient for strategic victory: Afghanistan and Iraq showed that battlefield success does not guarantee lasting political outcomes, and Iran may yet prove the same point.

We also examined why democracies struggle to translate tactical success into strategic achievement: fragmented institutions, electoral cycles, public opinion and media scrutiny complicate the political resolve required for prolonged wars of choice.

The challenge becomes greater when democracies fight as coalitions.

Alliances combine military power, share costs and draw on capabilities few states could sustain independently.

But military integration does not produce political unity.

Each member remains accountable to its own electorate, parliament and national interests. A coalition may therefore be highly integrated on the battlefield while remaining politically and strategically decentralised.

In prolonged limited wars, military interoperability is not enough if allies cannot sustain the political will, industrial capacity and common strategic purpose required to endure.

II. Why Democracies Fight in Coalitions

The nuclear age made direct great-power war prohibitively dangerous, shifting competition towards limited wars, insurgencies and proxy conflicts.

Western militaries increasingly moved towards smaller professional forces equipped with more advanced weapons, shaped by technological progress and new strategic realities.

After 1991, the Gulf War and subsequent operations against weaker adversaries appeared to vindicate the effectiveness of Western expeditionary forces.

But smaller professional militaries and increasingly expensive weapons also made allies progressively dependent upon one another. Coalitions allowed democracies to aggregate military power, intelligence, logistics and specialised capabilities without each maintaining the forces and industrial capacity required for large-scale national mobilisation.

For thirty years, that system seemed to work.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed these vulnerabilities over several years; the US-Israeli war with Iran is now testing many of the same assumptions.

Both demonstrate that limited wars can become contests of manpower, industrial capacity and political will.

Of these pressures, political endurance is perhaps the most difficult for democracies to sustain.

III. The Political Endurance Problem

For democracies, fighting a long, limited war depends as much on political legitimacy at home as on military capability.

In wars of choice, where national survival is not at stake, governments must continually justify why the costs of war remain necessary.

Initial public support may create space for intervention, but it erodes as casualties rise, costs accumulate, and the prospect of a clear strategic outcome grows uncertain.

Casualties alone do not determine support.

Democratic societies have accepted heavy losses when citizens believed a war was legitimate, necessary and winnable.

The deeper problem emerges when the link between sacrifice and strategic purpose becomes unclear. As confidence in success fades, losses that once seemed tolerable turn politically damaging. Elections, parliamentary opposition, media scrutiny and changes of government then allow declining public confidence to reshape national strategy. Afghanistan illustrated this over two decades.

Western military superiority was never in doubt, but political will steadily weakened. The longer the war continued without a convincing political end state, the harder it became for democratic leaders to explain what more time, money and lives would achieve.

Authoritarian states face similar pressures but, without competitive elections and independent media, can better insulate strategic decisions from public opinion.

Against democratic opponents, this creates a critical asymmetry: a weaker adversary may not need to win militarily, only survive long enough for democratic political will to erode.

IV. The Industrial Endurance Problem

Political endurance is only one side of the problem. The other is material.

Since the Cold War, Western militaries have increasingly relied on technology instead of mass.

Smaller professional forces employ sophisticated aircraft, ships, missiles and networked systems aimed at achieving decisive results while minimising casualties. But each generation of weapons is more expensive and complex, production runs shrink, and replacing battlefield losses becomes harder as war drags on.

The United States can absorb these pressures better than smaller allies because of its defence budget, technological base and industrial scale.

Even so, American forces became smaller, while defence-industry consolidation reduced the number of manufacturers capable of producing specialised weapons. For smaller allies, limited budgets forced difficult choices between personnel, platforms and munitions, while dependence on American weapons, software, supply chains and sustainment deepened.

Quick wars against weaker opponents long obscured these problems.

Ukraine has brought them sharply to the surface, while the Iran conflict is testing them anew. Advanced weapons can be consumed faster than peacetime factories replace them, while cheap drones and missiles allow weaker states to impose continuing costs on advanced rivals.

This creates an uncomfortable paradox.

Military interoperability strengthens coalitions on the battlefield but also creates industrial dependencies that are difficult to escape. In long, limited wars, technological superiority matters only as long as the coalition can afford, produce and replace what it consumes.

V. A Coalition of Decentralised Systems

Coalitions do not solve the political endurance problem; if anything, they make it worse.

Integrating militaries does not erase national sovereignty. Allied forces can share command structures, intelligence and interoperable systems, but each government still answers to its own voters, parliament and interests.

Afghanistan made that painfully obvious. NATO operated under one mission on paper, but contributing states imposed their own caveats and restrictions on where and how their troops could operate.

Those caveats were not bureaucratic quirks; they reflected different domestic political pressures and appetites for risk. They made burden-sharing and coalition cohesion harder than the unified-command narrative suggested.

Of the contemporary great powers, the US above all can supply the backbone of an international military coalition: intelligence, logistics and advanced capabilities.

What it cannot do is fuse the sovereign political systems behind every other contributor.

Middle and smaller powers like Australia and Canada still matter because they bring niche capabilities, diplomatic weight and political legitimacy while operating inside their own domestic constraints.

Coalitions may fight as one integrated military network, but the statecraft holding that network together stays stubbornly decentralised.

VI. From Military Interoperability to Strategic Interoperability

This gap between integrated military networks and decentralised statecraft is the central weakness of contemporary coalition warfare.

Modern limited wars therefore require more than military interoperability. They require strategic interoperability.

Sovereign allies must be able to coordinate military, political, economic and industrial power to pursue and sustain a common strategic objective.

This does not mean supranational government or surrendered sovereignty, but unity of strategic effect even when national policies differ.

In practice, this could involve standing allied mechanisms that integrate political planning, defence production, economic measures, strategic communications and military operations around an agreed political end state before a crisis becomes a prolonged war.

Conclusion

Across these three articles, we have argued that military superiority alone cannot guarantee strategic victory; that democratic institutions often struggle to turn battlefield success into sustainable political outcomes; and that these difficulties multiply when democracies fight as coalitions.

The endurance of democratic alliances will depend on more than their ability to fight together.

Sovereign governments must sustain public support, share political and military burdens, and remain committed to common strategic purpose when conflicts become longer and more costly than expected.

Democratic accountability need not become a strategic weakness, but preserving sovereignty while sustaining collective action will require greater political cohesion.

The ultimate obstacle is not technology or concepts, but political will: overcoming domestic divisions and institutional rivalries to sustain common purpose.

As the era of AI unfolds, technology will keep changing warfare, but it cannot repair the organisational weaknesses of those who use it.

Strategic interoperability ultimately depends on whether democracies can find the will to build it.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Friday, August 21, 2026

**Published:** August 21, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-friday-august-21-2026.md



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### Global Intelligence Report for Thursday, August 20, 2026

**Published:** August 20, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-thursday-august-20-2026.md



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### Shanghai Spies: Aliases, Lies and Extraterritoriality

**Published:** August 20, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/shanghai-spies-aliases-lies-and-extraterritoriality.md

BOOK REVIEW: THE SHANGHAI AGENTS: THE SOVIET PLOT TO START A REVOLUTION IN INTERWAR CHINA

By Heather Salter/ Cambridge University Press

Reviewed by: Martin Petersen

The Reviewer — Martin Petersen is a CIA veteran, Asia expert, and a Cipher Brief Expert. He is the author of City of Lost Souls, A Jack Ford Shanghai Mystery, which was named Earnshaw Books Best Seller of 2024. A second Jack Ford Shanghai Mystery, City on the Edge, will be published late this year.

REVIEW: The Noulens Case was a global cause célèbre in 1930s and is masterfully documents in “The Shanghai Agents” by Heather Salter. Noulens was an alias, one of many and for the sake of simplicity I have chosen to refer to the principals by that name in this review. Like the Rosenbergs, the Noulens attracted world attention and leftists agitated for the release of this husband and wife team accused of being communists and running a spy ring.

The true identity of the Noulens was not revealed until 1991. At the time of their arrest, they claimed Belgian citizenship and said they were Marie Motte and Fernand Vanderheruyssen. Before it was all over, they said their name was Noulens and when that story collapsed, they claimed to be Paul and Gertrud Ruegg, supposed German nationals. They were in fact Tatyana Moiseenko and Yakob Rudnik, Russians and the key Comintern agents in Shanghai. (The Comintern, short for Communist International, or the Third International, was founded by Lenin to work for the overthrow of capitalist governments around the world.)

Earlier books and articles leave the impression that they were fairly minor

players. But Salter’s research shows that as the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau leads in China, they had a central and critical role in Moscow’s efforts to advance communism across all of Asia. They were the critical communications and money channel between the fledgling Chinese Communist Party and Moscow and between Moscow and communists in Malaya, India, and French Indochina. Salter describes in some detail how the Noulens operated and the tradecraft they employed.

Their arrest was a huge blow for Moscow, which is why the Comintern launched a huge propaganda campaign that claimed the Noulens were innocent of the Communist charge and were victims of the repressive Chinese Nationalist Government. A major part of this effort was the creation of Committees to save the Noulens and drafting petitions calling for their release. Albert Einstein, Henri Barbusse, and Otto Dix were among the Noulens’ supporters. Salter’s research reveals that Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) played a much larger role than previously known in aiding this public relations onslaught. She was not duped. She was well aware of their guilt.

Extraterritoriality—a provision of Western treaties with China dating to the end of the Opium War that said Westerns could only be tried in their own national courts using their national law—was also a factor in the many aliases used by Noulens. Russia renounced its extraterritoriality after the Communist revolution. So Russian citizens then would be tried in Chinese courts and under Chinese laws. The crimes the Noulens were charged with—and guilty of—carried the death penalty. Thus, the repeated efforts to establish identities protected by extraterritoriality first as Belgians and then as German nationals.

China was trying to negotiate an end to extraterritoriality at this time and knew for that to have a chance, the Chinese legal system had to be seen in the West as fair, honest, and modern. The Noulens, however, were badly treated while awaiting trial, which frightened ex-pats in China, and the death penalty hung over their heads. They were found guilty in the end but the death sentence was commuted to life in prison. Their trial antics—hunger strikes, refusal to answer questions or cooperate in any way, and continually disrupting the proceedings—rivals the behavior of the Chicago Seven circus in 1969.

A fascinating collection of historical figures march though and around this story: Madame Sun Yat-sen, Zhou Enlai, Richard Sorge, Agnes Smedley, Valentine Vivian, and Ho Chi Minh. Added to these are the Comintern officials in Moscow and their agents in Germany. Ironic perhaps, but their arrest, the long maneuvering before trial, and imprisonment almost certainly saved the Noulens’ lives. They were in a Chinese prison when the Great Terror started in Russia and officials with ties to the Comintern were prime targets.

The Noulens were released under a general amnesty after the Japanese attack on China in 1937. They made their way home to Russia in September 1939 where they were reunited with a son they had not seen in 13 years. Both died in 1964.

The case has been touched on—generally in passing—in other works, most notably Frederic Wakeman’s Policing Shanghai 1927-1937, and a 1994 article in The China Quarterly by Frederick Litten dealt with the case in more detail. Drawing on press accounts from the period, trial transcripts, and Russian archives, Salter has written what has to be the definitive account of this episode. She has also written a book that readers who are interested in modern Chinese history, Russian machinations in China, intelligence tradecraft, the Comintern, or a good spy stories will enjoy.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

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### Global Intelligence Report for Wednesday, August 19, 2026

**Published:** August 19, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-wednesday-august-19-2026.md



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### The Return of the Essential Art: Electronic Warfare and the Lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War

**Published:** August 18, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-return-of-the-essential-art-electronic-warfare-and-the-lessons-of-the-russia-ukraine-war.md

A Post-Cold War Assumption That No Longer Holds

For three decades, the Alliance operated under a dangerous assumption: that the electromagnetic spectrum was a permissive sanctuary. Lulled into complacency by counter-terrorism campaigns that allowed precision strikes and networked command to go largely unchallenged, we forgot how to fight in the dark. The Russia-Ukraine war has violently corrected that amnesia. Today, electronic warfare is not an enabling function; it is the apex of modern combat power. If a force cannot survive in the spectrum, its sensors are blind, its networks collapse, and its kill chains are severed.

The Alliance stands at a critical inflection point. The time for incremental modernization has passed; this short piece is a call to arms to reclaim our operational advantage. The war in Ukraine has proven that the half-life of a technological advantage is measured in days, not decades. If we do not aggressively institutionalize agility across our warfighting commands, we risk entering the next conflict blind, deaf, and disconnected.

Russia’s Spectrum Offensive at Scale

Russia entered the war with a deep inventory of EW systems, rooted in Soviet-era investment and modernized over the past decade. From strategic GPS denial across Eastern Europe to tactical jamming of drones, radios, and artillery sensors, Russian forces use EW to degrade decision-making, disrupt fires, and blind ISR, continuously, at scale, across every echelon.

This is not a supplementary effort; it is a structural pillar of Russian combat operations. According to analyses by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Russia achieved a staggering density of EW coverage, deploying a major electronic warfare system approximately every 10 kilometers along the front line during peak operations. This continuous, layered spectrum defense can be understood across two distinct operational tiers:

1. Strategic and Operational Denial

At the macro level, Russia has deployed high-powered, truck-mounted systems designed to blind NATO and Ukrainian airborne intelligence and disrupt satellite architectures.

The Krasukha-4: Designed to protect high-value assets, this system emits powerful jamming signals targeting airborne early warning and control aircraft (AWACS), radar reconnaissance drones, and low-Earth orbit spy satellites. By targeting X-band and Ku-band radars, it degrades long-range aerial surveillance, forcing ISR platforms to operate at suboptimal standoff distances.

Murmansk-BN: Operating at the strategic level, this system targets high-frequency (HF) military communications up to thousands of kilometers away, aiming to disrupt the operational coordination of enemy forces on a theater-wide scale.

2. Tactical Interdiction and the Defeat of Precision Munitions

At the tactical edge, Russian EW is integrated down to the battalion level to create local bubbles of spectrum denial. This has profoundly affected the effectiveness of Western-supplied precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

Neutralizing GPS-Guided Weapons: Systems like the R-330Zh Zhitel and Pole-21 have been explicitly used to create GPS-denied environments. Because GPS signals travelling from space are relatively weak by the time they reach Earth, localized jammers easily overpower them. RUSI has noted that this jamming significantly degraded the accuracy of key weapons, including Excalibur 155mm guided artillery shells, Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), and GMLRS rockets fired by HIMARS. Without GPS, these munitions must rely on inertial navigation, which drastically reduces their hit probability.

Drone Suppression and ISR Severance: In the early months of the war, Ukrainian Bayraktar TB2s operated with near impunity. As Russian forces entrenched, their EW architecture caught up. By blasting the 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequencies used by commercial and military drones, systems like the Borisoglebsk-2 sever the command links and video feeds between drones and their operators. This strips frontline units of their "eyes," returning artillery duels to grid-square estimations rather than precision strikes.

Ukraine’s Rapid Adaptation Under Fire

Ukraine’s response has been just as instructive. Forced to adapt under fire, its forces built a distributed EW ecosystem spanning national infrastructure to handheld infantry jammers, fielding and replacing thousands of systems in months, not years. EW operators are now embedded in maneuver, air defense, and fires units. The war has become a laboratory of spectrum conflict with drones jammed out of the sky, counter-battery radars blinded, munitions diverted, networks disrupted. EW is both shield and sword: protecting friendly systems while blinding the adversary.

While Russia relies heavily on legacy, mass-manufactured, centralized platforms, Ukraine’s survival has depended on democratizing the electromagnetic fight. By abandoning rigid peacetime acquisition processes, Ukraine has successfully pioneered a "DevOps" warfighting philosophy, prioritizing the rapid, iterative deployment of real-world software capabilities and commercial hardware modifications.

Ukraine has mastered the art of using the electromagnetic spectrum not just for defense, but to actively hunt Russian forces. By integrating EW operators directly into fires and maneuver units, the spectrum has become the primary hunting ground for target acquisition.

EW as a Mass Capability

The scale is the lesson. Both sides are fielding equipment and training operators at a pace NATO hasn’t matched since the Cold War. EW is no longer a boutique, specialized function; it’s a mass capability woven into daily battle rhythm and treated as a core determinant of survivability and lethality. In Ukraine, EW isn’t an adjunct to maneuver or fires. It’s inseparable from them.

For NATO and allied forces, Ukraine's experience demonstrates that surviving a high-intensity conflict requires transitioning from static, hardware-centric platforms to data-centric environments where software updates can be continuously deployed to the tactical edge under fire.

NATO’s Vulnerability Without EW Dominance

The implications for NATO are stark. Precision fires need assured spectrum access. Air defense needs resilient sensors and networks. ISR needs unjammed collection. Command and control needs protected communications. Without robust EW, all of it evaporates. This war shows EW is both the first layer of protection and the first layer of lethality, the foundation everything else rests on.

Rebuilding EW as a Core Competency

Reconstituting EW will take more than new hardware, it demands a cultural shift. Commanders must think in terms of spectrum maneuver, fires, and protection as naturally as kinetic operations. Exercises need realistic EW conditions, not sanitized ranges. Training pipelines must expand, and offensive and defensive EW forces must be rebuilt at every echelon, from squad to strategic level. Doctrine must treat EW as a decisive domain, not a supporting function.

The Essential Art Returns

The essential art of warfare in the twenty-first century has been violently reintroduced, and the electromagnetic spectrum is no longer an invisible enabler; it is the primary maneuver space where the first shots are fired, and the deepest vulnerabilities are exposed. NATO must reclaim this domain fully, urgently, and at scale.

For too long, the Alliance rested on the laurels of post-Cold War permissive environments, operating under the dangerous assumption that our networks would always connect, our drones would always fly, and our precision munitions would always find their mark. The battlefields of Ukraine have permanently shattered that assumption. We can no longer afford the luxury of rigid, decade-long peacetime acquisition cycles. Surviving the modern fight requires a fundamental paradigm shift: embracing a "DevOps" warfighting philosophy that prioritizes rapid, iterative deployment of software-defined capabilities directly to the tactical edge.

Lethality today is inextricably linked to digital survival. If we cannot protect our data lineage, secure our networks, and continuously update our countermeasures under fire, we will cede the kill chain to our adversaries. The next fight will be decided not just by who holds the physical terrain, but by who dominates the spectrum.

NATO must institutionalize this reality across every echelon. Electronic warfare is not an adjunct to maneuver; it is the very foundation of our combat credibility. We must transition our defense structures to data-centric environments, integrate our joint capabilities, and ensure that when the next conflict erupts, the Alliance dictates the spectrum and the adversary is left blind, disrupted, and defeated.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

---

### Where Did Venezuela’s Oil Billions Go?

**Published:** August 18, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/where-did-venezuelas-oil-billions-go.md

“We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela, one of the most fertile places for oil in the world. And as you know, it was a forty-eight minute war, lasted forty-eight minutes. And we paid for the war with what we’ve taken out many, many, many times. Where have you heard that before? You haven’t heard that before. It’s the old fashioned way. Right? It’s the old fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils. Right?”

That was President Trump, speaking impromptu on August 5, during a campaign-style speech on the U.S. economy at the Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I use that quote as a way to get into the serious question of what has happened to the now estimated $13 billion worth of Venezuelan oil that’s been sold since January 9, when President Trump announced his Executive Order (EO), Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People.

The EO set up so-called "Foreign Government Deposit Funds" meaning funds from the sale of Venezuelan oil or other natural resources from that country held by the U.S. Government in designated U.S. Treasury Department or other accounts in a “custodial and government capacity.”

Every six months, according to Trump’s January 9, EO, “The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, is hereby authorized to submit recurring and final reports to the Congress” about those funds.

Apparently, no such report has so far been sent to Congress, although it would seem at least one should have gone to Capitol Hill last month.

Venezuelan oil money has been generated and serious amounts have been received by the U.S., as Trump himself has claimed many times.

For example, back during his January 9 press conference with oil company leaders at the White House, Trump announced that Venezuela had already given the U.S. 30 million barrels of what had been previously-sanctioned oil that it had on hand.

“That's about $4 billion worth,” Trump announced back in January, adding, “And it's on our way to the United States right now. And we want to thank Venezuela for that. And we're working very well with them, obviously, or they wouldn't have been so generous.”

There has been no accounting that I know of for that first gift of $4 billion worth of Venezuelan oil.

On January 28, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that funds from Venezuelan oil sales in the “short term” would go to a bank account in Qatar, but he added, “Ultimately, it will be a U.S. Treasury blocked account in the United States.”

Rubio explained to the committee that the U.S. “at the front end say this is what this money can be spent on, these things. We will submit to them they will submit to us a budget request. We want to use this money for these things and part of the proceeds will go to fund an audit process to make sure that that's how the money is being spent.”

Rubio told the committee one payment of $300 million had already been made “to keep sanitation workers, police officers, government workers on staff,” and that it was from Venezuelan oil sales totaling $500 million. Of the remaining $200 million, Rubio said, “It's still sitting in the account is my understanding at this time .”

Rubio added that he thought this U.S.-control of Venezuelan oil sales funds might involve “another $2.5 billion-to-$3 billion” of Venezuelan oil income.

But Rubio made clear, “The permanent structure we want to see in the long term. We just want them to have a normal industry where the companies are involved in there. They're selling it directly to the market and we're out of that game.”

In March, the U.S. Treasury issued licenses to entities to do business with Petróleos de Venezuela S.A, or PDVSA, and handle, transport, refine, and market Venezuelan-origin oil under strict operational limits. One limit: All payments for the Venezuelan oil go to a special U.S.-controlled account and not to sanctioned Venezuelan entities such as PDVSA.

In other words, the U.S. would control the cash flow back to Venezuela for its oil sales.

On April 1, Bloomberg reported the estimated value of U.S.-controlled Venezuelan oil exports had increased from $600 million in January \ -- about 380,000 barrels per day -- to about $3.7 billion in April alone -- about 1.1 million barrels per day.

On April 16, the State Department’s Michael Kozak, a senior official from the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, disclosed “around $3 billion” of Venezuelan oil revenue had moved through the U.S. accounts “paying the salaries of government workers in Venezuela; buying supplies for their oil industry, and so on, other things that benefit the public.”

Kozak also said the U.S. accounting firm, KPMG would be making quarterly audit reports on the Venezuelan oil bank accounts and providing them to the State Department.

One day after Kozak’s appearance, on April 17, four Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, requesting “an audit of the United States-Venezuela energy deal that was announced by President Trump on January 6.”

They asked that “the review cover both the period of time that the funds were routed to accounts in Qatar, the current arrangement for funds to be routed to U.S. accounts controlled by the Treasury Department, and any other successor mechanism utilized by the Administration to facilitate the sale of Venezuelan oil, custody of these assets, and disbursement of these funds.”

The GAO has since confirmed they have an investigation underway.

On June 3, Roxanna Vigil, a former senior sanctions policy advisor at the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, raised questions about the Venezuelan oil funds in a Council on Foreign Relations article.

Vigil wrote, “In the first four months of the United States exerting control over Venezuela’s oil exports, almost one hundred million barrels of oil worth an estimated $8 billion have flowed through a process marked by no transparency and minimal oversight.”

She added, “While the Trump administration has repeatedly framed this control as benefiting both countries, it has not publicly disclosed how much Venezuelan oil it has sold, how much revenue it has collected, or how it has used those funds since seizing control of the country’s oil exports following the January 3, military intervention that deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.”

On June 24, earthquakes struck Venezuela leaving more than 5,000 dead, 16,700 injured and damage the World Bank estimated would cost some $19.7 billion to reconstruct. The Trump administration coordinated a humanitarian response including more than $386 million for which polls have shown Venezuelans are grateful.

However, those polls have also shown Venezuelans resent the poor handling of the disaster by acting-President Delcy Rodríguez and are troubled by the Trump administration’s open support of her relatively unpopular government.

On July 22, the Financial Times published a story that led by saying, “The Trump administration has collected more than US$13 billion in revenues from Venezuelan oil sales this year, according to FT calculations, but has said almost nothing about what has happened to the money.”

The FT story went on to say, “But six months after the U.S. seized control of the funds, economists say the evidence of a recovery in Venezuela is relatively muted — a potential sign that the U.S. has not sent all the revenues back to Caracas.”

The FT also said, “The Venezuelan government set up a website to track the revenue from U.S.-run oil sales, but it has only one entry — a transfer of US$300 million in March.”

Since the FT story, almost everyone has used the $13 billion figure as the amount of money that has passed through the U.S.-run accounts. However, Trump, himself, when asked about that figure on July 27, during a press interview on Air Force One, replied, “$13 billion, I think even more than that.”

On August 4, during an interview by Fox News, Trump said, “Venezuela’s really a totally different place. Right now we’re taking out hundreds of billions of dollars, they’re taking out hundreds of billions of dollars it’s actually a different place.”

Of course, Trump’s statement is not true, “hundreds of billions” is more than twice Venezuela’s annual gross national product. But there are billions of dollars from Venezuelan oil sales yet to be accounted for and neither the Donald Trump or Delcy Rodriguez governments are trustworthy when that kind of money is involved.

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

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### Gen. David Petraeus: The U.S. Must Prepare for a Revolution in Warfare | Iran, Ukraine, China & Drones

**Published:** August 18, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/gen-david-petraeus-the-u-s-must-prepare-for-a-revolution-in-warfare-iran-ukraine-china-drones.md

Former CIA Director and retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus joins The Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly for a wide-ranging conversation about the wars reshaping the global security landscape — and why the United States needs to fundamentally rethink how it prepares for the conflicts of the future.

From the war with Iran and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine to China’s military calculations over Taiwan, Petraeus explains how drones, autonomous weapons and rapidly changing battlefield technology are transforming warfare faster than many military institutions can adapt.

On Iran, Petraeus examines whether there is a realistic path to ending the conflict, why maintaining economic and maritime pressure on Tehran matters, and how Iran’s missiles and drones have changed the threat to U.S. forces, regional partners and some of the world’s most critical energy infrastructure.

He also warns against believing the United States can simply disengage from the region.

“Trying to leave the Middle East for the United States is like Michael Corleone trying to leave the mafia,” Petraeus says. “You just keep getting sucked back in.”

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### Global Intelligence Report for Tuesday, August 18, 2026

**Published:** August 18, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-tuesday-august-18-2026.md



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### Terror's First Celebrity

**Published:** August 18, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/terror-s-first-celebrity.md

BOOK REVIEW: THE JACKAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF CARLOS, THE WORLD'S FIRST SUPER-TERRORIST

By Joby Warrick / Scribner

Reviewed by: Joe Zacks

The Reviewer — Joe Zacks is the former Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA for Counterterrorism, the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Aardwolf Global Solutions and a Cipher Brief subject matter expert.

REVIEW: As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we will see a number of books on terrorism and terrorists come to market. A case in point is Joby Warrick's, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist. Warrick's superb book reads like a novel and is also exceptionally well-researched and well-written, a biography of a renowned terrorist. Carlos the Jackal was largely a freelancer who benefited from the Cold War struggle between East and West and the deep pockets and ill intentions of renowned Middle Eastern strongmen of yesteryear.

As Warrick portrays him, aside from leading a playboy's lifestyle, murder and mayhem were Carlos' specialty. His narcissistic personality drove him to carefully and publicly brand his dastardly deeds as uniquely attributable to the black-beret wearing “Carlos the Jackal.” He wanted to be famous and saw terrorism as his path toward achieving this twisted goal of glory.

“Carlos” was born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez to a relatively wealthy and devoutly Marxist Venezuelan father who was so fond of Lenin that he named his sons Vladimir, Ilich, and Lenin. Carlos was a lackluster student who participated in revolutionary causes in Venezuela and attended the Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University in the Soviet Union. He was ultimately expelled from the university and the Soviet Union for poor academics, misconduct on campus, and unsanctioned political activity. Despite his future close cooperation with and support from eastern European security services, the KGB never recruited nor showed much interest in Carlos due to his youthful bad behavior.

In 1970, not long after he left the Soviet Union, Carlos ended up in Beirut, Lebanon, in search of adventure and revolutionary causes. He volunteered to serve the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—one of the most extremist and reactionary Palestinian groups—by boldly walking into the offices of its publication and offering his services. In short order, he closely allied himself with one of the PFLP's founders, Wadi Haddad, whom he served faithfully for six years. His relationship with Haddad taught Carlos how to meticulously plan and operationalize terrorist attacks. He carried out a series of attacks in western Europe, some more successful than others. These included complex attacks that later became a hallmark of al-Qaeda. During this period, he demonstrated his willingness to murder in cold blood. He developed a network of Arab and far left western European collaborators who would remain instrumental to his later criminal endeavors. In addition to chronicling Carlos's work with the PFLP, Warrick paints a comprehensive portrait of Haddad—to include his likely death at the hands of Mossad through poisoned toothpaste—the PFLP and the Black September battles in Jordan in 1970-71.

As Warrick explains, Carlos was formally expelled from the PFLP in 1976 after leading the infamous 1975 attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna. While this sensational event captured world headlines for days and put Carlos publicly on the map as an international terrorist, it failed to achieve its primary objectives of murdering the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers. In fact, it is almost certain that Carlos cut a deal with Saudi Arabia to release all the hostages for a ransom that he himself pocketed and that was estimated in the tens of millions of dollars. Only Haddad's fondness for Carlos prevented him from being executed for his failures in this plot.

Unshackled from his commitments to the PFLP, Carlos became a free agent in the world of international terrorism. Often with the support of Eastern European intelligence services, he was for many years able to freely operate from bases in the region where he amassed large quantities of weapons and explosives not to mention multiple foreign—often diplomatic—passports. He contracted his services for years to eastern European governments and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Syrian government of Hafez al-Asad. With the support of these state sponsors of terrorism and the financial largesse of these Arab leaders, Carlos operated with relative impunity for close to twenty years. It was only the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist regimes as well as Syria's attempt to gain favor with the West in the early 1990s that forced Carlos to flee his refuge in Syria and later Jordan to set up his last base of operations in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1993.

In concluding the book, Warrick chronicles the CIA's intense operation to locate Carlos in Khartoum. He brings to life the activities of legendary CIA operatives Cofer Black and Billy Waugh as well as the French DGSE agents who, with the support of the Sudanese government, ultimately had the legal authority to capture Carlos on August 14, 1994. This international terrorist was finally brought to justice in Paris, where he remains imprisoned for the remainder of his life.

Throughout his book, Warrick provides fascinating portraiture of a cast of international characters who rallied to support Carlos during various phases of his life. These include the Swiss financier and fanatical Nazi supporter Francois Genoud, French lawyer Jacques Vergès, and Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, the French defense lawyer whom he married while in prison.

In addition to telling an incredible tale, Warrick highlights important points related to terrorism. For example, most, if not all terrorists, are wanton murderers who often gain self-purpose through killing. Additionally, state sponsorship gives terrorists refuge and finances. As Warrick pointed out in his July 23, 2026, opinion piece in The New York Times, we are seeing these patterns with Russia and Iran today as they too are increasingly supporting and relying on a cadre of freelance terrorists. It is critical, at a minimum, to condemn publicly and sanction these state sponsors.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views.

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### Open-Source Intel Makes U.S. Troops an Easier Target for Iran

**Published:** August 17, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/open-source-intel-makes-u-s-troops-an-easier-target-for-iran.md

Iran is reading American service members’ social media feeds to deadly effect. The fact is that not all intelligence must be gleaned from secret, closed sources for it to be effective, and Tehran has made use of public and open-source data to target U.S. forces with psychological and kinetic attacks. Until the Pentagon updates and enforces its policies on social media posting and personal device security, American servicemembers will be sitting ducks.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the commander of CENTCOM, warned in a letter last month to U.S. forces that Iran is using social media posts from personnel, such as footage of U.S. bases, to improve its lethality. For example, a video of soldiers running for shelter during Iranian strikes helped Iran perform a battle damage assessment of their strikes, including their precision, and understand base layout for future attacks.

Iran has long exploited open-source data to target U.S. forces and allies. Two years ago, Iran doxxed 2,200 Israel Defense Forces personnel relying exclusively on open-source data. In April 2026, the Department of the Navy warned service members that unnamed cyber adversaries (obviously referring to Iran) are reaching out on social media and conducting phishing attacks, urging sailors to turn on privacy settings and refrain from posting on social media. The same month, Iranian hacker group Handala sent threatening WhatsApp messages to U.S. troops and published the supposed personal information of 2,300 U.S. service members stationed in the Persian Gulf.

Open-source data is broader than just Instagram and Facebook. Iran exploits data breaches to collect information and identify and send text messages to former Israeli defense personnel to threaten them and to attempt to recruit them for espionage purposes.

Iran is exploiting Signaling System 7 (SS7), an older telecom protocol for roaming, to identify devices with U.S. SIM cards, according to threat intelligence platform Mobile Surveillance Monitor. Using SS7, Iran was reportedly able to pinpoint hotels that housed U.S. personnel and contractors.

Iran can also simply buy data for its malicious campaigns. CENTCOM stated in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) that it has been warned that Iran may have used commercially available location data used by digital advertisers to “target and surveil” U.S. personnel. While the phone numbers behind advertising IDs are anonymized, Iran could use them to track devices in specific areas such as military bases. The Pentagon conceded that these IDs are not yet disabled by default on government-issued phones.

None of these vulnerabilities should be a surprise to defense officials. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report from October 2025 found that social media posts from service members and their families or friends provide adversaries with names, ranks, and locations that can be pieced together to reveal information about U.S. force formations and operations. Wyden and his Democratic and Republican colleagues in the House and Senate sent a letter to the Pentagon’s chief information officer in May 2026 urging more secure personal data practices and blaming current vulnerabilities on the department’s “failure to prioritize this threat and implement common sense cyber defenses recommended by federal cybersecurity experts.” The House version of the annual defense bill, meanwhile, calls for the department to better understand and train personnel about how adversaries can exploit commercial technologies to identify and monitor U.S. personnel.

To curb adversarial intelligence collection opportunities, the Department of Defense (DoD) should expand operational security requirements across the force.

First, the DoD should harden government and personal devices by requiring removal of all Mobile Advertising IDs (MAIDs) on personal and DoD-distributed devices for personnel in sensitive areas. Without IDs, the locations and metadata cannot be tracked or associated with individual users and sold to adversaries posing as commercial buyers.

Next, the DoD should create and enforce stringent policies for social media posting. Personnel should be prohibited from uploading unofficial photos and videos of military facilities or that otherwise relate to their roles and should limit the amount of information they post about their roles on platforms like LinkedIn. Government devices should have their cameras disabled or removed unless required for specific purposes, and GPS should be disabled by default. DoD should also consider providing troops with alternative devices for personal use with GPS disabled and the cameras removed.

Additionally, the DoD should monitor breached data to understand what is publicly available about all its personnel. Knowing when data is exposed will allow the DoD to identify potential threats before Iran acts and begin fixing the issue as soon as it occurs. The department can also use this information to enable mandatory password and credential rotation when information is exposed. The Pentagon should also consider encouraging or requiring additional methods of authentication, such as passkeys and biometrics, for all devices and accounts

Finally, Congress should pass regulatory reforms to transition from SS7 to new signaling technology. SS7 is an outdated system and cannot guarantee secure communications, even if new updates were to be completed. Changing the system will allow service members abroad to communicate with loved ones without leading adversaries to their location.

These measures will limit the open-source data that, at present, is readily available to Iran and other adversaries. If the DoD continues to permit unrestricted use of personal devices abroad, Iran and other adversaries will continue exploiting their vulnerabilities to locate, study, and threaten American forces.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Inside Iran’s New Wartime Leadership

**Published:** August 17, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/inside-irans-new-wartime-leadership.md

Tehran’s new power brokers

A wave of assassinations rebuilt Iran’s leadership from the top down, leaving a severely wounded supreme leader and a security establishment now calling the shots. Tehran, however, isn’t saying who is actually in charge. The silence is part of the narrative; who are the country’s power players?

Earlier this month, Iranian state media did something it had never done before.

Mehr News, an outlet controlled by the country’s Islamic Development Organization, released a video titled “First Images of the Leader,” showing Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei addressing a small group of students. The footage was undated. It came, however, days after Israeli outlets reported the 56-year-old cleric was in “extremely critical condition,” and it appears to have done little to settle the question consuming Iran’s political class: is anyone actually running the country right now.

The clip echoed a similar undated video IRIB released in March, showing Khamenei teaching religious sciences. President Masoud Pezeshkian acknowledged this week that reaching him has been “very difficult,” though he described their last exchange as constructive.

Multiple sources close to Pezeshkian’s administration told IranWire that no cabinet minister has met with Khamenei since the February 28 strike that killed his father, Ali Khamenei, and that officials “would not be surprised” to hear news of his death.

Iranian authorities have repeatedly denied he’s incapacitated. But the man now holding life-tenure authority over Iran’s armed forces, judiciary and clerical establishment hasn’t spoken publicly, delivered a sermon, or appeared unedited on camera since taking the post in March.

“The main issue for U.S. policymakers — especially any president — is whether the new leadership in Iran, or any leadership we can currently anticipate, is likely to depart materially from the strategic policies of the previous leadership,” Norman Roule, a former CIA officer who spent 34 years managing programs related to Iran and the Middle East, tells The Cipher Brief. “The evidence to date suggests no fundamental break.”

The vacuum at the top didn’t stay empty for long.

A Leadership Rebuilt Through Killings

The cascade began on February 28, when a joint U.S.-Israeli strike killed longstanding leader Ali Khamenei along with Mohammad Pakpour, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ commander-in-chief, and a string of other senior officials. An interim leadership council, made up of Pezeshkian, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei and cleric Alireza Arafi, held the state together for less than a week before the Assembly of Experts named Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s third Supreme Leader on March 8.

The choice was unusual on its face. The Islamic Republic was founded on the overthrow of hereditary monarchy, yet its clerical establishment had just installed the son of the man he replaced. Mojtaba lacked the religious credentials typically required of a Supreme Leader. He was widely regarded as a hojatoleslam, a mid-ranking cleric, rather than an ayatollah — yet he had spent nearly two decades as his father’s gatekeeper and enjoyed deep loyalty inside the Revolutionary Guard.

President Trump, who had labeled him “unacceptable” during the war, later told Fox News that the succession was not one his own father had wanted, adding, “their leadership is gone, their second leadership is gone, now their third leadership is in trouble.”

Roule, however, cautions against reading the new bench as a break from what came before it. Most of Iran’s current leaders, he notes, “rose within institutions shaped by Ali Khamenei and were trusted, promoted, or shaped within, and by the system he developed over years of rule.”

Roule points to the generational math: Pezeshkian, Mohsen Rezaee and Ali Reza Zolghadr were about 25 years old at the time of the 1979 revolution; Ahmad Vahidi was 21; Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Sadeq Amoli Larijani around 18; Mojtaba Khamenei just 10.

“For this group, the 1979 Revolution remained the ideological foundation of the system, but the Iran-Iraq War and the post-2003 campaign for regional influence were more important professional experiences,” Roule explains. “Most are veterans of the Iran-Iraq War or were directly shaped by it.”

The current command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has followed the same brutal pattern.

Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Guard’s aerospace force, was killed in a strike in June 2025. Pakpour, who had succeeded Hajizadeh’s predecessor Hossein Salami, was killed at the outset of the U.S.-Israeli campaign in February. His successor, Ahmad Vahidi, a Quds Force founder and former interior minister with an Interpol red notice tied to the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, was formally installed as commander-in-chief on March 1.

Unverified reports of Vahidi’s own death circulated in Tehran in late May and again in early June; Iranian, Israeli or American officials have confirmed none, and Vahidi continues to be listed as the IRGC’s active chief.

A Crackdown That Fits the Moment

The uncertainty at the top has coincided with a sharp rise in executions and threatened executions, months after the January protests that shook the regime.

Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science, says the war and the unrest have compounded each other rather than one driving the other alone.

“The protests and the war have fueled — it’s like putting a little bit of an accelerant into something that’s already pretty flammable,” Sarat tells The Cipher Brief. “The protests were, I think, much more trigger than the war itself. The war has just provided yet another excuse, because it’s jacked up nationalist fervor.”

Sarat is skeptical that outside pressure, including past White House rhetoric threatening consequences over executions, has had much bearing on Tehran’s calculus.

“The administration has said nothing about human rights abuses, let alone execution practices around the world,” he says, underscoring that any outside leverage is more likely to come from Europe than Washington. He views the surge itself as a familiar survival tactic for a leadership still finding its footing.

“It’s not a kind of unfamiliar tactic for a regime new to power to want to flex its muscle and terrorize the population,” he observes. “This is a survival moment, and they are going to do what they are going to do to preserve the essential character of their regime.”

The Guard Consolidates Around the Vacuum

With the younger Khamenei largely unseen, the Revolutionary Guard didn’t sit on its hands. It moved fast, filling top posts through official decrees.

Along with Vahidi, the Supreme Leader’s office named Mostafa Izadi as deputy IRGC commander, Ali Azmaei to head the IRGC Navy and Hossein Taeb to lead the Basij paramilitary force, filling six senior military posts vacated by wartime deaths.

Mohsen Rezaee, who commanded the IRGC from 1981 to 1997, was separately appointed as the Supreme Leader’s representative on the Supreme National Security Council. This post opened up, according to Rose Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, after Zolghadr was pushed out.

Kelanic argues the reshuffle amounts to more than a personnel change.

“Mojtaba Khamenei’s role appears to be that of a figurehead and potential scapegoat, enjoying far less authority than his father, whom he replaced,” Kelanic tells The Cipher Brief. “The real power rests with Ghalibaf, Vahidi and Rezaee, who are all career IRGC officers, which functionally means that Iranian government authority has shifted even further from civilian control to military control.”

That shift, she continues, carries its own risk for any settlement with Washington.

“When military leaders assume control as heads of state in wartime, they tend to make worst-case assumptions about adversaries’ intentions, view compromise as weakness, and favor offensive military strategies over defensive ones,” Kelanic points out.

Roule, meanwhile, frames the Guard’s rise in institutional rather than personal terms, and says the war has widened rather than preserved its reach. Estimates of how much of Iran’s economy the IRGC touches “vary widely — roughly from a fifth to a third,” he says, depending on whether one counts only directly controlled firms or also affiliated holding companies, pension funds and sanctions-evasion networks.

“A better way to think about the IRGC is not simply as a military organization with commercial interests, but as a central actor in a state-security-economic network,” Roule notes.

Ghalibaf’s Quiet Climb to the Center

The other figure benefiting from the uncertainty at the top is Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker and former IRGC commander who has spent the war years turning what is traditionally a legislative post into something closer to a shadow foreign ministry.

Ghalibaf, a two-time presidential also-ran who trailed Pezeshkian in the first round of the 2024 election, has emerged as Tehran’s principal interlocutor in the indirect talks with Washington, serving simultaneously as Iran’s special envoy to China and as a bridge between the political and military-security establishments that Pezeshkian, a physician by training with no roots in the security services, has struggled to command.

Parliament re-elected Ghalibaf to a seventh consecutive term as speaker in late May, with 235 of 271 votes cast, as reports circulated of friction between Pezeshkian and the new Supreme Leader’s office. Judiciary chief Mohseni-Ejei congratulated Ghalibaf on the vote by calling him a “tireless and battle-hardened jihadist leader” who had waged jihad “both in the field and in diplomacy” during the war.

Roule warns against reading Ghalibaf’s prominence as a formal power grab.

“His current prominence should not be confused with general supremacy over Pezeshkian,” he says. “Pezeshkian nonetheless remains president, heads the executive branch, and formally chairs the Supreme National Security Council. There is no evidence that Ghalibaf has assumed any of the presidency’s general constitutional authorities.”

His influence, Roule highlights, “is best understood as issue-specific power produced by circumstances, his political standing, longstanding IRGC relationships, and wartime delegation.”

Who Actually Holds the Reins

What emerges from the past five months of conflict, however, is a regime governed less by the clerical hierarchy that has defined the Islamic Republic since 1979 than by an overlapping wartime trio.

A Supreme Leader whose authority is formally absolute but whose physical capacity to exercise it remains unverified. An IRGC command structure rebuilt twice over through assassination and now operating with wide latitude, alongside a parliament speaker who has converted legislative standing into genuine diplomatic weight.

Still, Roule sees continuity as the most likely outcome even if Mojtaba’s health worsens further.

“If Mojtaba Khamenei becomes seriously incapacitated or dies, the most likely outcome absent a successful mass uprising or a major elite fracture is continuity rather than reversal on the issues of greatest concern to the United States,” he says. “The IRGC would remain a central power center, and the system has constitutional procedures for interim leadership and selection of a successor.”

He also points out that if Mojtaba’s death were tied to the war, “the state would almost certainly use a martyrdom narrative to reinforce regime legitimacy and resistance.”

Kelanic is less sanguine about what that continuity means for diplomacy. Iran, she stresses, will also grow harder to negotiate with simply because power is now split among rivals rather than concentrated in one office, leaving Washington without a clear address for any deal.

“The IRGC’s strengthened rule over a weaker civilian leadership makes reaching a peace deal harder,” Kelanic adds, “which is one of many ways the Iran War has backfired.”

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Monday, August 17, 2026

**Published:** August 17, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-monday-august-17-2026.md



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### Dead Drop: August 16 - 22

**Published:** August 16, 2026 | **Author:** Suzanne Kelly | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dead-drop-august-16-22.md

PRINCE OF THE AIR — Blackwater founder Erik Prince has reportedly launched an air defense company offering both hardware and operational management of air defense systems. The company Vectus Air Defense Systems has partnered with the Ukrainian drone software company Swarmer, which Prince is also heavily involved in. The Financial TImes describes Vectus as being presented as an “air defense as a service” model. Prince has been associated with a number of companies around the world since selling Blackwater to outside investors. He has also advised the Chinese government on some of Beijing’s global initiatives. Wanna know more how Prince got here? We recommend you pick up Master of War: Blackwater USA’s Erik Prince and the Business of War for some light (and fascinating) weekend reading.

THE SPIES WHO CAN'T GET PAID: The CIA has a problem that sounds like the setup to a bad joke: so many Agency officers are retiring, there are not enough people to process their pensions. The Washington Post reports that the agency's retirement system is so overwhelmed by departures that some former officers are waiting up to nine months or longer for their first full retirement check. The CIA calls the volume of cases "unprecedented." Meanwhile, OPM's workforce, which helps handle the paperwork, has fallen by a third since 2024, while the average time to process a federal retirement claim has climbed from 79 days to 109. Having a bunch of people with a lot of classified information in their heads and not enough cash in the bank – is said by some to be a counterintelligence nightmare. Too bad we don’t have a Department of Government Efficiency or something like that to get all this back on track, eh?

WHEN SABOTAGE ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY HAS TO GET THERE: Even saboteurs need a pilot program. A court in Stuttgart convicted Ukrainian national Yevhen B. this week of acting as an agent for Russian intelligence and conspiring to commit arson, sentencing him to one year and three months, all of it already covered by time served in pre-trial detention. According to Reuters, prosecutors said he arranged for two packages, stuffed with GPS trackers and spare auto parts, to be mailed from Germany to Ukraine via a Ukrainian parcel service, at the direction of a contact in Russian-occupied Mariupol. The court said the real purpose wasn't the parts, but the data: a logistics test run for future incendiary shipments. Two co-defendants were acquitted outright, a result Reuters noted "fell well short" of what prosecutors wanted.

WHO YOU GONNA CALL? SPY BUSTERS: Germany's domestic intelligence service has opened a helpline for people who fled Russia, China, Iran and other authoritarian countries and now fear they are being targeted by their former governments. According to Reuters (as picked up by the Moscow Times) the BfV says dissidents, journalists and others facing intimidation, surveillance, abduction or assassination attempts can call for help. A 16-page brochure advertising the service also asks callers to share what they know about the repressive tactics of their former governments. It's a clever arrangement: The spies are offering a hotline for people being spied on by spies.

A PUSH FOR INDEPENDENCE DID HIM IN – Max D. Lederer Jr. , publisher of the legendary military newspaper Stars and Stripes, has announced his retirement, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his allies in the Pentagon are moving to take over editorial control. According to the Associated Press, Lederer wrote a memo to the staff saying it had “become clear that my philosophy of leadership, and my understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes, differ in fundamental ways from the direction the leadership of the Department of Defense has for the organization.” Lederer’s departure comes four months after the Pentagon fired S&S ombudsman Jacqueline Smith, who wrote in a farewell column, “No one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence.” Recently, Stars and Stripes has been reporting on deteriorating crew conditions on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, during its 250-plus day deployment. Hegseth and President Trump have repeatedly downplayed reports of miserable conditions attributed in part to Iran’s destruction of resupply hubs in the Middle East.

THE MABNA MULLIGAN: The Justice Department has unsealed a superseding indictment charging 17 alleged members of Iran's Mabna Institute, (a hacking outfit that is accused of targeting professors at 144 U.S. universities and 178 foreign universities on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) and other Iranian entities. Prosecutors believe the hackers successfully compromised roughly 8,000 professor’s email accounts after attempting to breach more than 100,000. They allegedly stole more than 31 terabytes of research, academic material and intellectual property. Some of the stolen material was then reportedly sold through Iranian websites to universities and other customers, according to Reuters. Nine defendants were charged in 2018. Yesterday, the DOJ added eight more. The State Department is also offering up to $10 million for information leading to the location or arrest of five of the suspects.

CAMPUS SECURITY REVIEW: The Pentagon has assigned 30 American universities some homework: review their foreign partnerships, especially those involving Chinese institutions, and cut ties that DoD considers problematic. The Associated Press reports that schools have two weeks to complete the review or risk losing federal funding. The schools reportedly include Harvard, MIT and Johns Hopkins, along with universities that previously operated Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government-backed campus centers that became a major target of U.S. scrutiny over concerns about Beijing's influence and access to American research. The Pentagon hasn't officially identified the 30 schools. A U.S. official did, however, leak the list to reporters, according to the AP…which is an interesting information-handling decision in a story about information security. The universities have 14 days to review their partnerships and terminate any that run afoul of the Pentagon's requirements.

BALLROOM DIPLOMACY? — Rodney Mims Cook Jr, chair of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, who is overseeing Trump’s controversial White House ballroom construction, held talks with Kremlin officials in Russia this summer as part of a quiet diplomatic mission, according to reporting by the Financial Times today. The paper cited people familiar with the matter. While attending Russian president Vladimir Putin’s economic forum in St. Petersburg in June, Cook reportedly met with Kremlin officials, including Anton Kobyakov, a senior aide to Putin and at a question-and-answer session with Putin, Cook passed on a “good hello from your friend, President Trump,” adding: “We have a lot of ideas to talk about between our two capital cities in the next week.” Putin reportedly thanked Cook and said he “pushed the puck back” to Trump.

ESPIONAGE ON THE HORIZZEN: Reportedly, a small Brisbane consultancy called Horizzen had a few domestic clients, no interest in expanding, and no plans to hire anyone in the U.S. That didn't stop applications pouring in. Starting mid-2025, according to the Guardian, Horizzen fielded calls and applications from strangers touting defense and security credentials for jobs the firm never posted. Turns out someone had cloned the company’s name, logo, and website into a fake "international consultancy" advertising defense, trade, and politics roles. It wasn't alone. The FBI seized 13 such domains back in June with the assistance of counterintelligence partners in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and New Zealand. The scheme, prosecutors say, targeted Americans with security clearances: pay for open-source information first, then bigger money for more sensitive material, then a quiet migration to encrypted chat. "The fake consulting company domains seized by the FBI illustrate the lengths the Chinese government's intelligence services will go to," said the FBI's Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director for counterintelligence, in the original DOJ announcement. Sounds like a down-underhanded tactic to us.

YOU’VE GOT EMALS – NO WAIT! President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to figure out how to replace the Ford-class carrier’s electromagnetic catapults (called EMALS) with the steam technology they replaced — starting with CVN-81, the future USS Doris Miller. USNI News says the memo gives the Pentagon 60 days to produce a plan, including timelines and costs. EMALS replaced the steam catapults that launched carrier aircraft for seven decades. The first three Fords — Ford, John F. Kennedy and Enterprise — reportedly would keep it; but Doris Miller and subsequent carriers would go backward. The irony: according to Newsweek the Navy says electromagnetic catapults are more efficient, require fewer sailors and are easier and cheaper to maintain. They also reportedly provide more precise launches and less violent acceleration for aircraft. China’s newest carrier, Fujian, chose EMALS too. Then came the second throwback. The Washington Post reported on Saturday that, at the President’s request, the Navy is also considering moving the Ford-class carrier’s island — the command tower — from its current position near the stern toward the middle of the ship, making it look more like a WWII carrier. The aft location isn't an aesthetic accident: it creates more aircraft parking space and reduces turbulence during landings. Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, who studied the idea during Trump's first term, told the Post the move would require an extensive redesign affecting the ship's weight and buoyancy. An earlier Pentagon study reportedly put the price in the billions and added years to construction. And that's the real problem: the Navy already has too few carriers to meet its commitments (ask the crew of the Abraham Lincoln.) Every year added to Doris Miller's construction schedule is another year of asking other carrier crews to stay at sea longer waiting for relief. Let’s hope someone doesn’t get the idea to go back to wooden decks on carriers next.

Got news to share? Drop us a note: Editor@thecipherbrief.com

Read more expert-driven national security insights exclusively in www.thecipherbrief.com.

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### Technology Has Not Replaced Geography and Human Judgment

**Published:** August 14, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/technology-has-not-replaced-geography-and-human-judgment.md

BOOK REVIEW: GEOPOLITECH - THE SECRET GEOPOLITICS OF TECHNOLOGY: THE DAWN OF A NEW POWER

By Kevin Escoda / Independently Published

Reviewed by: Jean-Thomas Nicole

The Reviewer — Jean-Thomas Nicole is a Policy Advisor with Public Safety Canada. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of Public Safety Canada or the Canadian government.

REVIEW:

Kevin Escoda's Geopolitech: The Secret Geopolitics of Technology — The Dawn of a New Power is an ambitious and accessible exploration of one of the defining realities of the twenty-first century: the fusion of technology and geopolitics. Rather than treating technology as a realm detached from geography, power, and state competition, Escoda argues that the digital age has intensified dependence on physical infrastructures, strategic bottlenecks, and invisible systems of control. The book is less a conventional geopolitical treatise than a guide for understanding how power operates beneath the surface of everyday technological life.

Kevin Escoda is a French technology consultant, AI and digital transformation specialist, and author based in Milan, Italy. His work spans fintech, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and innovation strategy, including advisory roles in the financial sector. He is the author of a trilogy exploring the intersections of technology, finance, intelligence, and geopolitics: From DeFi to Institutional DeFi, From the Machine That Calculates to the Machine That Thinks, and Geopolitech: The Secret Geopolitics of Technology.

Geopolitech's strongest and most consistent argument is that technology has not rendered geography obsolete. Instead, it has concentrated power in a series of critical nodes: semiconductor fabrication plants, rare-earth processing facilities, undersea communication cables, satellite networks, and specialized industrial technologies. Through examples such as Taiwan's semiconductor industry, ASML's near monopoly over extreme ultraviolet lithography, and China's role in resource refining, Escoda demonstrates that digital power ultimately rests on tangible infrastructure.

This argument is particularly effective because it challenges a popular misconception. The “cloud,” as Escoda repeatedly reminds readers, is not a cloud at all but a network of physical assets that can be protected, disrupted, controlled, or weaponized.

A recurring theme throughout the book is the importance of chokepoints. Escoda encourages readers to ask two deceptively simple questions:

1. Where does it run?

2. Who can close it?

These questions serve as the analytical framework for the entire volume. Whether discussing data flows, supply chains, communications networks, or financial systems, Escoda shows how influence often belongs not to the largest actor, but to whoever controls key access points. The concept is applied successfully across multiple domains and provides readers with a practical lens for analyzing global affairs (e.g., the Strait of Hormuz is closed, the Bab el-Mandeb is contested, and the Panama Canal is straining under rerouted traffic — what is happening to freedom of navigation?).

The discussion of “weaponized interdependence” is especially compelling. Drawing on contemporary scholarship, Escoda illustrates how globalization's interconnected networks can become instruments of coercion when states gain leverage over critical flows of information, resources, or technology.

Unlike many books on geopolitics that promote a single grand theory, Geopolitech focuses on method. Escoda explicitly seeks to teach readers how to observe, investigate, and think critically rather than simply accept conclusions. The book frequently introduces tools associated with open-source intelligence (OSINT), including satellite imagery analysis, metadata examination, and the verification of publicly available information.

This methodological focus is one of the book's greatest strengths. By emphasizing evidence gathering and patient observation, Escoda empowers readers to engage directly with geopolitical questions instead of relying exclusively on experts or governments. As a result, the book functions simultaneously as an introduction to geopolitical analysis and a practical guide to investigative thinking.

Another noteworthy contribution is the book's insistence that technology does not eliminate the need for human judgment. Escoda repeatedly highlights examples where human intervention prevented catastrophic outcomes or where human error introduced significant vulnerabilities. His discussion of incidents such as Stanislav Petrov's refusal to blindly trust Soviet warning systems illustrates the enduring importance of critical thinking and skepticism.

This theme gives the book a welcome human dimension. While many technology-focused works drift toward technological determinism, Escoda argues that individuals remain indispensable actors within complex systems.

The book concludes with a dossier of real-world investigations, including analyses of Chinese island-building activities, missile silo identification, and publicly available data related to the war in Ukraine. These case studies serve as practical demonstrations of the analytical methods discussed throughout the book. Rather than merely describing geopolitical developments, Escoda shows readers how those developments can be observed and understood using publicly accessible information.

This section is especially valuable because it transforms abstract concepts into concrete examples and demonstrates the growing significance of open-source intelligence in modern security analysis.

The book's greatest strengths also create some weaknesses. Its scope is exceptionally broad, spanning history, technology, intelligence, economics, cybersecurity, and international relations. As a result, certain subjects receive less depth than specialists might desire. Readers seeking detailed policy prescriptions will also find little discussion of specific reforms or governmental responses. Escoda is more interested in teaching readers how to think than in providing definitive solutions.

Additionally, the book's enthusiasm for open-source investigative methods occasionally risks overstating their democratizing potential. While Escoda acknowledges limitations and dangers, some readers may feel the work underestimates the ability of governments and corporations to manipulate information environments or restrict access to data.

Geopolitech is an intelligent, engaging, and highly relevant contribution to contemporary discussions about technology and power. Its greatest achievement is not the presentation of a novel geopolitical theory, but the development of a practical framework for understanding how modern systems function and who controls them. Escoda combines technical literacy, historical perspective, and investigative rigor in a manner that is accessible without being simplistic. Policymakers, analysts, and anyone interested in national security, technology, or international affairs will find considerable value in its insights. Ultimately, the book succeeds because it teaches readers not merely what to think about modern power, but how to see it.

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### The Dollar's Next Battlefield Isn't a Country. It's Code.

**Published:** August 14, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-dollar-s-next-battlefield-isn-t-a-country-it-s-code.md

Money is moving onto new rails, built in code instead of wires and vaults, and that shift is quietly reshaping a tool that America has relied on for a generation: the ability to see a transaction, trace it, and freeze or seize it the moment sanctions or law enforcement demand it. Whoever builds and supervises those digital rails inherits that power. Whoever doesn't, loses it. That is the real stake in the debate over blockchain-based payment technology. Not the technology itself, but who ends up controlling it.

China and Russia understand this. Beijing is swiftly shifting to its digital yuan, e-CNY, and is settling commodity trades with BRICS partners in yuan. Moscow is pushing ruble settlement with its own trading partners via its regulated ruble-based stablecoin network A7A5. Both are explicit, funding bets on moving international trade beyond the reach of U.S. sanctions and U.S. oversight. Neither has cracked the dollar's dominance yet, which still captures 88% of foreign exchange transactions. But if either succeeds in becoming the default rail for the next generation of cross-border payments, America doesn't just lose market share—it loses its reach into the global financial system with sanctions and anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism, effectively handing the keys to the global financial system to our geopolitical foes.

I've spent my career on the U.S. side of this problem, first as an attorney at the Department of Homeland Security and later at the Treasury Department working anti-money-laundering and sanctions cases, and today as the Bank Secrecy Act Officer at Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., the first federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States. The lesson is simple: The global economy craves an international currency, and the U.S. dollar has held that position since Bretton-Woods. American power depends on the U.S. dollar's continued dominance worldwide, and that dominance depends on deep, liquid capital markets, strong institutions and rule of law, and military and geopolitical power—resulting in America's ability to see, trace, and freeze global assets when it needs to. And that leverage only exists when dollars move through systems that the U.S. can actually supervise.

There's a common misconception that digital assets are harder to trace than traditional finance. It's actually the opposite. Cash leaves no trail at all. A bank wire leaves a record, but that trail typically goes cold after a few transactions. A public blockchain transaction, however, leaves a permanent record of every movement, from the moment a token is issued to the moment it's redeemed. Bringing this activity onshore, under U.S. supervision, extends that visibility. Pushing it offshore limits it.

Stablecoins, digital tokens pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar, are already a multi-hundred billion dollar market, and industry data put the US dollar-pegged share at roughly 90 percent globally. When a stablecoin is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, it operates under the same rules as any U.S. national bank—full reserve backing, segregation of customer funds, and Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money laundering, and sanctions compliance obligations. That supervision is also what gives the government its edge. Every transaction is a record the United States can see, trace, and, when law enforcement requires it, freeze or seize in real time. When that same activity happens offshore, outside any regulator's perimeter and visibility, the U.S. loses that line of sight entirely.

The stakes are not only strategic. They're also human. Consider what dollar stablecoins already mean, for example, in Venezuela, Argentina, and Turkey, where ordinary people hold and transact in US dollars, as much as possible, because their own currencies and banking systems have failed them or been weaponized against them. A family in Caracas holding a US dollar stablecoin is protected from a currency collapse in a way a bolivar denominated bank account is not. That is happening now, delivered by infrastructure that an authoritarian regime cannot freeze the way it can freeze a domestic account, with or without U.S. participation in building the digital rails underneath it, which is exactly why the United States has an interest in making sure that infrastructure is built responsibly, transparently, and under a regulatory framework that keeps it trustworthy at scale, rather than leaving it to whichever jurisdiction is willing to host it with the least oversight.

That means finishing the job Congress started. Treasury, the OCC, and FinCEN should implement GENIUS Act rules that keep issuance onshore, supervised, and interoperable with existing sanctions and AML programs, not slowed by duplicative reporting or ambiguity that pushes issuers back offshore. And Congress should pass the CLARITY Act to extend that same regulatory perimeter to the rest of the digital asset market, including exchanges, broker-dealers, and platforms that still operate today with little or no federal oversight. Every rule that keeps this activity under U.S. supervision is a rule that keeps the dollar, and America's ability to enforce sanctions, at the center of the global financial system.

When the United States built and opened the Global Positioning System, it didn't just launch satellites; it established a silent, invisible utility that now powers the modern world. Because America laid the groundwork and set the standards, we secured a generation of technological and strategic leadership. The next version of that global utility is being built now, in code, including the rails, the standards, and the supervision beneath them. Dollar stablecoins are already flowing into economies around the world, with or without a decision from Washington. The only open question is whether that infrastructure is American-built and American-supervised, or whether the United States cedes the ground to adversaries already working to bypass the dollar. GPS was a choice. So is whether we write the rules for the next generation of global payments, or let our adversaries write America out of it.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### It is in the U.S. interest to Support Democratic Legitimacy in Venezuela

**Published:** August 14, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/it-is-in-the-u-s-interest-to-support-democratic-legitimacy-in-venezuela.md

The Trump administration’s response to the catastrophic earthquakes that hit Venezuela seven weeks ago was impressive: timely, massive and appropriate. This should reassure those who worried that the administration’s efforts to downsize and reorganize the U.S. government early in this second term in office had all but eviscerated our capacity to respond to foreign natural disasters. It was also not surprising. The Trump administration made Venezuela an early priority and has undertaken its economic and political rehabilitation since removing dictator and de facto president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Celia. It has been clear since January that the post-Maduro effort would be complicated, time-consuming and closely watched by the world community and, especially, by the rest of Latin America.

Following the successful military operation to remove the Venezuelan dictator, the Trump administration articulated a three-phase plan for rebuilding a country devastated by decades of economic incompetence, corruption and, especially since 2013, increasing authoritarianism. Unfortunately, the two earthquakes that rocked the country on June 24 set back the Trump administration’s near and mid-term plans. The twin disasters also cast into sharp relief the extent of the long-term damage done to the country’s economy, institutions and infrastructure by the regime led by, first, Hugo Chavez, then Maduro and now Delcy Rodriguez.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Trump team opted to leave in place Maduro’s long -time collaborator and vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, as interim president even as it undertook the daunting task of trying to reverse the damage from 30 years of Chavista/Madurista malfeasance. This was a risky decision. Among other things, it marginalized the overwhelming winner of Venezuela’s 2024 election whom the U.S. had recognized in late November of that year as ‘president-elect.”

Not surprisingly, the Venezuelan public was mortified by the regime’s ineffectual initial response to the catastrophic damage caused by the two earthquakes and disgusted by the dismal state of the country’s infrastructure. Venezuelans, on the other hand, were grateful for the international assistance that was surged into the country after the quakes, especially from the U.S. At the same time the scope and effectiveness of international support stood in sharp contrast to what the public saw as the fecklessness of the interim government’s efforts. Worse yet, the inevitable willingness of foreign first responders to work with the de facto Venezuelan government generated concern that Delcy Rodriguez, Interior Minister Diosdado and others were being legitimized by their cooperation with international relief contingents especially those from the U.S. Despite the regime’s best efforts to placate the public, frustration with the regime and Rodriguez erupted into public view as relief efforts were ongoing.

The sharp domestic criticism of the regime’s leadership even as it responded to the earthquakes suggests the difficulty of the United States’ challenge in Venezuela. Specifically, it suggests that the Achilles heel of the administration’s plan to rebuild the country may have been its decision to leave the Maduro regime in place while announcing that restoring democracy would be postponed to some point in the future.

It would be a serious miscalculation to assume Delcy Rodriguez, Diosdado Cabello and the rest of the surviving Maduro cabal share the U.S. commitment to a democratic future for the country. It is true that the regime has taken some steps to ease domestic tensions and encourage economic recovery as U.S. authorities have acknowledged. Oil is flowing, the refugee crisis has abated and some political prisoners have been released. That said, much of the Venezuelan public believes Rodriguez has orchestrated these changes only because she has no choice and that the U.S. is really calling the shots. This is important for at least two reasons.

First, if the U.S. appears too comfortable with Rodriguez and the Venezuelan regime does not believe the U.S. fully supports an early return to democracy, it may opt to slow roll any reproachment with the opposition and hope that President Trump’s attention will be absorbed by other crises or they may opt to try try to wait out the Trump administration. Second, under those circumstances, the simmering resentment toward the repressive and criminal regime the administration left in place after apprehending Maduro could quickly morph into something much stronger, undermine confidence in the U.S., and discourage both investors and other partner nations in the region.

Publicly accelerating the U.S. strategy for reviving the country’s political institutions would be the first step to a solution to this problem. The administration already understands this and has endorsed initial talks between the regime and representatives of the democratic majority. However, representatives of the unified opposition which won an overwhelming victory in the elections two years ago were not at the table. To the Venezuelan public this may look like the regime is continuing to do everything it can to divide the democratic opposition and marginalize the winners of the July 2024 election, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, and the wildly popular opposition leader and Nobel prize winner, Maria Corina Machado.

A recently released poll by AtlasIntel in association with Bloomberg shows that if elections were held now Machado would win by a substantial margin. In also shows that approval of Delcy Rodriguez hovers around 22 percent while Machado’s approval level was comfortably above 70 percent. If the U.S. administration wants to renew confidence in its commitment to restoring Venezuelan democracy, Trump should insist on Machado’s proximate return to the country and guarantee her security. Machado’s presence would be an unmistakable signal of the United States’ determination to foster democratic legitimacy. Doing so would also do much to advance President Trump’s goal of reestablishing U.S. leadership in the region as well as underscoring the U.S. ambition once again to be seen as the economic partner of choice for Latin America.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

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### Global Intelligence Report for Friday, August 14, 2026

**Published:** August 14, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-friday-august-14-2026.md



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### Dr. Michael Vickers: America Isn’t Ready for the Wars Ahead | Iran, China, Russia & Ukraine

**Published:** August 13, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dr-michael-vickers-america-isnt-ready-for-the-wars-ahead-iran-china-russia-ukraine.md



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### Former NSA Chief Gen. Paul Nakasone: AI Is Changing the Cyber Battlefield

**Published:** August 13, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/former-nsa-chief-gen-paul-nakasone-ai-is-changing-the-cyber-battlefield-2677701312.md



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### It’s Time For The President To Level With The American People on Iran

**Published:** August 13, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/its-time-for-the-president-to-level-with-the-american-people-on-iran.md

The U.S. administration’s strategic expectations are increasingly colliding with a set of hard realities. While Iran has taken a considerable beating, it remains standing and does not appear on the verge of either submitting or collapsing. Its newfound control over a key commercial waterway, the Strait of Hormuz, provides it with a weapon of mass disruption (credit to the NYT’s Tom Friedman) that it previously did not enjoy, and it appears intent on exercising that authority. Despite the administration’s continued threats and claims of imminent victory, there is no clear military solution in sight. Bottom line: the administration miscalculated.

Another strategy is called for. The truth.

“The practice of espionage is a quiet act of war: A very human endeavor, sometimes born of lies and betrayal, of greed or revenge; but often of deep truths and trust.”

This is the banner of my Substack, drawn from the preface of my upcoming Iran espionage novel; “A Prince of Mirrors.” It attempts to encapsulate my feelings about my chosen profession: Intelligence Officer. But for now, let’s focus on the last phrase: “but often of deep truths and trust.”

Trust is in very short supply between the United States and Iran as they attempt to come to terms. First, to re-open the critical Strait of Hormuz – a shipping route that was open prior to the War – and, second, to end an increasingly fruitless War. All while failing, at least for now, to fully address the other key issues at play: Iran’s nuclear program, Iran’s ballistic missile program, and Iranian-supported proxies.

While the world looks breathlessly on, the U.S. awaits the results of negotiations between Iran and tiny, wonderful Oman (admission; I spent several years at the U.S. Embassy in Oman) – a country literally stuck between the rocky Musandam coast, and a hard place called Iran – over the future administration of the Strait.

Based on initial reports of the terms, either Iran is going to have to step back from its assertions of control, or the United States is going to have to agree to some level of Iranian control that was not present prior to the War. Given the utter lack of trust between the parties, is either likely?

So, let me lay out, as best I can, what I believe to be true.

This is a time for truth. Hard truths.

The Middle East has changed.

The Iranian regime has survived a series of devastating U.S. and Israeli strikes. Iranian military capacity, both the regular Artesh (Iran’s conventional army) and the IRGC (Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), is significantly weakened; however, it retains the ability to strike targets outside Iran, including shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian regime has not fallen and appears to be consolidating power around… well, no one yet knows which individuals or factions will emerge triumphant in Tehran. But for now, an even more hardline, IRGC dominated leadership is in place.

The regime is attempting to assert its newfound control over the critical Strait of Hormuz, a right tacitly acknowledged, or at least not specifically prohibited, in the flawed June MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) signed by the President of the United States.

Barring something new, something we have yet to see, U.S. and/or Israeli military force is unlikely to significantly alter this equation.

Iran and the United States, and the world economy, remain trapped in a test of wills over who blinks first.

The truth is, the regime is bad in so many ways. And they are dangerous. But not existentially so to the United States. Disliking Iran is not a sufficient reason to go to war with them barring a truly compelling reason.

But neither can an IRGC dominated Iran be allowed to run roughshod over the region. The U.S. and its Western and Gulf allies need to develop a new deterrence strategy that includes both carrots and sticks.

The Impacts of failure

Any agreement needs to mitigate, to the extent possible, the damage that Iran can do going forward. First and foremost, the world economy cannot allow one country to exert control over such an important international shipping route as the Strait. Any agreement must minimize Iranian control over ships transiting the Strait, possibly by compensating in other areas. The most critical issue, Iran’s nuclear program, must be addressed in a manner that includes both dealing with the 60% enriched uranium (HEU) currently in their possession and strict verification of enrichment activities going forward.

The American people can handle the truth!

That for now, the only way out is a negotiated agreement that is certain to fall short of the ideal. Only for now. Simply a truce. This is not an admission of defeat, simply a pause to rethink, to recalibrate.

But also…

That the Islamic regime has significant internal weaknesses. That stepping away from the current tit-for-tat military action, a strategy that is not achieving its objectives, will force the regime to confront the serious problems, some existential, that the Iranian nation faces. This is Iran’s, and the regime’s, Achilles heel. One that could eventually force change that no outside military force could.

Just the truth.

This article was originally published on Substack and is republished here with permission.

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

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### The Biggest AI Models Are Not the Biggest Threats

**Published:** August 13, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-biggest-ai-models-are-not-the-biggest-threats.md

Almost every AI security framework we are applying rests on one misguided assumption: danger scales with size. Compute thresholds, export controls, and tiered evaluation regimes all encode the same intuition, the larger the model, the more we should worry. If this isn’t true, what policy changes are needed?

I recently mapped more than twenty fielded AI systems against two axes: raw offensive capability with safeguards stripped, and residual risk as actually deployed (Fig. 1). They ran from millions to trillions of parameter models, and included munition seekers, gene design models, theatre planning, cyber offense systems, and general-purpose AI models. The picture does not support the above assumption. In fact, the data supports the inverse. Small, specialized models beat bigger general models at offense, but bigger models maybe better at defense.

Figure 1. Security Risk vs Size of Model. Hollow ring: raw offensive capability with safeguards stripped. Filled dot: residual risk as actually deployed. Cyber related positions anchored to CAISI / UK AISI results, July 2026. Data compiled by Alvin W. Graylin.

Each system appears twice: a hollow ring for raw capability with safeguards stripped, a filled dot for residual risk as deployed. The gap between them is the safeguard effect. Read left to right, and the size to threat correlation everyone assumes is simply absent.

Seven assumptions worth rethinking

One: the largest models pose the greatest risk. The high-residual band, where capability and deployed risk are nearly identical. Across six orders of magnitude, no clear trend. In 2022, researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals inverted the scoring function on a commercial drug-discovery model (MegaSyn) of under 100 million parameters and generated more than 40,000 candidate chemical warfare agents (many more lethal than VX) in just six hours on a desktop. Chemprop-class retrosynthesis models, which can find non-controlled precursor routes around scheduled pathways, run at one to ten million parameters. Evo models with single digit billions of parameters can help design novel life forms. News just came out last week that this exact system was able to generate 16 new viruses. All these systems sit well below the axis floor of any parameter-based regime. Compute restrictions do nothing to fix this.

Two: compute thresholds capture the relevant risk. Hackphyr, built on Zephyr-7b-β at 7 billion parameters, performs comparably to GPT-4 on network attack scenarios and runs on a single GPU. Deep Hat V2 ships commercially at 30 billion parameters, is marketed as uncensored for offensive security, and executes inside the customer environment with no external calls. No government evaluation covers it, so that placement rests on vendor claims. Neither would trip a FLOP ceiling.

Three: capability and threat are the same axis. Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 share one underlying model. Their capability positions are nearly identical; their deployed risk differs sharply, because Fable's added domain safeguards drop cyber requests back toward Opus 4.8 behavior. The difference comes entirely from the safeguards and distribution controls layered on top. That vertical gap is what governance can act on. Parameter count is not.

Four: open-source models are more dangerous than closed ones. Recent NIST study found that Kimi K3, the strongest PRC open-weight model, only scored 32 percent on ExploitBench against 57 percent for the leading U.S. model, and reached step 17 of a 32-step attack range where U.S. models reached 28.5. On the highest-severity outcome test, arbitrary code execution (ACE), Kimi K3, succeeded on 0 of 41 tasks, while the most capable U.S. models averaged 20. So, we really need to be careful about self-interested parties saying larger open-source models are more dangerous, when it likely has more to do with protecting margins than national security concerns. (see Fig. 2)

UK AISI did recently report that the Kimi K3 model was able to escape its sandbox during testing, but it merely used a misconfiguration in the testing sandbox that left the door open, rather than a sophisticated swarm agent attack like what the OpenAI model did. And when it did get out, all it did was look up the answer for the test it was given, rather than doing any damage to real world systems. In the future, this behavior could change, but it’s important to question the basic assumption that open models are always more dangerous.

Figure 2: CAISI/NIST - Comparison of aggregate capabilities over time of the most capable U.S. and PRC models. A 400-point increase on the y-axis equates to a 10x increase in the odds of solving tasks. Shaded regions denote 95% CIs.

Five: model quality determines attack success. Microsoft's MDASH is a harness, not a model. It orchestrates more than 100 specialized agents across an ensemble and scored 88.4 percent on CyberGym at launch, against 83.1 percent for the Mythos preview model. Adding a compact security model roughly 1/10th the size raised that to 95.95 percent. The orchestration layer beat every individual model. Regulating training while ignoring scaffolding regulates the less important variable.

Six: national security requires the largest models. It requires the opposite. Loitering munition seekers performing automatic target recognition run on Jetson-class edge hardware, capping them in the single-digit millions of parameters. Edge deployment favors small models on latency, power, thermal envelope, and operation without a datalink. Larger models are slower and, in narrow domains, more easily distracted by irrelevant context. They are also harder to validate, and validation is what matters when a false positive is a struck target. Cisco's Foundation-Sec-8B matches or exceeds models ten times its size on security benchmarks while running on one or two GPUs. The famed DoD Maven Smart System is based on a fine-tuned 2-year-old Claude Sonnet 3.5 model. That level of intelligence can now be distilled into a 4B model which could potentially run on a smartphone.

Seven: denying China compute is the primary lever to keep U.S. safe. Due to shared risks between these superpowers, on many safety related issues, cooperating may actually produce the outcomes most beneficial to the U.S. and the world. More on this below.

Five threat domains, five different answers

Attack and embedded systems favor small models that don’t require a comm link. Air-gapped operation, no API telemetry, no rate limits, no refusals mid-chain. The offensive bottleneck is stealth and throughput, not reasoning.

Cyber Orchestration favors large models, but the advantage attaches more to the system rather than the model, as MDASH shows. There’s little discussion today on regulating orchestration systems, but it’s clearly very needed.

Cyber Defense favors large models most clearly, and this is where the current approach fails. Defenders need breadth across every vector; attackers need depth in one. Safeguards that constrain security research are therefore costly in a way that is easy to miss.

When Hugging Face's systems were breached in July by OpenAI models, commercial frontier-model APIs blocked the forensic requests because their safety systems could not distinguish defensive analysis from attack. The team ran the open-weight Chinese model GLM-5.2 on its own infrastructure instead, worked through more than 17,000 logged actions, and contained the intrusion. An American company under active attack by an American closed-model was defended by a Chinese open-source model because the American ones could not tell friend from foe.

That is a Slave AI failure, in the terms I set out in Beyond Rivalry. A model trained toward obedience can only refuse; it cannot reason about whether refusing is right. What we need is Guardian AI: systems capable and contextually aware enough to protect us from malicious actors, from other AI systems, and from our own unintended consequences. That requires scale, because judgment requires breadth. It also requires that we stop locking down every capability rather than stewarding it. High-quality models with fewer restrictions, in defenders' hands, are a global public good. Every hour a defender spends fighting a guardrail is an hour the attacker fights nothing.

Bio/Chem Design favors small models. Molecular graphs, protein sequences, and binding energies come from compact architectures immune to alignment techniques built for natural language. A graph neural network has no refusal layer to remove. The key here is monitoring and controlling access to precursor chemicals and expanding safeguard for synthesis equipment.

Bio Synthesis is the outlier, and there is good news and bad. For biology, model-level access control has already failed. Evo 2 shipped with weights, inference code, training code, and its full dataset. There is no API to revoke. What remains is the synthesis chokepoint: Customer vetting and sequence screening at nucleic acid providers already operate internationally through the Gene Synthesis Consortium, whose members screen orders against databases of sequences of concern before synthesizing. There are still gaps as novel AI-generated combinations are developed, but they can be reduced if vendors and regulators globally work more closely together to keep the systems updated. Closing those gaps buys more security than any parameter threshold. But this requires Washington and Beijing to align, since they are the two largest suppliers of synthesis equipment in the world. Of course, collaboration across all vendors globally is needed to truly secure this threat vector. Again, larger general AI models aren’t the core problem.

Data beats intelligence

On the opening day of the U.S.-Iran war in February, a Tomahawk missle struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab, killing at least 168 people, more than 100 of them children under twelve. The school sat within 100 yards of an IRGC naval installation and had been inside that perimeter until a wall went up around 2013. Targeting ran through the Maven Smart System, which generates roughly 1,000 target packages an hour. A preliminary investigation concluded the strike likely followed from outdated intelligence, and former officials said stale human-curated data, not AI, was to blame.

The school had a website. Free satellite imagery showed a schoolyard with a sports field. No model of any size prevents this, because the failure was in data lineage, not reasoning. A larger model querying the same stale record returns the same coordinates faster and with more confidence.

The China mistake

The threat model that matters is not Beijing reaching AGI first. It is a non-state actor with a 30-billion-parameter uncensored model, a good harness, and no return address. Small models proliferate regardless of jurisdiction and leave no attribution trail, and an unattributable intrusion between nuclear powers is an escalation problem before it is a technology problem. In that world, a China unable to defend its own infrastructure is a liability to global stability, not an advantage to Washington.

Beijing is already regulating its own labs more aggressively than any other market. Concordia AI's 2026 survey documents agentic AI security guidance, ethics review requirements, and binding obligations on consumer AI services that are already deployed and enforced. It should be noted that Chinese frontier safety research output grew roughly 60 percent year over year, with agent safety rising from 8 percent of new papers in early 2025 to 27 percent by early 2026. The caveat: only five of ten leading Chinese developers reported safety evaluation results on release. Shared standards here would make a difference.

As Fig. 2 showed, CAISI found the Chinese models less dangerous, but they also found GLM-5.2 answers sensitive biological queries at far higher rates than tested U.S. models, which is where PRC safeguards are weakest. In personally speaking with multiple Chinese labs, it’s clear that their lack of compute resources due to export controls has forced them to deprioritize safety demands vs. capability enhancement. Expanding safety testing compute resources, like what UK AISI has, to more countries could help improve AI safety globally, without fear of its misuse by rival nations.

The race framing is softening at home, too. More than 100 organizations, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Palantir, OpenAI and Google, have now signed the July 24 Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter opposing premature restrictions. Days later, Nvidia and roughly 50 partners launched the Open Secure AI Alliance to build open defensive models and agent harnesses, citing the Hugging Face incident as its founding case. Every participant has commercial exposure to a ban, so weigh the motives. But 8 of the top 10 models on OpenRouter in July are already open-source, and the industry has now reorganized around the proposition that open weights are defensive infrastructure.

Four Asks for September

Four asks follow, and Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington on September 24, the first in over a decade, is where they could land. Trump has said AI will be on the agenda.

Shared harm standards, not shared capability standards. Agreement on what constitutes an unacceptable capability, evaluated the same way in both countries, so that "safe" means the same thing in Shanghai and San Francisco. That’s clearly missing today and doesn’t require mutual trust.

A shared safety evaluation cluster. Chinese labs are compute-constrained, so safety research competes with capability research for scarce chips. Compute earmarked for evaluation and red-teaming is cheap relative to the benefit, and the benefit is global. An international testing facility open to any vendor institutionalizes it. Require publishing safety scores alongside capability benchmarks so safety investment earns a competitive return. Then, both Chinese and US labs would have no excuse not to test their systems.

An incident notification channel. The Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers, staffed continuously since 1987, exist because a misread signal costs more than talking. An equivalent for AI incidents where attribution is contested is cheap insurance. With the rising risk of bad actor attacks and false flag operations from non-state actors, this safeguard will be increasingly needed.

Capability non-development agreements. A capability never trained cannot leak. This matters more than denying Beijing another turn of the scaling crank. Beijing also wants to limit rogue actor misuse, thus agreeing on redlines in advance makes sense for both sides (no nuclear weapon command/control, no AI uplift to bio weapon design, no AI-attack on civilian infrastructure, no autonomous self-replication outside control environments ). General commercial models have no need for bio and chemical threat design, so keeping defense use case training only in military labs on both sides seems quite reasonable.

Another Asilomar moment

At Asilomar in 1975, molecular biologists imposed a voluntary moratorium on a class of recombinant DNA experiments, then built the containment framework that governed the field for decades. They acted before the capability matured enough to do real harm.

That view is starting to catch on in the AI labs now. On July 28, 1,200+ employees of frontier labs published Pacing the Frontier, asking Washington to support an international effort to build tools for deliberately slowing automated AI development. Signatories include top technical leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google. The concern is recursive self-improvement (RSI) of AI that goes out of control. The logical extension is an explicit agreement not to implement it in frontier labs even once it becomes possible.

But this cannot stop at two capitals. If dangerous systems are small and cheap, a country with a modest research budget and a few hundred GPUs can build a competent offensive cyber agent or an inverted molecular designer. Within a few years, dozens will. Any regime binding only Washington and Beijing binds the two parties least likely to defect and leaves the growing middle untouched. A U.S.-China agreement is the necessary first move, not the finished structure, and it has to open immediately to third parties. That is how Asilomar's containment norms and the Montreal Protocol scaled.

Bigger AI is not more dangerous. Better orchestrated is more dangerous, less monitored is more dangerous, and irreversibly released is more dangerous. All three require cooperation with Beijing: orchestration needs shared harm standards, monitoring needs shared evaluation infrastructure, and irreversible release needs joint agreement on what never gets built. September 24 is a good place to start.

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

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### Global Intelligence Report for Thursday, August 13, 2026

**Published:** August 13, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-thursday-august-13-2026.md



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### Former NSA Chief Gen. Paul Nakasone: AI Is Changing the Cyber Battlefield

**Published:** August 12, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/former-nsa-chief-gen-paul-nakasone-ai-is-changing-the-cyber-battlefield.md

Artificial intelligence is transforming cyber warfare - and former NSA Director and U.S. Cyber Command Commander Gen. Paul Nakasone says the speed of that transformation demands a new approach to America’s defense.

In this episode of The Cipher Brief’s State Secrets podcast, Suzanne Kelly sits down with Gen. Nakasone to discuss how AI is reshaping offensive and defensive cyber operations - and why increasingly autonomous systems could fundamentally change the role humans play in cyber conflict.

They examine China’s penetration of U.S. telecommunications and critical infrastructure, cyber threats from Iran, Russia and North Korea, the growing ransomware threat, the race to prepare for quantum computing, and what Ukraine is teaching the world about autonomous warfare.

Gen. Nakasone also explains why America’s intelligence capabilities remain a critical competitive advantage, why defending critical infrastructure requires deeper partnerships between government and the private sector, and what national security leaders should be watching now.

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### How About Equipping Local Law Enforcement with a Better Anti-Drone Arsenal?

**Published:** August 12, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/we-trained-them-we-certified-them-we-just-never-listed-anything-they-could-use.md

During the week of March 9, drones came over Barksdale Air Force Base in waves. Barksdale is the home of the 2nd Bomb Wing, one of the places this country keeps its nuclear-capable bombers. The base issued a shelter-in-place order and stopped flight-line operations, and the Air Force has declined to say precisely how many aircraft were up there or who was flying them. NORTHCOM's counter-drone fly-away kit, the good one, the one that worked over a strategic installation in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury on February 28, was somewhere else. There is only one of them.

Then General Gregory Guillot told Congress the number that should have ended the conversation about whether we have this handled. "About a quarter of the ones that we detect, we're able to defeat." He offered it as good news, and by the standard of the previous year he was right: in 2025, he said, "almost every one that was detected was not defeated."

Welcome to The Iron Triangle, a dedicated column serving the procurement officers who are asked with buying the future, Investors funding the next generation of defense technology, and the policy wonks analyzing impact on the global order.

Hold that in your head. The federal government with every authority Congress can write, the entire electromagnetic spectrum at its disposal, and a defense budget larger than the next nine countries combined, stops one drone in four over its own bomber bases.

Now we are handing the same problem to a sheriff's department in Talladega, and we have written them a rule that is worse.

A Rule That Anticipates Everything Except the Answer

On July 6, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security published the interim final rule implementing the SAFER SKIES Act, effective July 1, and for the first time extended real counter-drone authority to state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement, and, critically, to correctional agencies. This is overdue, it was built fast, and the people who wrote it deserve credit for standing up a certification and oversight architecture on a compressed timeline.

Then you get to the Authorized Technologies List, which is the part that decides what a certified agency may actually field. The Departments expect the initial list to contain three categories: radio-frequency detection with command-and-control signal interception, RF disruption (broadband and protocol-specific jamming), and RF protocol manipulation, meaning command injection and cyber takeover. All three are radio-frequency categories. There is no fourth.

This would be an unremarkable sequencing decision except that the rest of the rule plainly contemplates bringing an aircraft down by physical means. The statute authorizes certified agencies to use reasonable force to "disable, damage, or destroy" an unmanned aircraft. The rule requires air-traffic notification for mitigation that emits no radio frequency, and the preamble explains why in language that leaves nothing to interpretation: such an action can affect the airspace "for example by bringing an unmanned aircraft down or creating falling debris." The rule requires Mitigation Certification for personnel who physically intercept a drone in flight.

So the rule trains an agency to do it. Certifies the officer to do it. Writes the falling-debris notification procedure for when they do it. And then hands them a list with nothing on it they can do it with. Plainly spoken, the rule does not include kinetic interceptors, something that knocks a drone out of the sky.

That is what happens when a list gets populated by whatever already had the deepest federal deployment history, which is exactly what the Departments said they were doing. The RF categories had the paperwork. So the RF categories got the boxes. The list has nothing to do with what works. It is a fossil record of what has already been bought.

Three Categories, One Point of Failure

Here is why this is a safety problem and not a paperwork problem. The three listed categories are functionally distinct and they share a single dependency: every one of them requires the target aircraft to present an exploitable radio link. Where there is no link, interception has nothing to intercept, jamming has nothing to jam, and cyber takeover has no protocol to take over. They do not degrade independently. They fail together, at the same instant, against the same threats.

Three classes of aircraft now routinely present no such link. A drone flying a stored waypoint route with its control link severed emits nothing and listens to nothing; this is a checkbox on consumer airframes. A protocol-hardened or custom-built airframe falls outside the signature libraries that detection-and-takeover systems depend on. And then there is fiber optic, which is the one that should be keeping planners awake. They manage control and video via physical filament. There is no radio link at all. Fiber optic drones are immune to jamming as a matter of physics rather than engineering. Russia is turning out more than fifty thousand fiber-optic FPV drones a month at a single facility in Veliky Novgorod. The technique defeated RF countermeasures at Kharkiv. It defeated them over Victory Base Complex in Baghdad, where there was no visible intercept attempt at all.

None of this is exotic. It is three years old, it is cheap, and it is documented in open sources that any competent adversary reads on the same afternoon you do.

An agency limited to the three RF categories is superbly equipped against a careless hobbyist with a stock quadcopter and defenseless against anyone who has been paying attention. That is precisely the inverse of the risk profile the rule exists to address.

The Recent Events Are Not Ambiguous

On June 24, just twelve days before the rule was published, the Justice Department indicted twelve defendants in what it called the largest federal prosecution to date involving coordinated drone operations to smuggle contraband into prisons. Ten federal facilities across eight states. Thirty-eight documented drops using six aircraft, running from September 2023 through May 2026. Methamphetamine, K-2, Suboxone, cell phones, tobacco, and saw blades.

Two and a half years of flights. Thirty-eight of them are documented. That is not a hobbyist wandering into restricted airspace. That is a logistics operation with route planning, aircraft attrition, and a customer base. Organizations at that level of sophistication adapt to countermeasures. The adaptation most cheaply available to them is the one the initial Technologies List cannot answer.

Compare the coverage. Five days later a JetBlue crew reported striking a drone on approach to JFK, and it led the news for a week before a preliminary investigation found no physical evidence that it happened at all. The collision that may have been nothing got the cameras. The thirty-eight drops that certainly happened got a press release from the Middle District of Georgia.

The Part That Should Embarrass Us

Now for the contrast that makes this a column instead of a comment.

On January 28, Brigadier General Matt Ross, who directs Joint Inter-Agency Task Force 401, told reporters: "I see us using low-collateral kinetic interceptors at all installations in the homeland." The Deputy Secretary of Defense had directed JIATF-401 to ensure kinetic capability at every location. Two days later the task force awarded $5.2 million for the Bumblebee V2, a kinetic interceptor, with deliveries beginning in March. Asked about squeamishness over kinetic engagement inside the United States, Ross said he "fundamentally disagrees."

Same airspace. Same threat. Same country, in the same calendar year. The Department of War calls low-collateral kinetic interception essential and is buying it for every installation in the homeland. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security published a list on which that category does not exist.

What Each Corner of the Triangle Should Take From This

For the Procurement Officer, understand what you are budgeting against. You can be accredited, certified, trained, and funded, and still have nothing to buy, because the box your requirement lives in has not been created. The rule as published does not tell you plainly that kinetic capability is unavailable to you. State and local agencies are writing fiscal-year plans and grant subaward requests against it right now, and some of them are going to buy capability they are not authorized to employ.

For the Investor, this is the diligence question you are not asking. You have been asking whether the technology works and whether there is a customer. Start asking a third question: what category does this go in, and does that category exist yet? A company can be technically excellent, combat-proven, and commercially validated, and still be unsellable because a list has no line for it. Listing risk is not a footnote in the regulatory section of the deck. In this sector it is the whole thesis, and it is currently unpriced.

For the Policy Wonk, notice what just happened to the locus of policy. Congress debated the SAFER SKIES Act in public. The interim final rule went through interagency review and took comment. But the Authorized Technologies List, the instrument that actually determines what a certified American police department may deploy against a drone over a school, is an administrative artifact updated through a coordination portal. No one voted on it. Most people affected by it do not know it exists.

I have spent years watching good capability lose to bad process, and I thought I had seen the full catalogue. I had not. The Valley of Death I have been writing about is a money problem: you have the technology, you cannot get the contract. This is something else. This is a company that has the technology, the customer, the certification, the training pipeline, and the federal deployment history, and cannot sell, because the taxonomy has no word for what it built. Call them the Unlisted. They are the Forgotten Bench's stranger cousin, and they lose more quietly, because there is no rejection letter. There is just a list that does not mention them.

The fix is small and it is already scheduled. The Departments said they would run a sixty-day sprint to revise the list after publication. Add a fourth category, low-collateral kinetic interception, defined narrowly enough to exclude firearms, unguided ballistic means, directed energy, and anything heavy enough to be its own hazard. Write objective listing criteria the way the RF categories already have them: bounded interceptor mass, bounded terminal energy, demonstrated fail-safe behavior on loss of lock, a modeled and test-validated debris footprint, a declared engagement envelope. Then say plainly, in one sentence, that until such a category exists, kinetic mitigation is unavailable so that nobody spends a grant on a capability they cannot lawfully employ.

The Risk

I am not going to pretend this one is free, because it is not, and the people who will be nervous about it are right to be. Radio-frequency mitigation that fails harmlessly drops a link. Kinetic mitigation that fails drops an object, and it drops it over a stadium concourse, a prison yard at count time, an interstate at rush hour. The rule's own falling-debris notification requirement exists because somebody thought that through, and a two-kilogram interceptor over a crowd is not a spreadsheet exercise. Widening this list carelessly buys us a very bad Tuesday.

There is a second risk, and I have written this column before from the other direction. A category written narrowly enough becomes a moat for whoever helped write it, which is how well-intended technical criteria turn into incumbency by another name. That is the ITAR story wearing a domestic uniform, and anyone advocating for a new category, including me, should be watched for it.

And a third: certification is not proficiency. A deputy with forty hours of classroom time and a kinetic interceptor is a genuinely different risk than an operator who has done it a thousand times. Recurrency has to be tied to the effector an agency actually fields, not to one undifferentiated certificate, because competence with a jammer transfers to a kinetic interceptor exactly not at all.

None of that argues for keeping the category empty. It argues for writing it carefully, on a clock, with real criteria, which is a harder job than leaving the box blank, and the reason the box is blank.

We have built a system in which the most consequential procurement decision in American counter-drone policy is not made by a program office, a contracting officer, or a member of Congress. It is made by whoever maintains a list. Comments on the rule close on September 4. After that, the question stops being what we should have listed and becomes what we have to explain. The honest version of that question is this: when a drone that does not answer a radio comes over the wire at a federal prison, and the certified, trained, funded officer standing under it has nothing on the list to use, whose signature is on that?

Disclosure: Atlas Special Projects prepared a public comment on the rule discussed below on behalf of a counter-UAS manufacturer. The argument here is that of the author, and it applies to a category of technology rather than to any one company's product.

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

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### Global Intelligence Report for Wednesday, August 12, 2026

**Published:** August 12, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-wednesday-august-12-2026.md



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### Lessons on Political Violence, State Capacity, and Democratic Resilience

**Published:** August 11, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/lessons-on-political-violence-state-capacity-and-democratic-resilience.md

Book Review

American Pogroms: Lessons on Political Violence, State Capacity, and Democratic Resilience

Steven R. Ward

Daniel Byman. American Pogroms: How Forgotten Massacres Shape America. Oxford University Press, 2026.

National security professionals spend much of their careers studying political violence abroad. They analyze insurgencies, ethnic conflict, civil unrest, democratic backsliding, and state failure around the globe. Daniel Byman’s American Pogroms asks readers to perform the far more uncomfortable exercise of applying the same analytical frameworks to the United States. The result is a highly original and timely book.

Byman, a leading scholar of terrorism and political violence, is uniquely qualified for the task. He argues persuasively that episodes of frontier violence, religious persecution, and vigilante justice in American history are better understood through a provocative term normally associated with Tsarist Russia and anti-Jewish violence. As he presents them, these events fit the pattern of “pogroms,” organized campaigns in which elite-led members of a dominant community attack a vulnerable minority to preserve or restore an existing political and social order.

That distinction matters because it shifts attention away from spontaneous public disorder and toward the political and institutional conditions that make organized violence possible. In Byman’s account, pogroms are not irrational explosions of hatred but instruments of social control, political coercion, and democratic exclusion couched in terms of local justice and security. Across nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, they shared common features: overwhelmingly one-sided violence, victims blamed for provoking it, perpetrators rarely punished, and general success in stalling social change.

The book ranges widely across U.S. history, beginning with anti-Mormon violence and continuing through anti-Catholic riots, anti-Chinese expulsions, anti-Mexican violence, and anti-Black massacres, including the New York Draft Riots of 1863, the overthrow of Reconstruction-era governments, and the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street.” Byman demonstrates remarkable continuity across episodes separated by generations and directed against different oppressed communities. Still, each chapter tells a compelling story, with individual events vivid enough to stand on their own while building a cumulative case.

Byman’s real achievement lies in explaining why this violence occurred so often. The same variables recur: previously subordinate communities appear poised to gain political, economic, or social influence; political and civic leaders frame these developments as existential threats; rumors and conspiracy theories portray minorities as dangerous aggressors; appeals to protect women, religion, or traditional values supply moral cover for coercion; and local law enforcement proves unwilling, unable, or politically reluctant to intervene. Once unleashed, violence develops its own momentum while advancing the objectives of those who encouraged it.

One of Byman’s most important insights is that these pogroms always “revolved around the vital question of who should enjoy the full rights of being an American.” Violence emerged when established communities believed that expanding rights for others threatened their political dominance. Pogroms became mechanisms for determining who could safely vote, hold office, own property, participate in civic life, or even remain in a community.

The discussion of elections is especially compelling. Throughout American history, elections repeatedly served as focal points for communal violence because they made shifts in political power immediate rather than hypothetical. Immigration, emancipation, demographic change, and new voting rights threatened established coalitions, and influential elites sometimes chose intimidation and violence rather than risk losing power through democratic competition.

This observation deserves particular attention today as the United States enters another contentious election cycle. Byman does not argue that history is destined to repeat itself, nor does he indulge in alarmism. Instead, he reminds readers that democratic resilience depends less on the goodwill of political officials than on institutions capable of enforcing the rule of law regardless of circumstance.

That institutional emphasis is another critical insight. Byman argues that the United States largely escaped its history of pogroms not because prejudice disappeared but because institutions improved. Professional police forces, stronger federal authority, independent courts, investigative journalism, civil rights enforcement, and broader conceptions of citizenship raised the political and legal costs of organized violence. The history he recounts is therefore one of inadequate state-building and state capacity as much as racial and religious conflict. He also briefly discusses advances in civil rights, stronger state protection, changing attitudes, and the gradual recovery of the truth about these dark periods in American history.

The book’s final chapters ask whether current safeguards remain sufficient. Byman points to several developments over the past decade that already concern national security professionals: rising political polarization; fragmented media environments in which rumor outpaces verified information; declining trust in public institutions; greater tolerance for political intimidation; and leaders who portray opponents as existential enemies rather than democratic competitors. None guarantees renewed communal violence, but collectively these conditions resemble those that historically made it more likely.

Perhaps the book’s most sobering lesson concerns accountability. Again and again, Byman shows that American pogroms flourished not merely because prejudice existed but because influential leaders believed they would face no consequences for encouraging or tolerating violence. Political elites organized mobs, newspapers legitimized inflammatory narratives, local authorities failed to intervene, and prosecutions seldom followed. Violence became politically profitable because impunity was the norm. As Byman observes, mobs carry out attacks, but elites determine whether violence is encouraged, restrained, or ignored. This lesson is neither partisan nor ideological. Democracies endure only when political leaders accept electoral defeat, the rule of law constrains those tempted to incite violence, and citizens refuse to let fear, rumor, or grievance define who belongs.

That lesson gives American Pogroms significance well beyond historical scholarship. Domestic political violence is not merely a law enforcement problem but a test of state effectiveness. Citizens must demand that leaders at every level possess the capacity and the will to enforce the law impartially, monopolize legitimate force against mobs bent on intimidation, and protect vulnerable citizens during periods of intense political competition. Domestic security depends not only on preventing terrorism or responding to disorder after violence erupts, but also on preserving confidence in elections, maintaining politically neutral law enforcement, resisting elite incitement, and holding those who encourage violence accountable regardless of status or party. History suggests that elections become especially dangerous when influential actors regard losing office as an existential threat rather than an ordinary feature of constitutional government.

More than an excellent history, American Pogroms is a sophisticated study of political violence, democratic resilience, and the foundations of domestic order. Elegantly written, meticulously researched, and analytically rigorous, it deserves a wide readership among policymakers, law enforcement and homeland security leaders, judicial and intelligence professionals, and anyone concerned with safeguarding American democracy. By turning the study of political violence inward, Daniel Byman has produced a book that illuminates neglected chapters of America’s past while offering a timely framework for recognizing—and preventing—the conditions under which they might return.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

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### Global Intelligence Report for Tuesday, August 11, 2026

**Published:** August 11, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-tuesday-august-11-2026.md



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### A War Crimes Prosecutor's Inside Account of Al Qaeda's Secret Nuclear Plot

**Published:** August 11, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/a-war-crimes-prosecutor-s-inside-account-of-al-qaeda-s-secret-nuclear-plot.md

BOOK REVIEW: SECOND WAVE: INSIDE AL QAEDA’S POST-9/11 ATTACK PLAN AND AMERICA’S SECRET EFFORT TO STOP IT

By Michael Lebowitz / Diversion Books

Reviewed by: Robert J. Eatinger, Jr.

The Reviewer: Robert Eatinger is a former Senior Deputy General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency and a retired Captain in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps with 30 years of combined active and reserve service. He is now in private law practice.

REVIEW: The horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, were not the be all and end all of al Qaeda’s plans for mass casualty attacks in the United States. It was but one attack in al Qaeda’s war on America. In Second Wave: Inside al Qaeda’s Post-9/11 Attack Plan and America’s Secret Effort to Stop It, former Department of Justice National Security Division attorney and Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions prosecutor Michael Lebowitz describes al Qaeda’s plan to smuggle explosives into the United States and trigger a second wave of attacks on U.S. soil. The scheme relied on the business operations of a Pakistani family — Saifullah Paracha and his son Uzair — who held U.S. permanent resident status. Investigators’ scrutiny of the family’s shipping company intensified once they tied Saifullah to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11. By 2003, U.S. intelligence believed those explosives were already en route through American ports, and officials could not rule out that they included nuclear or radiological material for a so-called dirty bomb — the nightmare scenario investigators came to call the “Second Wave.”

As a military commissions prosecutor, Lebowitz had access to a staggering volume of law enforcement and intelligence information as well as to investigators, defense counsel, and even some participants. He had to sift through all these materials — as he would to present a case to a jury — to reconstruct the plot from its beginning prior to 9/11 to its disruption. Second Wave is not, however, a prosecution memo. The book is not seeking to prove the elements of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Far from it; the book could have just as easily been written by a defense attorney as by a prosecutor. Rather, Lebowitz has written Second Wave to engage the reader by telling the story from the different perspectives of participants and those trying to stop them or investigate them. The narrative hops back and forth in time throughout the book but not in a way that loses the reader. Instead, it makes sense and keeps one interested.

The book becomes a page turner as one progresses through it. At times, it reads less like a non-fiction and more like an intrigue novel. Lebowitz uses dramatic writing at times to whet one’s curiosity. You want to know what happens next. For example, he writes “Majid didn’t know it then, but his direct involvement with al Qaeda would eventually have real-world consequences. People were going to die.” Elsewhere, he tells us “Farhats’ persistence would later be rewarded with answers, some more harrowing that she or her family could bear.”

The main players are not two-dimensional caricatures understood only by what they did or said. Lebowitz takes time to develop their backgrounds and personalities. We get to know them, at least to the extent Lebowitz could form a view of them from the information he accessed and the interviews he conducted. Second Wave seeks to tell us who they were and how they came to be where they were and do what they did. We get a feel for which major developments were planned and which were purely circumstance but fateful. Lebowitz, however, does an excellent job of telling the story to the extent the information allows. Who among the participants was truly evil and who among them was naïve or duped? We do not even today know the answer to those questions for everyone. What is unknown, he does not attempt to resolve.

A key fact to the plot remains unknown–did the patriarch of the family know what he was doing. It does not remain unknown for lack of investigative effort. Neither does it remain unknown because the patriarch’s interrogation was poorly conducted. The patriarch’s interrogation is meticulously detailed over a number of pages. The interrogation was clearly an important event in the investigation and was superbly conducted by FBI Special Agent Janelle Miller. The fact remains unknown despite the masterful interrogation because of a demand for a potty break that was not made by the subject of the interrogation. We are left to wonder whether the interrogation was crippled because someone who was not doing the interrogating had a weak bladder or because that someone’s ego was bruised by not doing the interrogating.

US counterterrorism operations after 9/11 were and remain highly controversial and Second Wave does not avoid the controversy. Lebowitz has a definite view, and he expresses it throughout the book. He does not, however, interrupt telling the story of the second wave plotting to expound on his position; he waits until the story concludes.

Unlike an intrigue novel, Second Wave does not have an exciting, everything is wrapped up ending. It could not and remain true to the facts. The book had to end as it does to give it a purpose beyond just telling the story. There is meaning to how Second Wave ends. It is a warning appropriate to the current times and unlike so many other things today, the warning is bipartisan.

The Cipher Brief participates in the Amazon Affiliate program and may make a small commission from purchases made via links.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

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### How Ukraine Is Changing the Way the U.S. Army Fights

**Published:** August 11, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/how-ukraine-is-changing-the-way-the-u-s-army-fights.md

“To me, the biggest way that we're doing this is introducing technology into the formations that is not fully baked. And so all of us who were in the Army in the 90s, the 2000s, even the 2010s, you were issued a piece of equipment and that was it -- maybe a TM (technical manual) and you didn't have any say in how it was made or how it should be altered. And today in a number of different organizations, we're putting the tech in an immature state in front of the soldiers -- and industry is with them -- to be able to iterate and make things so much better, so much faster. So that to me is compelling to them and they can give very real feedback and everybody that's dealt with soldiers knows they're not going to pull any punches, right?”

That was Under Secretary of the Army Michael Obadal speaking July 30, on The Future of U.S. Land Powerat the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) along with former-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who held that job during the first Trump administration.

Together, the two provided insightful looks at how the Army is dealing with the introduction of new technology.

Obadal, for example, described a personal experience from a day or two earlier when he got into an autonomous vehicle with a staff sergeant. “We're getting ready and he's showing me all this stuff, and I said, ‘This is incredible. What do you think?’ And he said, "Yeah, I don't like it.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’"

Obadal then recalled he and the sergeant had a 15minute conversation and he learned when the sergeant told him “I think this is really cool tech, but it's the integration of that tech” that bothered him. For Obadal that was something “that you don't get in a lab, you get it only by putting those things in the hands of soldiers.”

“We're introducing them at the very onset of their Army career to technologies being pushed down in units.” Obadal said, adding, “There is additional skill-type, identifier-training that they can go to. We have a software factory in Austin, Texas that's incredibly capable. It's a two-year program where they really are able to code and create new applications, all really software based.”

McCarthy recalled, “If you go back to 2017, there was nowhere near the emphasis on pushing autonomous systems into the formations. A lot of that's cultural. If you go even back to like 2008 and the Air Force's resistance to taking on more Predator caps in the Middle East, my former boss, Secretary Gates, making it a priority with the department. So, culture is a big part of it. The good thing is it's 10 years later, we have younger people, much more technologically savvy than I ever was.”

As with most people, Obadal starts his discussion of change with Ukraine, which he described as an “incredible battle lab,” about which he said, “not just the Army, the entire Department has gone to great lengths to understand what are the lessons that are coming out of there, because no one is iterating technology faster than the Ukrainians.”

He then described the initial Russian-Ukraine fighting as “positional warfare, because neither side possessed an actual maneuver, combined-arms, army.” Instead, Obadal said, “two uncoordinated armies really came together, got into positional warfare, and then we saw the innovation of the drones and a number of other things, but specific is the drones.”

Currently in the Russian-Ukraine war, Obadal said, “You have a dead zone of several kilometers between these two positions and it's very reminiscent of World War I,” where artillery was introduced, and “now the drone…is an enabler of soldiers. So how do you deny terrain with drones? How do you actually take terrain with drones?”

“We've taken all of those lessons and incorporated in,” Obadal said, “so now at this point in basic training our soldiers are actually operating drones. Not something that was happening two or five years ago. But they get that familiarization as soon as they are coming into the Army in our training centers.”

At the Army National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, Obadal said he watched U.S. operational forces conducting exercises “utilizing a number of different drones to have certain effects – electronic warfare, observation, calling-for-fire, and first-person, viewer-kinetic action. That's the ‘operationalization’ of it .”

But Obadal was most interesting to me when he expanded on how the Army had “spent billions on buying commercial off-the-shelf drones that are customized for military use,” and shipped them to “almost every division and even down in regiments.” There, he continued, “We have small groups of soldiers that have been pulled in by the leadership, given some budget, small budget, and given a facility and said, ‘Put together drones that we can go out on our training areas and utilize.’”

The result of this localized drone creation was, Obadal said, “They are not exquisite. They cost very little to make. It's okay to crash them. But what it's doing is not just the technology, the other thing we're learning, from the Ukraine, is you have an incredibly capable core that knows how to utilize drones in every aspect of it.”

Another purpose, Obadal explained, “It's not about flying an FPV drone that's part of it, it's about how do you team them together; how do you do all of the things that we're watching the Ukrainians do; so we we're baking that in into our organizations by letting them…mass-produce as many low-cost drones as they can so that they can get the repetitions…We have to go through hundreds of repetitions a day in our Army to build that repository of knowledge, turn that into doctrine, which is constantly evolving, and then spread it throughout our Army.”

Commenting on the Army drone system, McCarthy said, “They're allowing leaders at every level to be entrepreneurial in nature, to look at the capability, to learn the technology, and make recommendations to the changes in task organization. They're going to have to change the

business model of the Army. There might not be 40 people in a rifle platoon five or 10 years from now. There might be half as many. So we have the luxury where we can be a little deliberate. We may want to go faster. The world's complicated, but doing it the right way, the smart way, they're going to make better choices.”

For example, at a February 2026 exercise at Fort Stewart, Georgia, soldiers experimented with electronic warfare payloads on medium-range reconnaissance systems and tested various configurations on FPV drones to determine system limitations and capabilities, according to an

Army press release. “The ongoing innovation includes stressing equipment through rigorous training to understand what works best for operational units,” the release said.

The Army, Obadal said, is “trying to encourage small companies, new entrants that have compelling technology. We're trying to leverage as much external capital, because there is a large amount of external capital that's invested in the defense technology industry, but we just haven't rewarded it at the right level.”

Army Assistant Secretary for Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology Brent Ingraham is changing acquisition processes that are intended to foster rapid prototyping, rapid fielding and rapid acquisition of new capabilities, Obadal said.

He continued, “What it's about is continuing to prototype and experiment at scale and then feed all of that into our Combined Arms Center (CAC).” There, he said, Lt. Gen. James P. Isenhower III, CAC Commanding General will determine “now how do we put our findings back into areas that will change force management or capability requirements.”

Summing up, Obadal said, “Today we have young men and women that I see out in the organizations with highly technical capabilities that allow them to do direction-finding, to do pinpoint locations of enemy emissions, and then utilizing other capabilities to visually confirm feeding all of that back into a data-centric C2 system. So it's that human machine teaming of giving the right capabilities to our soldiers allows them to be far more effective than they were just a couple years ago.”

Obadal added, “It's an important thing to remember right now we're not replacing soldiers with autonomous or unmanned weapons. What we're doing is we are unburdening the soldier from the mundane tasks or the most dangerous tasks so that they can take a step back and they can do the things that only humans -- whether it's soldiers, commanders -- can do.”

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

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### The Houthis’ External and Internal Crises Converge: Can a Tactical Solution Fix a Strategic Problem?

**Published:** August 10, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/the-houthis-external-and-internal-crises-converge-can-a-tactical-solution-fix-a-strategic-problem.md

As they fire dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles against Saudi-led coalition forces in Yemeni government-controlled areas, the Houthis are escalating on two major external fronts. This comes at a time when they are already facing internal crises regarding the economy and the tribes of northern Yemen. The temptation is to attribute escalation abroad to an effort to distract from the crises at home.

From Sanaa’s perspective, the regime’s internal and external crises are deeply intertwined to the point that they cannot be separated. This is especially true in the conspiratorial worldview of the Houthis in which “you are either with us or against us” – meaning part of the Houthi project they call “the Quranic March” or part of the “American-Zionist-Saudi conspiracy.” This worldview is based in part on their interpretation of a Quranic verse which states, “And whoever among you allies with them is one of them.” That being the case, the Houthis see their problems as part of a broader conspiracy launched by the evil forces abroad and facilitated by Yemeni “mercenaries” at home.

This view is on display in al-Jawf, where the Dahm tribe recently rallied around a woman claiming to be a victim of the regime’s injustice. According to the woman claiming to be “Mira Saddam Hussein,” she is the secret daughter of Saddam Hussein of Iraq and her assets were confiscated by regime insider Fares Manea during a chaotic moment in the Yemeni civil war. Houthi media presented the tribal activities on her behalf as coordinated with the Saudi special committee, an organization charged with maintaining good relations via patronage between Riyadh and Yemen’s tribes. Whether there is truth to this claim is unclear, but like all conspiracy theories it is easy to release into the media space to muddy the waters and nearly impossible to conclusively disprove.

Regardless of the root of the current Houthi crisis with tribes in al-Jawf, it appears to have uniquely destabilizing potential for the regime given its geographical scope and the number of tribesmen standing in defiance. Having set up camp outside of Houthi territory, the Dahm tribe is leading an anti-Houthi line that seems to be garnering widespread support and has thousands of participants – including from areas under Houthi control.

The timing is what makes this dangerous for the Houthis: their economy continues to sink as the finite solution of looting government institutions and local industry approaches its limits. The lawless kleptocracy that they have created, alongside heavy sanctions, makes any economic improvement in the near term unlikely. This poor economic performance, combined with the fact that tribal loyalty is often bought, should worry the Houthis. Much of the population living under their control has tribal affiliations that might be “activated” as the group has not yet managed to completely decimate tribal structures in Yemeni society in favor of absolute loyalty to Abdulmalik al-Houthi. The resources to buy quiet have dried up precisely when the regime needs them most.

While one might expect this would make it an inopportune moment to escalate on additional fronts, in the past month the Houthis have attacked not only Saudi Arabia but, more recently, the Yemeni government. Three practical calculations, rather than mere distraction, help explain the timing.

The first is deterrence. At a moment of weakness, the Houthis want to kill any perception among the regime’s enemies that trouble at home translates into a reduced appetite for escalation, a perception that might invite attacks against the regime. This also comes after the regime showed relative restraint during the most intense weeks of the Israeli and American strikes on Iran, sitting out as the rest of the axis of resistance rallied and raising speculation that the regime was averse to the associated risks. By initiating conflict now, the regime is cultivating the impression that it is just as radical, reckless, and aggressive as ever.

The second is economic. Escalation against Saudi Arabia may be meant to resolve the group’s money problems in either an absolute or a relative sense. In an absolute sense, if the escalation leads to an agreement with Saudi Arabia that would infuse cash into their economy and provide the resources the regime needs to continue funding their war machine and buying quiet from those dissatisfied groups challenging them. In a relative sense, even if the Houthis cannot reach an agreement with Riyadh, targeting Saudi energy exports may make it more costly for Riyadh to keep financially supporting anti-Houthi forces in Yemen, including the Yemeni government. Absent that support, the group’s control of much of Yemen’s economy would give the regime a major advantage over its rivals, even if its budget remains small compared to that of a functional state.

The third is simple tactical opportunity. With the Strait of Hormuz blocked as fallout from the Iran war, the Houthis have additional leverage over Saudi Arabia’s alternative shipping routes through Bab al-Mandeb and the Red Sea. Still, risk aversion tempers that ambition: The desire to target Saudi oil exports without galvanizing a coalition against them, or upsetting the axis’s quieter backers such as China, limits the scope of actual disruption to these shipments.

From a conspiratorial, zero-sum ideology in which anything bad for the U.S. and its allies is good for the regime, the Houthis have scored points that exceed expectations. The Houthis are exceptionally good at picking targets that maximize extortion while limiting expected blowback, and jumping from one target of opportunity to the next keeps their adversaries guessing. Still, this approach of focusing on the short-term targets of opportunity and very long term eschatological vision leaves a strategic gap that will likely lead group’s structural problems to grow more severe and eventually erupt in an inevitable crisis.

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

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### America, North Korea, and the Search for Peace

**Published:** August 10, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/america-search-peace.md

The South Korean Buddhist monk, the Venerable Pomnyun Sunimin, in his book “What is Happiness?” introduces us to his philosophy of life: “Everyone born into this world has the right to be happy … and being helpful to the world and to others around us increases our own personal happiness.”

The U.S. is now ranked 24 out of the 147 countries surveyed by the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup. Factors that contribute to this ranking include higher GDP per capita, a strong social support system, higher life expectancy, greater freedom, absence of government and corporate corruption and charitable giving. The U.S. ranking has dropped each year since 2011, with a significant decline between 2022 (ranked 15) and 2025 (ranked 24).

As a world leader, the U.S. is concerned with the world around us: With the wars in Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza and the innocent people killed; with the terrorism of October 7 and the innocent Israelis killed; armed conflicts in Sudan and Myanmar; insurgencies in Africa and Asia, and the criminal conflicts and the drug cartel violence in the Americas.

With this concern, there are understandable debates and doubts in the U.S. about a myriad of issues: the amount of aid we are providing to Ukraine, to defend itself from an invading Russia that’s receiving troops and weaponry from North Korea; efforts to peacefully negotiate a ceasefire with an Iran that says it has the right to enrich uranium and kill innocent peaceful protesters; an elusive peace in Gaza when Hamas refuses to disarm and tension in the West Bank intensifies; and a nuclear North Korea building more nuclear weapons and aligned with a revanchist Russian Federation. Helplessness with the conflicts in Sudan and Myanmar and the jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State operating throughout Africa. Security concerns in Haiti and Ecuador due to gang violence and our inability to effectively counter the flow of illicit drugs coming into the U.S., primarily from Mexico, Columbia, and China. It’s hard to find happiness when assessing the world around us and the absence of peace.

Working with our allies and partners is an integral part of diplomacy and conflict resolution. NATO, AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.) and allies like South Korea, Japan and the Philippines are key to managing the ever-increasing security threats around the world. How we manage these relationships with our allies and partners is important.

Domestically, extreme political polarization has replaced polite political debate. A myriad of issues contribute to anxiety among the people: reported cuts to food stamps, Medicaid and social programs, with the rise in food and gas prices that receives daily media coverage. Nicolas Kristof of the New York Times reports a rise in homelessness in California, Oregon, and Hawaii and the plight of the Americans left behind. There’s extensive media coverage to rescind a planned $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and whether it was vandalism or shoddy construction of the Reflecting Pool in our Nation’s capital. Indeed, there are other political and social issues, like AI, that the average informed American is exposed to daily. Following these and other foreign and domestic issues is important for an informed electorate that will be voting in November and in 2028, but are we on overload? Of concern is the extreme polarization of views on these issues and the government’s responsibility to inform and seek the public’s support on these important issues, without adding to the polemics.

The author of “What is Happiness?” tells us: “Between 1995 and 1998, about three million people died of hunger and disease in North Korea and those who survived also suffered greatly as their family members, friends and neighbors died.” Despite North Korea’s formidable nuclear and missile capabilities, there are exigent health and food issues that continue to demand attention. The U.S. previously helped with these humanitarian issues because it was the correct thing to do. Returning to talks with North Korea to halt their nuclear and missile programs, with the lifting of sanctions and no longer demanding denuclearization as a condition for talks, would be the correct thing to do. It would be a positive development for Northeast Asia and the Korean people and hopefully contribute to the eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula.

Progress with North Korea should bring some form of happiness to the Korean people and to the people in the U.S. who cry out for a more peaceful world.

The author is a former Associate Director of National Intelligence. All statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government.

This piece was originally published in The Washington Times and is republished here with permission.

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

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### Global Intelligence Report for Monday, August 10, 2026

**Published:** August 10, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-monday-august-10-2026.md



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### Dead Drop: August 9 - 15

**Published:** August 9, 2026 | **Author:** Suzanne Kelly | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/dead-drop-august-9-15.md

THIS DOESN'T REALLY WORK BOTH WAYS -- The Washington Post includes excerpts from reporter Joby Warrick’s new book about Carlos the Jackal, the infamous terrorist who electrified Europe in the 1970s. Warrick describes meeting Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a son of Venezuelan leftists, in Poissy Central Prison last year. Apparently, Carlos/Iilich wanted to show Warwick that he’s still got it. “I killed 83 people by my own hand,” he boasted. But when asked about a hostage taking in Vienna in 1975, in which three people died, he said, “You know,we didn’t intend to kill anyone.” Guess you can’t always have it both ways, eh?

And a birdie told us that retired LTG Mark Hertling’s book, If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal, was announced as a Gold Winner by the Nonfiction Authors Association. Congrats LTG!

THE KREMLIN’S HIT JOB IN POLAND? The Associated Press reports that Poland has foiled an alleged Russian plot to assassinate a Ukrainian-American citizen in Warsaw—the first known attempt by Russia to target a U.S. citizen on the territory of another NATO country, according to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Polish authorities arrested a Russian citizen on Aug. 7 who allegedly had been recruited by Russian intelligence. The operation to thwart the would-be assassin was said to have been conducted in cooperation with U.S. intelligence services. But the identity of the intended victim—and precisely how the hit was supposed to go down—remain classified. Tusk offered one clue about Moscow’s motive: The target, he said, was “uncomfortable for the Putin regime.” Well that narrows it down.

DID YOU SEE THIS? New Zealand's Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) used its newly released 2026 threat assessment to disclose that it had quietly shut down an attempt by a Chinese state-linked outfit to get a foothold in the South Pacific — not through a shell company or a diplomatic cutout, but an observatory. According to reporting by Reuters, Purple Mountain Observatory, based in China, tried to install ground-based satellite-tracking equipment in New Zealand by working through a local company that was likely unaware that the equipment could collect intelligence of military value. NZSIS says China is the only country that has been conducting espionage "at scale," in New Zealand, though Intel officials stopped short of telling Kiwi businesses to stop doing deals with Chinese partners. (Especially for outfits with telescopes, apparently.)

GET YOUR A** OUT OF THE BOARDROOM — Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg reportedly has asked major defense firms to send board members, not just CEOs, into the Pentagon for classified briefings on "the severity of the threat" facing the U.S. It's an unusual move as the department pushes for a wartime industrial footing. His message to contractors: "Those who don't ... will be gone."

PYONGYANG’S SIDE HUSTLE: North Korea has apparently found a new way to monetize the American workplace: work-from-home jobs. A year-long Wall Street Journal investigation found that North Korean IT operatives are using stolen identities, AI-generated résumés and even face-swapping technology to land remote jobs at U.S. companies. This isn’t exactly a new headline but there are compelling new details about how it happens. According to the reporting, one cell applied to more than 1,000 companies in just three months time. But the paycheck is the point. The Treasury Department has found that as much as 90% of the workers’ salaries flows back to Kim Jong Un’s regime, with the operation generating as much as $800 million a year. Investigators traced some of that money to a company sanctioned for its connection to Pyongyang’s weapons program. And because even North Korean espionage needs an American gig economy, U.S. facilitators provide laptops, bank accounts and even stand-ins for job interviews and company meetings.

GERMANY’S SPIES GET PERMISSION TO SPY: The Guardian reports that the German cabinet has approved legislation dramatically expanding the powers of the country’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, and domestic security service, the BfV — including the authority to hack computer systems, disrupt foreign cyber operations and use spyware and AI to analyze data. The reforms (which must still pass parliament) would also allow German intelligence to take active measures against threats, including secretly neutralizing explosives. That provision comes amid growing concern over hybrid operations, including last week’s discovery of an explosive-laden drone at Leipzig/Halle Airport. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt calls the overhaul a “security revolution” and said the goal was to turn Germany’s intelligence agencies into “genuine secret services.” Germany’s postwar intelligence apparatus has traditionally operated under unusually tight restrictions, thanks to the country’s less-than-fond memories of what happens when governments give spies too much freedom. For now, Germany is about to give its spies permission to do more spy stuff.

THE LAUNDRY TRUCK THAT WASN’T: President Trump’s recently revealed catering-truck switcheroo in Turkey has apparently given new life to one of the stranger bits of 9/11 lore. On a recent Joe Rogan Experience podcast, journalist Annie Jacobsen, by her own admission passed along an unverified tip, saying a “CIA spy pilot” named Ken Collins told that her George W. Bush was smuggled around Texas (or Florida) in a laundry truck on 9/11 to evade possible attacks before being taken to the “doomsday plane.” There’s just one problem: Bush’s movements that day are exceptionally well documented. He went from Sarasota to Barksdale Air Force Base to Offutt Air Force Base and then back to Washington aboard Air Force One. The Bush Presidential Library confirms the itinerary, as does extensive contemporary and retrospective reporting with no references to doomsday planes let alone laundry vehicles. Collins, who died in 2022 at age 93, is an intriguing source. He was a genuine CIA-associated A-12 Oxcart test pilot, later profiled extensively by Jacobsen herself, in her book Area 51 but not exactly a presidential security insider. So now we have a genuine 2026 presidential catering-truck deception apparently giving an entirely unverified 2001 laundry-truck tale a second life and putting us through the spin cycle.

RUSSIA’S LEIPZIG MESSAGE? WE COULD HAVE BLOWN UP YOUR PLANE. U.S. intelligence believes the explosive-laden drone discovered at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle Airport was a Russian operation. According to The Guardian, German authorities, however, have not publicly endorsed that conclusion, leaving public attribution officially unresolved. The drone was found beside a Ukrainian cargo aircraft carrying ammunition and was packed with Semtex and a detonator. It reportedly may have struck the aircraft — but the bomb didn't explode. Investigators still aren't certain why. Which raises a deliciously sinister possibility: What if the point wasn't to blow up the plane, but to demonstrate that someone could? A Russian intelligence operation that leaves behind an unexploded bomb might be less about destruction than communication. No evidence currently establishes that was the plan. But if Moscow wanted to send a message without starting a war, “Nice airport you have there. Shame if something happened to it” is a pretty unmistakable one.

MOSSAD'S "BRING BACK AHMADINEJAD" PLAN GETS THE AXE — SO DO ITS ARCHITECTS: Regime change is easier to propose than to pull off. According to the Times of Israel, citing Israel's Channel 12, Mossad Director Roman Gofman has removed the chiefs of the agency's Intelligence Directorate and Iran Division. According to the reporting, the officials were believed to be the architects of a plan to topple the regime in Tehran by arming Kurdish factions under Israeli/U.S. air cover and installing former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new man in charge. Yes, that Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying one. Netanyahu reportedly used the plan to help talk President Trump into February's war. It didn't survive contact with reality, and neither did the two officials' job titles — though both are said to be staying on in Mossad in quieter roles. Their removal is a fate The National suggests is really about insulating Netanyahu from blowback.

ARE THERE ALIENS IN THE PAPERWOK? The Department of War is apparently not ready to phone home just yet. On Friday, the Pentagon announced the fifth release of declassified and historical Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files, as part of something called the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters or “PURSUE.” (Because apparently even UFO disclosure needs an acronym.) The latest batch is now posted on the Pentagon’s UFO website, with the department promising that more files will be released on a “rolling basis.” The Pentagon offered few details about what’s actually in this latest installment, so this is a see for yourself kind of operation.

EX SECAF LOSES CLEARANCE. APPARENTLY AIR FORCE ONE DOESN’T TAKE CRITICISM WELL: The Pentagon announced on Friday that former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has lost his eligibility to access classified information and is barred from holding any sensitive position, accusing him of improperly disclosing classified information about the capabilities of the new Air Force One. Kendall says he did no such thing and says he hasn’t even been told precisely what he supposedly disclosed. The Pentagon’s action sends a very clear SIGNAL from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: suspected mishandling of classified information will not be tolerated. Well, at least from some people about some topics. Either way, the message from Hegseth is clear: Loose lips sink clearances and apparently, so do loose comments about pet presidential projects.

Got news to share? Drop us a note: Editor@thecipherbrief.com

Read more expert-driven national security insights exclusively in www.thecipherbrief.com.

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### Global Intelligence Report for Friday, August 7, 2026

**Published:** August 7, 2026 | **Author:** Katharine Campbell | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-friday-august-7-2026.md



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### Global Intelligence Report for Thursday, August 6, 2026

**Published:** August 6, 2026 | **Author:** Brad Christian | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-thursday-august-6-2026.md



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### Former CIA Iran Expert: US-Iran War in an "Operational Pause"- But Next Move Could Trigger Wider War

**Published:** August 5, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/former-cia-iran-expert-us-iran-war-in-an-operational-pause-but-next-move-could-trigger-wider-war.md



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### There Will be Unseen Costs to be Paid over the War in Iran. Who is Weighing Them?

**Published:** August 5, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/there-will-be-unseen-costs-to-be-paid-over-the-war-in-iran-who-is-weighing-them.md

EXPERT INTERVIEW – With an interim agreement expected as early as today between the U.S. and Iran aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic, experts are assessing the short and long-term costs of any deal.

As negotiators work on an agreement to re-implement a ceasefire and restart negotiations aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, there are questions about whether Iran will end up with more control over the strait than it enjoyed prior to the war and about the hidden costs that could include impacts on the sanctions packages that the U.S. has been using as a diplomacy tool to try and keep Iran’s malicious activities in check.

Cipher Brief Executive Editor Brad Christian spoke in-depth with former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at ODNI Norm Roule about the current “operational pause” and about the unseen costs of any deal. Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. You can also watch the interview on The Cipher Brief’s YouTube Channel.

THE INTERVIEW

Christian: The situation with Iran has continued to progress in ways that maybe people didn't expect or anticipate when this war started. How do you describe where we are right now in terms of progress toward ending this war?

Roule: Where we are right now is in a lull. This is an operational pause. We're not approaching a significant core agreement. This is instead a period of coercive restraint. It's not a ceasefire. And Iran has continued to attack ships, but you're seeing the U.S. restrain its response again here to give diplomacy a chance. The president is showing considerable restraint. At the same time, the assets we have in the region are immensely powerful, immensely capable, and very well led. So, they have everything they need to do to undertake the dramatic operations the president has discussed. The diplomacy itself that's underway is a challenge. Each side is describing it dramatically differently.

If you look at the position of each side, there has been a consistent trend. The U.S. will announce negotiations, and the Iranians will deny negotiations are taking place. A few days later, there will be indirect negotiations through regional parties, still accomplishing the same things, but we're not at the table to talk about nuclear issues, missile issues, or militia issues as originally discussed.

The Iran-Oman mechanism that's being talked about right now in the press is likely being overstated by the Iranians and by some who would believe that concessions to Iran are the appropriate outcome from this crisis. Here's why it's being overstated: If tolls of any sort are charged, what happens to a shipper who refuses to pay? How does work in association with sanctions that have been imposed by the United States? Are American ships and American-related ships, allowed to pay Iran money? Through what mechanisms, what channels? Will we sanction other countries for paying Iran money through these channels? Iran has dictated which countries can enter the Persian Gulf and the bulk of this channel is through Iranian waters, but according to press reports, the Omanis must tell the Iranians who is transiting south. Iran's parliament has said no enemy countries can transit. Are Israeli or Israeli-related ships then banned from the Gulf? These are these are hugely consequential questions that are being glossed over by those who would say, ‘well, a deal is being worked out’. But this situation does show that while the U.S. absolutely has the military edge, it is restraining itself, and that has given Iran an ability to influence some would say, ‘control the pace’ of shipping in the Gulf. That shipping continues, and I've seen reports that as many as five million barrels of oil a day are now moving through the strait, which is going to reduce the pressure on oil markets, but this remains an unreliable waterway. Insurance rates remain very high and will remain high. And the blockade, of course, remains in place. This is a very delicate situation.

We also have to consider what happens if the Houthis look at the Iranian Oman deal and say, we want the same deal regarding the Bab el-Mandeb. What is the premise to refuse that? What would we do if the Houthis responded in their own way to attacking ships in the Red Sea?

So, we're in a very consequential period. And this is a period consequential for Iran because they're also in dire need of economic assistance. Their inflation is about 70%. Unemployment is horrific in many locations. I've seen figures as high as forty to forty-five percent in some areas. And the Iranians of course are showing defiance and claiming this isn't a problem, but this has got to be touching their decision making. And I think that's something the White House is considering.

Christian: President Trump has been very clear on where he stands on the issue of paying fees for passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Why is Iran pushing this issue when there were no fees in place before the war started? Is this one of Iran's most powerful points of leverage that they have over the strait? How are you thinking about their position on these fees?

Roule: It's a good question and I'm not putting a value judgment on it. I've tried to remain neutral on these issues. But those who advocate for making a deal with Iran, you know, diplomacy comes with severe consequences. If Iran is able to acquire control over the strait, will that collapse the international sanctions regime? For example, if Iran is able to control the strait in this regard, can it dictate which food shippers can come into Kuwait? If Iran controls the strait, it now has a permanent foot on the throat of the international community. And the idea that if we just do this, we can then build on trust with an IRGC government has no evidence in reality. Now that doesn't mean that it may not happen, but those who say you can build on this are not producing an argument that makes sense. Iran would be able to inject considerable power projection into the region in an unprecedented way, gaining billions of dollars, and that money would inevitably go to its missile program and proxies. And those who talk diplomacy with Iran, and you can see this when you look at social media statements or foreign affairs articles. The authors who speak most passionately and eloquently about engagement with Iran can't seem to acknowledge that people will die as a consequence. Now, that makes me sound like I'm opposed to this but I'm just giving you all the reasons why this is a problem.

The region, of course, has no desire for Iran to have this capability. But they also have no desire for a missile and drone war. That you either have a drone war, missile war, or give in to Iran, those are usually statements made by people who aren't professional diplomats, professional policymakers or have little understanding of the regional issues. There's going to be some sort of path in the middle that works if we're to protect and preserve sanctions as our tool against Iran's terrorism and other activities and if we’re to protect and preserve the national sovereignty and security of these countries who are our partners.

Also in the details of this deal are questions over whether the U.S. military would be banned from the Persian Gulf. The Iranians would have to approve the passage of U.S. military ships, which of course we wouldn't agree to, but the Iranians could claim that as a violation and things could unravel. We're going to land in a gray area on this if diplomacy is to succeed and it may not succeed.

Christian: In public statements, President Trump seems to be losing patience with the process. The president has said before that if Iran doesn't make this deal, that's it and we've witnessed similar red line crescendo moments before. You mentioned the IRGC led government. It's clear that they are running the country now. It's not clear how the diplomatic process is working, certainly by historical standards. What are your potential measures of success or indicators that the diplomatic process has run its course and what are you watching as potential next steps?

Roule: Throughout the last twenty years, various administrations, Democratic and Republican, have each said the same thing that we will try every possible diplomatic option for as long as possible and that all responses remain on the table. But once we've shown the world that we have tried every diplomatic option and the Iranians won't take yes for an answer, won't take diplomacy for an answer, then we'll be justified in using force.

I've been in congressional testimony where I've had Republicans and Democratic State Department officials insist that was U.S. policy. And that is congruent with the President's statements. He's basically saying, ‘Look, I'm going to give them every opportunity to negotiate’ because the consequences of a much broader conflict for the region, for the Iranian people, for civilians, for the U.S. war fighters who are risking their lives in the region, all of this will come into play.

We do have the assets in the region and our leadership in the military force there is exceptional and highly experienced. And based on the nature of the attacks conducted by the U.S. military in recent weeks, one can deduce a couple of points.

The first is that we know a lot about Iran's military architecture. And second, Iran has very little defense against our attacks because we've seen very little air defense or port defense as a result. Iran only has an offensive capacity. And it's attacking civilian architecture as well as U.S. military bases, not being used by the U.S. military, but nonetheless, they're bases where we have that presence. But at some point, if you believe in international values, we we've got to stand with our partners to protect them in a way that is congruent with their national interest and leadership approaches.

Christian: Over the weekend, news reports indicated that the Gulf states were the ones that convinced President Trump to not escalate this war right now. Do you have a sense of where the Gulf states are right now in terms of their approach to President Trump, their approach to Iran?

Roule: I think you need to have several different pillars in mind. First, let's talk about what the Gulf States have done that has been quite successful. Their defense against Iran has been very, very successful as a result of years of engagement with the United States and with the U.S. private sector, which is playing a large role in their successes and will play a role in their future successes in terms of defending against cyberattacks and drone and missile attacks. No air defense is perfect, but the performance by the GCC has been exceptional. And they have protected three things that we should applaud.

First, they've protected their own nationals and their own infrastructure, which is the duty of every state. They're protecting millions of other citizens to include hundreds of thousands of Americans who live in the region. They're keeping American lives safe with their air defense. And last, they've protected the international economy, preserving through their energy flows and their handling of the situation, the ability to maintain stable energy prices and distillate impact on subsidiary industries. All of that is exceptional.

At the same time, we've seen the Saudi military crisply respond to Houthi aggression with surgical strikes, and the Saudi military joining with the United States on strikes on Iraq, which is a first. And it's also a demonstration of the quality of Saudi Air Forces in general. So, there's a sense of extremely close partnership between our militaries. But how they move forward, you know, it is their neighborhood, so how they move forward in a world where there could be a major attack on Iran is likely going to mean that they're going to face more missile and drone attacks. They're going to want a voice in this.

They know their region better than we do. We should respect that. And I think that's what you saw last week in the reports of phone calls to the president, where he gave diplomacy a chance and was about to move, and I believe he was serious, based on my understanding. But he also took into consideration partners, people who have lives on the line and are trying to defend the world's economy and know their neighborhood very well. So, I'm not unhappy with what's happened. I don't think you can criticize that. That's a natural, organic and appropriate process.

Christian: Let's talk gray zone just for a moment. We've seen reports recently that the hacks against the water infrastructure in Minnesota could have involved Iran. We've seen reports that China, although not confirmed, was planning to deliver air defense systems to Iran. There's no doubt about the cooperation continuing between Russia and Iran. What are you looking at that some of us may be missing?

Roule: Press reports confirm what many observers have cited, and that is that Iran's cyber activities have continued unabated since this conflict began. Indeed, before the conflict, against multiple actors in the United States and largely that's been successfully defended against by our national cyber architecture, as well as the architecture of our Gulf partners. The president has disagreed with the assessment on Minnesota and other places, but that does fit with the past pattern of Iranian cyber activity against SCADA and other systems in the United States. and has been a longtime target of Iran itself. It is an attack on our national infrastructure, if it's proven. And if proven and we don't respond to it, the people in Tehran are going to say, ‘Well, there's no reason we shouldn't continue to do this’. So, I think that issue itself is pushing the White House towards alternative actions besides diplomacy. And in fairness, it has been a traditional standpoint of multiple administrations to say how we respond. Is it at a time and way of our choosing? We don't respond symmetrically, you know, we don't do the exact same thing back. So, if the United States were to respond with airstrikes against Iran’s cyber architecture, which would probably be a good thing in a conflict, that is an appropriate proportional response just done differently. And it would be congruent with multiple administrations' views and statements as to how they will treat Iranian aggression.

Christian: What are you looking for next? What are you paying the most attention to?

Roule: As I mentioned, if you give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, you're going to have consequences, not only in terms of whether they will ever negotiate seriously with us, but what does it mean for the Red Sea, and all sorts of other things? And those who say, well, we can work past that usually aren't in the Gulf, usually don't have children fighting right now and usually won't pay the price of those decisions. Not to say they won't be made, but we need to be upfront on those costs, and some of the issues aren't being discussed.

What I'm looking for is the conversation about those costs. And if it doesn't happen, that's a bad thing for everybody. The other issue is I think we need to look at is how the U.S. is going to respond to continued Iranian aggression. When does the U.S. restrain itself? Right now, the president is clearly, as he's announced, looking at de-escalation. But if the Iranians continue to probe with cyberattacks and missile and drone strikes, they've got to be addressed in a way that says to Iran, that there is a material price to be paid for that.

In the negotiating channels, I would look for any evidence that the U.S. is now directly dealing with the Iranians. That's unlikely to happen in the near term. That doesn't mean that diplomacy isn't occurring robustly through our partners, but any evidence of direct negotiations with the U.S. would be a very significant uptick.

And last, I would look for someone to address the issue of how any payments to Iran, involuntarily or otherwise, will impact the sanctions regime. Failure to address that is irresponsible in a policy world and indicates that maybe that's not being taken seriously.

And maybe one more point, and that is we should expect rhetoric on each side, but we should focus on what happens on the ground via the effervescent statements that are so often in the media.

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---

### BLUF: The US Must Lead in Gray Zone Activity

**Published:** August 5, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/bluf-the-us-must-lead-in-gray-zone-activity.md

As Washington works on the historically large defense budget, there is one theme which should loom large in the budget but comparatively, will cost little. Key to our national security is countering the gray zone activity that our adversaries are waging against the US and developing our own offensive gray zone strategies. Just as we would not ignore a kinetic strike against the US, we cannot ignore the targeted gray zone attacks by adversaries but we must be careful that our approach is thoughtful, and expertly executed in order to guard against escalation. Developing such offensive and defensive strategies will require gray zone expertise, proficient knowledge of the targeted adversary, a government wide strategy, and patience. As global leaders, we also must be open and clear that we will take on these gray zone activities, but we do not have to and should not discuss the details of our actions. We need to publicly put our adversaries on notice that we will not tolerate their actions against the US and we will counter them with our own, more debilitating gray zone activities.

The National Intelligence Council describes gray zone activities as “coercion and subversion . . . below what constitutes armed conflict but outside the bounds of historically legitimate statecraft.” The IC defines the gray zone as a realm of international relations between peaceful interstate diplomacy, economic activity, and people-to-people contact on one end of the spectrum, and direct armed conflict on the other. State-led activities that happen in that space that weaken governments’ resolve to confront the US or its allies, endeavor to change a nation’s policies, or strengthen a country's global leadership would be considered gray zone activities. Deniability is critical to the success of this strategy because attribution risks escalation.

David Pitts, another Cipher Brief Expert, has written about the current phase of warfare which he calls endless wars and the need to counter them. These endless wars are the gray zone activities that our adversaries pursue against us. The White House has made an important step in that direction by appointing the first US National Security Council Director for Cognitive Advantage. There is still a way to go, however, because cognitive advantage is just one part of gray zone activity.

The US must develop expertise for whole of government strategies that bring together all of the tools for gray zone activities. Some of those activities are:

Cyber, and information operations efforts focused on undermining public/allied/local/ regional resistance, and information/propaganda in support of US goals;

Covert and clandestine operations such as espionage, infiltration, and subversion;

Enlistment of non-governmental actors and assistance to irregular military and paramilitary forces;

Economic pressures that go beyond normal economic competition;

Calculated ambiguity to include deception and denial operations.

Autocracies tend to have an advantage in executing gray zone operations. It is generally believed that non-democratic states can operate more effectively in the gray zone than open democratic societies as non-democratic nations are not limited by domestic law and regulation. The nature of their centralized systems allows them to marshal whole-of-state (and whole-of-society) resources to execute operations. The United States lags behind its autocratic adversaries in the information domain, for example, because our adversaries have ingrained gray zone tactics into their doctrines.

In democratic societies, the use of gray zone tactics can be controversial because the nature of these activities is meant to covertly shape actions. It can be challenging for democratic states to respond to gray zone threats because our legal and military systems are geared towards seeing conflicts through the perspective of war and peace with little consideration for anything in between. Democracies have failed to build consensus around gray zone concepts. The US government has been arguing over the definition and leadership of gray zone and information operations for years.

Gray zone activities are not a new concept and historically have been accepted as a long standing form of statecraft. What are now being called gray zone methods have been well documented actions throughout history. These activities have been called by such titles as “political warfare,” “covert operations,” “irregular or guerrilla warfare,” and “active measures.” It is worth examining the historic record and recalling the benefits and rationale for gray zone activities that kept nations out of kinetic fights, allowed for de-escalatory engagement, arguably shortened warfare, and saved lives.

Examples:

The Trojan Horse operation exploited many of the instruments of a gray zone campaign– creating confusion and division among the enemy, extending ostensible inducements, implanting hidden military forces, deception, and clandestine infiltration of enemy territory.

During the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the Spartans recognized that they needed to prevent an uprising by the Helots, who were key to Sparta’s agricultural and military systems. Athenians were trying to create the conditions for a Helot uprising, which would then add an irregular dimension to the conventional conflict with Sparta. The Athenians used proxy forces who were experts on the language and culture of the Helots to sow distrust among the Helots against the Spartans. The Helots began to desert Spartan forces, thereby creating a national emergency in Sparta. The Athenian historian Thucydides reported that as a result of Sparta losing Helot support, it reached out to Athens to discuss ending the wars.

The Han Empire used economic and cultural engagement—such as trade agreements, marriage alliances, and cultural exchanges—to manage tensions with nomadic powers. These actions helped secure borders and reduce the need for large-scale wars

During the Cold War, superpowers like the U.S. and USSR engaged in gray zone tactics such as espionage, sabotage, and proxy support to influence outcomes in regions like Latin America, Korea and Vietnam. These active measures as they were called, kept the competition a contested space, avoiding immediate escalation with the US.

Gray zone campaigns are likely to increase and diversify because of more enabling technologies, the erosion or absence of accompanying norms, and challenges with attribution. There is a growing awareness among some in the US national security community that if we do not develop gray zone strategies against our adversaries, then we will find ourselves no longer the global power that we have been. Without these strategies, we also limit potential responses to our adversaries to kinetic ones.

As a national security community, we have trained only a narrow group of special operators and intelligence professionals to be able to think creatively enough to devise irregular warfare plans and strategies. To produce gray zone strategies the US will need to train a work force in creativity and out of the box thinking. It also will require organization and orchestration from all assets of the US government and the development of and use of technology to bring some of the ideas to fruition. A fully conceived gray zone strategy needs to marshal all aspects of the US government: military, intelligence, economic, trade, diplomacy, and public relations.

The US is not organized as a nation to devise these strategies. Our State Department is focused on developing relationships. Our National Security Council is hollowed out. Due to issues with legal authorities, neither the Department of War nor the intelligence community can take the lead in implementing whole of government strategies. We are at a standstill and have been for several years.

What to do?

We need to be upfront that leading in gray zone operations is good for US national security. If we do not quickly make gray zone strategies a key part of our national security then we risk our global leadership role. We must put in place the tools and organization to execute these strategies. Using part of the large defense budget to show US resolve on this matter would go a long way. Putting a seasoned professional at the NSC and making him/her in charge of integrating the USG gray zone activities against specific adversaries is key to winning in this realm. A lack of coherent command-and-control, as well as jurisdictional and philosophical boundaries between government agencies, inhibits the synchronized activities needed for successful and truly whole-of-government gray zone activities and responses. We also should use the trained Department of War and intelligence community planners, working with the rest of government, to develop government-wide plans that are implemented at the White House. While we move out in this way, we should also be training our national security professionals across the government in how to develop gray zone strategies. Now is the time to make this a national imperative.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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---

### Global Intelligence Report for Wednesday, August 5, 2026

**Published:** August 5, 2026 | **Author:** Brad Christian | **Section:** Open Source Reports  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/report/global-intelligence-report-for-wednesday-august-5-2026.md



---

### Sects, Lies, and Statecraft

**Published:** August 4, 2026 | **Author:** Ryan Simons | **Section:** General  
**URL:** https://www.thecipherbrief.com/book-review/sects-lies-and-statecraft.md

SCHISM: THE STORY OF SECTARIANISM IN THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

by Simon Mabon / Yale University Press

Reviewed by Andy Dunn, former CIA Deputy Assistant Director

The Reviewer — Andy Dunn retired from the CIA in October 2021 after a 29-year career as an analyst and Agency leader. He last served as Deputy Assistant Director of the Near East Mission Center from 2020 to 2021 and as Chief of Analysis in the Iran Mission Center from 2018 to 2020. Iran and the violence perpetrated by its proxies and partners in the region were the major focus of these units. Previous assignments included multiple leadership positions in the Counterterrorism Mission Center and two war-zone tours. The views expressed in this review are the author’s own and do not represent those of the CIA or any other U.S. government agency.

REVIEW: SCHISM, by Professor Simon Mabon of Lancaster University in the UK, tackles the formidable task of explaining the ever-changing sectarian dynamics of the Middle East, with a particular focus on Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Israel. The book argues that these political and religious authorities seek to manipulate and politicize the complex and evolving sectarian identities of their populations and the region more broadly, with mixed success. Mabon contends that these identities are more fluid than Western leaders often assume. He seems to have a particular axe to grind with President Obama’s characterization of the Middle East as a region “ravaged by historical divisions,” several times harking back to this “Orientalist” (gasp!) misapprehension by the former president.

Mabon first sets out to define sectarianism in the context of the Middle East and ultimately settles on “the process of setting apart from within for political ends” after an extended and often dense review of academic debates on the issue. If you are like me, that probably still leaves you asking, “Well, OK, but what the hell does that mean?” The answer ultimately comes down to the central point he seeks to make: much of the sectarian strife that plagues the Middle East flows from political or religious actors who seek to emphasize distinctions and boundaries between groups that belong to the same broader society or faith tradition in order to serve their own political objectives. In other words, sects become sectarian only when they are mobilized, institutionalized, and weaponized for political purposes.

Mabon spends the rest of the book applying this definition to the post-colonial history of the Middle East, with brief forays further back in time. For example, Iraq’s descent into sectarian civil war in the years after the U.S. invasion in 2003 was, in Mabon’s telling, driven by political elites in each community stoking fear among Shias and Sunnis to consolidate their own power and wealth, rather than reflecting just the reemergence of age-old animosities between the two groups. He cites the 2019 Tishreen uprising, which evolved into a widespread revolt against the sect-based post-Saddam power structure, as proof that inter-sect relations are more complex than we often assume. And that identities beyond Sunni and Shia can, in this case, motivate large swaths of Iraq’s population to political action.

He applies a similar analysis to the waves of what he judges to be elite-initiated sectarian violence in Lebanon beginning in 1975, followed by anti-sectarian popular unrest — most prominently in October 2019 — driven by many of the same grievances about corruption and economic ruin that motivated the protesters in Iraq. In both countries, though, Mabon concedes that sectarian establishments have managed to maintain their grip on privilege and power despite the unrest.

Mabon’s analysis of the zigs and zags of sectarianism in Saudi Arabia and Iran — particularly since the Iranian Revolution and the storming of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca in 1979 — also seeks to persuade readers that sectarianism in both countries is as much a product of government manipulation and policy as of underlying animosity between sects. He traces the ebb and flow of Saudi government discrimination against the Shia community in the Kingdom’s Eastern Province to make his point. This ranges from the execution of Shia Shaykh Nimr al-Nimr on terrorism charges in January 2016 at one extreme to today’s efforts by Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman to foster a Saudi national identity not tied to sect.

And on and on Mabon’s examples go, which brings me to the book’s shortcomings. It often feels more like an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink recitation of the region’s sectarian woes than a focused analysis. And the outlook could only emerge from academia. The last sentence of the conclusion — “How people navigate this (sectarianism), without recourse to violence, in a particularly precarious world, remains to be seen” — is not exactly an actionable insight for readers. And while Mabon mostly avoids academia’s reflexive sympathy for the Iranian regime and hostility toward Israel (his examination of growing animosity between Jewish sects in Israel is one of the book’s highlights), his epilogue denouncing Trump’s war on Iran is only tangentially connected to his primary thesis. It is little more than a temper tantrum aimed at the admittedly ill-conceived and erratically executed U.S. campaign.

Is Mabon ultimately persuasive? I suppose, but I’m not sure in a way that goes beyond the obvious. Political and sectarian leaders manipulate their followers; oftentimes, their followers follow, and sometimes they grow tired of being manipulated. That’s true in our own depressingly tribal politics and across the world. Is the book worth reading? Again, a lukewarm yes, particularly if you are unfamiliar with the region or want a refresher on its incredibly complex recent history. It helps that it is short but be prepared for a slog through often dense prose.

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