Four juicy spy stories

Move aside spy headlines like Wildly Senior ex-CIA Guy Caught Siphoning $40M in Gold, or Trump Nominates Jay Clayton as Next Spymaster (our take btw: this ex-prosecutor who signed Maduro’s secret indictment is at least more credible than housing-finance Pulte).

Anyway, here are some other intriguing spy headlines you might've missed, starting in....

🇺🇸 The US

The House just failed to extend a critical-but-controversial spying law (s702 of FISA):

• Critical because it (eg) once helped thwart a terrorist attack on Taylor Swift! But…

• Controversial as an alleged loophole for warrantless searches of American data.

Either way, s702 just expired at midnight for the first time since its 2008 enactment, though existing FISA court approvals are still valid until next year — courts just can't issue any new spy permits until the House (now on recess) hashes this out.

But speaking of big changes... the CIA's former chief-of-disguise (Jonna Mendez) just gave an intriguing keynote at Infosecurity 2026 in London, warning of how AI is rewriting the spy-book faster than agencies can adapt. She did, however, drop a spicy hint about the enduring value of classic spycraft — using the CIA’s 1990s-era animated mask tech, she said she fooled trained observers (and even a US president) while right next to them!

And while we're talking old-school, it was interesting to see the FBI expose 13 fake consultancy websites that China's MSS was using to recruit new US sources via fake job ads. Interesting because of frankly how undergrad that tactic feels (right up there with cold LinkedIn approaches), but also alarming because it does seem to work.

Now speaking of alarming, join us over in...

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka

The country's public security minister just dropped an absolute bombshell in parliament, claiming Sri Lanka's ex-spymaster "strategically directed" one of Asia's worst-ever terror attacks — the 2019 Easter bombings that left 269 dead!

The ex-spy denies the long-running allegations, which basically suggest he 'let it happen' in cahoots with Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the hardline ex-defence minister who (with his president brother) famously crushed the Tamil Tigers. But motive? Just two days after the Easter bombing, Rajapaksa announced his run for the presidency on a 'national security' platform that delivered a landslide win.

Of course, keep in mind Sri Lanka’s current government hates the dynastic Rajapaksa family, which insists it’s all political. But speaking of long-running rivalries, join us in...

🇮🇱 Israel

We’ll save a few words by noting up-front that literally everything in this section is "allegedly", but basically it seems Mossad was running a Palestinian (with a Ukrainian passport) to help identify Hezbollah targets in southern Beirut.

But the Shiite group captured and detained him until March, when he somehow escaped during Israeli airstrikes, which Hezbollah insists were targeted to help him flee! The guy then made it several miles across town to Beirut’s upscale diplomatic quarter of Baabda, where he disappeared into Ukraine's embassy and hasn't been seen since!

Everyone now seems to agree he's no longer inside the embassy, but nobody will say where he's gone, or how he got there. Our take? Mossad is famously good at exfiltrations.

Now let's wrap it up in...

🇦🇹 Austria

We've long flagged Vienna’s reputation as the continent's undisputed espionage capital. That’s partly because of what's there: the UN, OSCE, OPEC, IAEA, etc. But it’s also thanks to Austria's traditional philosophy of 'permissive neutrality' towards Russian espionage — ie, we'll turn a blind eye, just don't target us.

And yet, we continue to sense Austria's tolerance is waning — it’s now expelled 14 Russian spooks since 2020, recently booting another three over that absolute "forest of antennas” up on Russia’s Vienna embassy rooftop — they're not sharpening the signal so Ambassador Grosov can watch the World Cup. They’re hoovering data across the city.

Oh, and just yesterday, a Brussels court jailed a local businessman who The Insider spectacularly outed as a deep-cover Russian military intel officer, smuggling inputs to sustain Putin's sputtering war machine. Watch for who Putin now 'arrests' for a trade?

Other spy stories just from this week include…

• China has objected to what it argues is a Japanese spy plane off its coast, while Germany has arrested a Munich couple for extracting military tech for China.

• Outgoing US spymaster Gabbard has just rescinded an earlier intelligence assessment which had cast doubt on claims foreign adversaries were behind the mysterious Havana Syndrome symptoms hitting Western spies/diplomats.

• And Israel has arrested a man for helping Iran target infrastructure in Haifa, while the Pentagon has quietly upgraded Israel’s counterintelligence threat to "critical" (the highest) after Israel stepped up its collection on US-Iran talks.