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    Trump’s military pressure on Maduro evokes Latin America’s coup-ridden past

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    The ghosts of sometimes deadly Latin American coups of the past are being evoked by Donald Trump’s relentless military buildup targeting Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic socialist leader, whom Washington has branded a narco-terrorist.Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile toppled in a military coup in 1973, and Rafael Trujillo, the longstanding dictator of the Dominican Republic who was assassinated in 1961 in an ambush organized by political opponents, are just two regional leaders whose fates serve as a warning to Maduro.Allende is believed to have killed himself, although some doubt that explanation, as troops stormed the presidential palace in the Chilean capital, Santiago, in a coup – fomented by then president Richard Nixon’s administration – that ushered in the brutally repressive military regime of Gen Augusto Pinochet.The CIA is believed to have supplied the weapons used to kill Trujillo.Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, escaped into exile after being overthrown in a 1954 coup also instigated by the CIA. But the event triggered a 30-year civil war that killed an estimated 150,000 people and resulted in 50,000 disappearances.The agency is also thought to have made at least eight unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba’s communist regime, which is still in power and is closely allied to Maduro.The plot to depose Castro also included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion carried out by Cuban exiles and organized by the CIA in the early months of John F Kennedy’s presidency in 1961, but which was defeated by Cuba’s armed forces.Now, as the US stages its biggest naval buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, some believe Maduro’s life is equally at risk.Washington is preparing to carry out military strikes imminently inside Venezuela on already pinpointed targets that have been identified as military facilities used to smuggle drugs, according to reports.US officials are leaving little doubt that this could lead to fatal consequences for Maduro.“Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the Miami Herald quoted a source with close knowledge of US military planning as saying. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”The Trump administration has offered a $50m bounty for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan leader, after announcing in August that it was doubling the $25m reward initially offered during Trump’s first presidency.Explaining his decision this month to authorize covert CIA actions against Venezuela, Trump pointedly refused to say whether US forces were authorized to “take out” Maduro. However, Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA Latin America analyst, said the intense security surrounding the Venezuelan leader in effect rendered the reward a “dead or alive” proposition, meaning any attempt to snatch him is likely to result in his death.“Anybody who’s going to try to take him is going to be so heavily armed that any defense that he put up would lead to them pulling triggers,” said Armstrong.“Let’s say it’s locals and they want the bounty. Most of them will assume that they’ll get the bounty dead or alive. Our forces would be a little bit more disciplined, but then imagine the adrenaline that anybody trying to do a snatch would have coursing through their veins. They’re going to be trigger-happy.“Only a fool would think that they can go in there and say, ‘OK, let me put handcuffs on you and escort you to the car.’ That’s not how it’s going to work.”Maduro has survived at least one apparent attempt on his life, when two drones exploded as he was speaking at a military parade in Caracas in 2018. Television footage shows several members of his security team rushing to his side to shield him after the explosions.Maduro accused neighboring Colombia of being responsible, although some opponents suggested the episode was a false flag operation staged to win sympathy.In May 2020, Venezuelan security forces foiled an attempt by about 60 dissidents, accompanied by two former US Green Berets, to capture and oust him in a plot that involved infiltrating the country by sea. The episode was afterwards dubbed the “Bay of Piglets” in mocking reference to the botched plot against Castro.But a fresh sign of Washington’s determination to get its hands on Maduro emerged this week when the Associated Press reported that a US agent, working for the Department of Homeland Security, had unsuccessfully tried to bribe the Venezuelan president’s pilot into diverting his plane to enable American authorities to capture him.The Trump administration has deployed a daunting array of military hardware off the Venezuelan coast in what appears to be an intimidating statement of intent to bring about regime change in the country.Last week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Gerald Ford, the biggest aircraft carrier in the US navy, would sail from Europe to join a military force consisting of destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, B-1 and B-52 bombers, and special forces helicopters.At least 57 people have been killed in more than a dozen US military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Washington has accused Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials of being at the head of a cartel smuggling drugs into the US. Maduro denies the charge and experts dispute the significance of Venezuela’s role in the illegal drug trade.Trump has intensified the pressure further by authorizing the CIA to carry out covert activities inside Venezuela, although the contents of his instructions are classified and unknown.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionArmstrong argued that Trump was aware that his policy could prove fatal for Maduro.“What person wouldn’t be aware of that potential because you’re trying to take out a head of state, a tenacious head of state,” he said.“We do assassinations on a routine basis of people that we suspect of not even being senior members of groups that we consider to be terrorists. If we’re authorizing the assassination of regular combatants in the war on terror, how crazy is it to think that the administration would authorize the use of lethal means, if necessary, to snatch the head of a cartel.”Another former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their previous involvement in targeted assassinations in the Middle East, said decisions to authorize such killings were normally taken with great care and based on threat severity.“It is very specific and usually because there is a lethal threat to America and our allies. They are done super carefully,” the former agent said.“The president and the [national security council] come up with the plan, and then they decide who’s going to take the shot … Is it going to be the military [or some other agency], will it lead to war?”High-profile assassinations in recent times include Osama bin Laden by a Navy Seal team in 2011; Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qods force, killed by a drone strike ordered by Trump in 2020; and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s former deputy in al-Qaida, who was killed by a drone in Afghanistan in 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency.“Bin Laden was an easy decision – he killed thousands of Americans, and even before the 9/11 attacks he had done lesser stuff,” said the ex-officer. “Suleimani, too, was easy because he had killed so many Americans.”Maduro, however, presents a less clearcut target, even though Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has described the Venezuelan regime as “the al-Qaida of the western hemisphere”.“The idea of going after a guy, Maduro, who is a sitting leader of a sovereign country, whether we like the country or not, just seems really strange and disproportionate,” the former agent continued. “Maduro is not Hitler. Bin Laden, Suleimani and al-Zawahiri were not heads of countries.“If you look at our history, even in the last 40 or 50, years, we’ve been staying away from going after world leaders.”Disclosures about the CIA’s role in backing coups and assassination attempts on foreign leaders during the 1950s and 1960s led to committees being established in Congress to oversee the agency’s activities.While there is no evidence that Trump has authorized Maduro’s assassination, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, told senators during his confirmation hearings that he would make the agency less risk averse and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president.Armstrong suggested the administration’s preferred course was to goad Maduro’s opponents in the Venezuelan military and other parts of society to topple him in a coup, setting the scene for a democratic transition while precluding the need for direct US action.But some analysts believe such a scenario would probably spawn a replacement loyal to the leftist movement spearheaded by Maduro’s late predecessor, Hugo Chávez – with a full-blown democratic transformation potentially taking years to bear fruit.Angelo Rivero Santos, a former Venezuelan diplomat in the country’s US embassy and now an academic at Georgetown University, said the chances of a coup were likely to be dashed by domestic realities and the fact that even Maduro’s critics have rallied around the flag in response to recent US pressure. .“The year 2025 is not 1973,” he said, referring to the coup that deposed Chile’s Allende. “Statements from the opposition show that this is not heavily supported inside the country.” More

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      The ex-CIA scientist brothers perfecting Halloween

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      Crowley Place is a sleepy street in the Waynewood area of south Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb 30 minutes from DC. The unassuming homes are well-tended, and it’s a quick walk to six different churches.But each year at Halloween the police shut down the street as thousands of visitors flock to the area. It’s all due to two ageing brothers who spent 40 years working together in secret at a laboratory in the CIA.For six weeks, no matter what was going on in the world, the Park brothers would take leave from the agency – using vacation, sick days and anything else they could think of – and construct an elaborate front-yard Halloween display, often using CIA-inspired technology.View image in fullscreenThe espionage careers of Jeff and Brian Park spanned the cold war, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan’s war to topple the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulf war, and the global “war on terror”.Among the true insiders in the intelligence community, they were something of a legend. Among their specialties in the CIA office of technical services was to help to sabotage Russian systems. It is an obscure discipline even for intelligence services – sabotaging weapons can mean anything from secretly ruining rifle ammunition to hacking the guidance systems for an anti-aircraft missile.Still, their CIA work was just one part of their lives. Their obsession and delight was Halloween.It was three years ago that I first heard of the duo. My sources, veterans of the CIA, just called them the “Park brothers” – and spelled out their unusual expertise, claiming they didn’t remember their first names. It was difficult to track them down because Park was such a common name, but this year I used public records databases, keying in what their ages must be, and scanning through hundreds of names to find adjacent homes, and finally got their address.Outside the two adjacent homes on Crowley last week – the brothers own both – there was an absolute mess of black tents and graveyards, dotted with skeletons, robots, pirates and gory monsters. Lines overhead guide the flying witch and giant spider.Once I showed up on their lawn, the Park brothers were happy to talk.Jeff Park, 78, was pondering a jumble of electronics underneath a witch and near some skulls. He wore a brown T-shirt tucked neatly into tactical grey pants.View image in fullscreen“It takes six weeks to put this together and six weeks to take it apart,” he told me. He said he and his brother Brian, who strolled by lugging some equipment in a handcart, had started their display in 1977, and have been enlarging it ever since.“When I retired in ’14 I was the senior scientist at the CIA,” Jeff said, “so we got to do a lot of cool things. Things that you would go to jail for anywhere else.”Jeff confirmed what sources had said – that they used to sabotage Russian missiles. “We basically specialized in doing in – my brother and I, in our careers – doing in‬ weapon systems. Not just that, lots of other things too. But that was what we did. We did a lot of sabotage on‬ ‭weapon systems to stop the bad guys from doing stuff that we didn’t want them to do.”Brian Park, 75, has longer hair and a big smile. He said getting hired at the office of technical services in the 1970s was “like marrying into an extended Italian family”. Jeff added: “A mafiosa family.”But before talking about the CIA, they wanted to discuss Halloween. Jeff speaks fast, like an enthusiastic professor or Doc Brown of Back to the Future. He pointed out where the displays were going. “There will be Igor, there,” he pointed, “and the Gremlin and Ninja Turtle and ET and Yoda goes over there.” All of them, he says, are animatronic.The hi-tech displays are everywhere – all made by the Parks out of raw materials or discarded electronic devices, rescued parts, or remnants of some CIA experiments. There are elaborate cameras with radar and sonar sensors and a home-engineered 12-channel digital surround sound system threaded through the yard. There’s a giant cauldron – inspired by Disney’s Fantasia – with a computer and a smoke machine inside that emits different colors of smoke. Put your face too close and there’s a sensor to launch a surprise.A couple of graveyards, and one tombstone that flickers with a name changed at will.Jeff collects gargoyle statues; he’s got 210 of them so far. The gargoyles aren’t really part of the Halloween display, however, so they are just piled in the backyard for the winter.The living room of one Park home has what appears to be an old and worn-down La-Z-Boy chair, and the faded wall-to-wall carpet is littered with robots they built for bomb-disposal operations many years ago. On the walls are Christmas ornaments the Parks’ mother used to make.One house has all the electrical engineering supplies, with walls crammed with industrial shelving for resistors and capacitors and electrical connectors. There’s a massive specialized machine for making circuit boards.The other house has a metalworking shop, where the lathe is still littered with brass shavings.View image in fullscreenJeff has been setting up the animatronic gremlin they built. “We wrote software to modify his personality,” Jeff said, “as a function of your body movement. So you have a series of doppler shift radars that measure your body motion and it modifies how he reacts. So if you’re very calm and collected, he will look at you, OK? And then if you get hyper, then he pays no attention to you whatsoever.”Jeff said the exhibit is the most interactive. “Little kids, even four-year-old kids, know there is something special about him. Like, one year we had to cut his head open to repair something and they cried because they thought we were hurting him.”Close by is the alien rocket ship, with blue windows through which the alien is visible. It’s abandoned radio frequency testing equipment. “The throttle is from a B-1 bomber prototype,” Jeff said, pointing inside. It emits huge clouds of smoke for Halloween.In one back shed is a virtual reality device they first engineered in the 1970s for the CIA. Now it’s used to control a handmade, four-legged Star Wars Imperial Walker about five feet tall. “It’s got a 3,000-watt second strobe,” Jeff said. “You can feel it on the back of your neck at 20 feet.”The Parks joined the CIA in 1973. Brian Park was first, part of a fellowship program, and he convinced his bosses to meet with Jeff. Jeff insisted his first CIA interview – just to informally screen him – was at a downtown DC strip club that’s gone out of business.Brian said one early assignment was designing a specialized camera for a now well-known Russian spy for the CIA. “We had to build him a super tiny camera that would digitally store all this stuff so he wouldn’t have to put himself at risk. And so the first technology we used in the camera, the only way you could store digital, non-mechanically, was magnetic bubble memory.”It was the early days of digital memory. “We did something audacious. We shoveled four chips into one coil set and spent millions of dollars.”Whatever they did couldn’t protect the spy, whom the Russians executed in 1985. The story is the subject of a 2015 book and an upcoming movie starring Russell Crowe. And the technology they used – “bubble memory” – soon vanished from memory, obsolete.The CIA stories are never far away. Brian was lugging some Halloween display parts in a cleverly made cart, a one-handed wheelbarrow fashioned to distribute weight laterally.Jeff claimed the cart’s deck, fashioned out of a honeycombed aluminum material, used to reinforce the deck of racing boats he said were sent to the Contras, rigged with machine guns with massive recoil. He pointed at the cart. “That’s what’s left over!”Speedboats were indeed deployed to the region and provided to US proxies. Some speedboats were used in 1984 in CIA efforts to mine Nicaraguan harbors, an operation the international court of justice at The Hague declared illegal. It’s unclear if the specific boats the Park brothers refitted were used for that operation.Most of the year Brian and Jeff also have a railroad track made of aircraft-grade aluminum that encircles their property, over hills and bridges. It is for a miniature working steam engine that they handcrafted, with a seat so kids can ride it. Jeff said they built it using aircraft-grade aluminum. Unprompted, that launched him on a story about working on the track helped him as he engineered an early drone program in 1990, targeting Iraq.View image in fullscreenHe said the agency developed and deployed 25 of the unmanned aerial systems, with 7ft wingspans, prop driven gas engines – for reconnaissance, distributing propaganda leaflets, and finally for kamikaze bombing runs – and he boasted that earned him a promotion to the senior intelligence service level.It’s unusual to find people willing to chat about intelligence technology, even outdated gear. The CIA declined to comment on the Park brothers’ revelations.One of the things they’re proud of – “the coolest thing we ever did” – was an ambitious plan to destroy Scud missiles deployed by Russian client states.Earlier sources had referenced this when explaining the genius of the Park brothers, so hearing the details directly from them was like watching a movie where I’d only seen the trailer.View image in fullscreenBy engineering one key part, the brothers believed that deployed Scud missiles would make a U-turn and hit their own launching sites.“At the time the Soviet Union had come apart and so they were selling off to the black market a lot of the components that are used in Russian missiles,” Jeff said. “And so we basically went out, bought a bunch of them, brought them back to our contractors, modified them with my circuit.”In the end, the operation never moved forward. He said it was canceled because of resistance from the state department, worried about blowblack.Jeff boasted of another invention that he says he designed for US special operations. “It was the thing that probably put my name on the map. I had this crazy, wild-ass idea about how to build an infra-red beacon that you could see 10 miles away with night-vision glasses, and if you were two inches away from it you couldn’t see anything, using light-emitting diodes.”To convince the Navy Seals it worked, the brothers said, they invited the special operations forces to the Halloween festivities, and hid a beacon in a hedge a couple of streets over.After that, “for five years, I personally made all the night-vision beacons for the entire US military, including the Seals, Delta Forces, the Rangers. And that made me world famous.”View image in fullscreenJeff described one of their final plots – sabotaging Russian-made batteries, intercepted by the CIA, that Iran planned to install as an underground power back-up system for a nuclear facility.On this mission, the way he describes it, they went somewhat rogue. “Since it was two days after Christmas, all the bosses were on leave. And so there was just us in there. And so a whole bunch of us got together and we said, ‘Let’s screw the bad guys.’ So I trained a group of 10 people to drill holes randomly in the batteries, the diameter of a sewing machine needle.”The undetectable holes would slowly leak out the hydrogen and oxygen, to raise the internal resistance, and heat, of the battery to an explosive level.The brothers retired before they ever found out if the plan worked.View image in fullscreenCertainly their CIA, the one they talk about, is an agency where the notorious baggage and failures and scandal don’t play a leading role.This version of the CIA is not necessarily troubled by the old enhanced interrogation program, the “salt pit” death in Afghanistan, or “renditions”, or involvement in the mistaken shooting down of a plane carrying an American missionary family.Jeff said about two-thirds of all he did at the CIA never came to fruition, rejected by higher-ups or unsuccessful.But the Park brothers’ huge Halloween spectacle is at least a successful mission for them – where kids can be tricked and still be happy, where covert technology and deception actually work.View image in fullscreen More

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      Trump confirms that he authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela

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      Donald Trump confirmed reports on Wednesday that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in US efforts to pressure President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.The New York Times first reported the classified directive, citing US officials familiar with the decision.The US president said he authorized the action for two main reasons.First, he claimed Venezuela had been releasing large numbers of prisoners, including individuals from mental health facilities, into the United States, often crossing the border due to what he described as an open border policy. Trump did not specify which border they were crossing.The second reason, he said, was the large amount of drugs entering the US from Venezuela, much of it trafficked by sea.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think Venezuela is feeling heat,” Trump added, but declined to answer when asked if the CIA had the authority to execute Maduro. More

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      Project 2025 and Donald Trump’s Dangerous Dismantling of the US Federal Government

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      Fair Observer Founder, CEO & Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh, or the Rajput, and retired CIA officer Glenn Carle, or the WASP, examine US President Donald Trump’s cuts to the US federal government. Their wide-ranging discussion blends sharp historical insight with ideological critique, seeking to make sense of today’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world.

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      They emphasize that this topic has global resonance, since the world still depends on the stability and leadership of the United States. The discussion, therefore, becomes both an internal American debate and an international concern.

      Trump’s attack on federal agencies

      Atul and Glenn begin by cataloging specific Trump-era actions they view as evidence of a systematic weakening of the federal apparatus. These include the removal of officials such as Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Billy Long. They argue that such moves, combined with a broader hollowing out of institutions like the Federal Reserve, the State Department, the CIA, US Agency for International Development and NASA, represent an intentional “gutting” of agencies crucial to governance and public welfare.

      Atul and Glenn insist that these institutions exist not only for technical governance but also for maintaining the credibility of the American democratic model. If the credibility of these institutions collapses, it erodes public trust and damages the US’s global standing.

      Norquist’s philosophy and Ronald Reagan’s agenda

      Glenn situates Trump’s efforts within a longer ideological arc. He traces them back to US President Ronald Reagan’s “revolution,” which reduced faith in government and elevated conservative economic philosophy. Reagan’s agenda, amplified by figures such as Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist — who is famous for wanting to shrink government so small he could “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — and bolstered by conservative think tanks, paved the way for what Glenn calls today’s “Trumpian revolution.”

      Atul adds that the Reagan years were not just an American turning point, but part of a broader global shift toward neoliberalism, deregulation and privatization. The ideological groundwork laid in that era, they contend, continues to shape political agendas today.

      Trump and Project 2025

      Central to the conversation is Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation initiative Atul and Glenn describe as a radical blueprint. Its goals include cutting the federal workforce by half and dramatically expanding presidential powers. They stress that these proposals would not only disrupt government efficiency and accountability but also tilt the balance of power sharply toward the executive branch.

      Atul and Glenn emphasize that the size of the workforce reflects the government’s ability to deliver services, regulate markets and provide stability in times of crisis. Reducing this by half would, in their view, leave the country dangerously exposed.

      Federal layoffs under Trump 2.0

      Atul and Glenn note that Trump’s current plans echo his first term, but with greater intensity. They state that proposals to eliminate 50% of the federal workforce are unprecedented in scope. They interpret these layoffs as more than cost-cutting; they are an ideological purge designed to weaken federal institutions and concentrate loyalty directly under presidential control. Such measures would ripple outward beyond Washington to ordinary citizens who depend on federal programs, grants and regulatory oversight for health, education and economic stability.

      Presidential control: a threat to US democracy?

      Glenn links Trump’s approach to the legal philosophy of Carl Schmitt, “[Adolf] Hitler’s legal theorist,” who defended the primacy of unchecked executive authority in Nazi Germany. Schmitt’s concept of the unitary executive resonates with Trump’s own political movement, Glenn argues, by undermining checks and balances and normalizing near-absolute presidential power. This strikes at the heart of democratic governance.

      Atul points out that the American system was designed around the separation of powers. If that foundation is eroded, the US risks losing what has long been its distinctive democratic safeguard.

      The Republican Party’s evolution

      The conversation also turns to the broader Republican Party. Atul and Glenn argue that decades of conservative activism, think tank influence and shifting party priorities have steered the Grand Old Party toward radical centralization of power. They suggest that what once seemed like outlandish ideas are now mainstream within the Republican platform, particularly under Trump’s leadership. This shift is both political and cultural, representing a redefinition of what conservatism means in the US.

      Fascism, strongmen and the future

      Atul and Glenn conclude with a sober warning: Left unchecked, the United States risks sliding from liberal democracy into what they call a “conservative autocracy.” They point to echoes of strongman politics and fascist ideology, stressing the long-term danger of normalizing authoritarian principles. At the same time, they note Trump’s diverse support base — including many immigrants who align with cultural conservatism and share a disdain for bureaucracy — as evidence that these dynamics are both complex and deeply embedded in American society.

      They highlight that this contradiction of immigrants supporting an anti-immigrant politician reveals how cultural and ideological affinities can often outweigh personal experience. The episode ends as a call to reflect on the fragility of democratic institutions and the vigilance required to protect them.

      [Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

      The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Trump administration to cut thousands of jobs from CIA and other spy agencies – report

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      The White House plans to cut staffing at the Central Intelligence Agency by 1,200 positions while other intelligence agencies including the National Security Agency will also shed thousands of jobs, the Washington Post has reported.A person familiar with the plan confirmed the changes to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.The Trump administration has told members of Congress about the planned cuts at the CIA, which will take place over several years and be accomplished in part through reduced hiring as opposed to layoffs, the Post reported on Friday. The cuts include several hundred people who had already opted for early retirement, it said.In response to questions about the reductions, the CIA issued a statement saying its director, John Ratcliffe, was working to align the agency with Donald Trump’s national security priorities.“These moves are part of a holistic strategy to infuse the agency with renewed energy, provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position CIA to deliver on its mission,” the agency said in the statement.A spokesperson for the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Gabbard’s office oversees and coordinates the work of 18 agencies that collect and analyse intelligence.The CIA earlier this year became the first US intelligence agency to join a voluntary redundancy program initiated by Trump, who has vowed to radically downsize the federal workforce in the name of efficiency and frugality. The NSA has already offered voluntary resignations to some employees.The CIA has said it also plans to lay off an unknown number of recently hired employees.The Trump administration has also eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs at intelligence agencies, though a judge has temporarily blocked efforts to fire 19 employees working on DEI programs who challenged their terminations.Trump also abruptly fired the general who led the NSA and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, Tim Haugh.Ratcliffe has vowed to overhaul the CIA and said he wants to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China.With the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse More

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      Trump 100 days: ‘unpredictable’ US alienates allies and disrupts global trade

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      For US foreign policy, Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were the weeks when decades happened.In just over three months, the US president has frayed alliances that stood since the second world war and alienated the US’s closest friends, cut off aid to Ukrainians on the frontlines against Vladimir Putin, emboldened US rivals around the world, brokered and then lost a crucial ceasefire in Gaza, launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen and seesawed on key foreign policy and economic questions to the point where the US has been termed the “unpredictable ally”.The tariffs Trump has unleashed will, if effected, disrupt global trade and lead to supply chain shocks in the United States, with China’s Xi Jinping seeking to recruit US trade allies in the region.The pace of the developments in the past 100 days makes them difficult to list. Operating mainly through executive action, the Trump administration has affected nearly all facets of US foreign policy: from military might to soft power, from trade to immigration, reimagining the US’s place in the world according to an isolationist America First program.“The shake-up has been revolutionary, extraordinary. It’s upended 80-some years of American foreign policy,” said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former ambassador to Nato.The Trump presidency has ended the relative peace in the western hemisphere since the end of the second world war underwritten by US economic, military and diplomatic influence, Daalder said.“The foundation of the Pax Americana was trust, and once you break trust, it’s extraordinarily difficult to restore,” he said. “And restoring trust – trust in America, trust in American institutions, trust in American voters – it takes a long time to rebuild.”The US’s key foreign policy and national security making institutions are in crisis. The Pentagon is mid-meltdown under the leadership of Pete Hegseth, whose erratic and unsteady leadership has been reflected in score-settling among his senior staff, while a leaked Signal chat embroiled the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and others in scandal. The state department under Marco Rubio is undergoing a vast shake-up, and the US’s diplomats are being sidelined in favour of envoys such as Steve Witkoff with little background in foreign policy. Critics say the gutting of USAID will cut back on US soft power for generations.“There’s no better way to get us into a war, perhaps a catastrophic war, than essentially poking out your eyes and numbing your brain, and you’re left with Donald Trump and a few people sitting in the White House winging it, and they’re not competent to wing it,” said Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer for the CIA and Department of Homeland Security, and the executive director of the Steady State, an advocacy group of former national security professionals. “And so we’ve seen that with the tariffs. We’ve seen that with Nato. We’ve seen that with Ukraine, and we’re gonna see a lot more of it.”After assuming office in 2021, Joe Biden declared: “America is back.”“The world now knows America is not back,” Daalder said. “America is gone again.”In a recent interview with the Zeit newspaper, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, expressed similar sentiments, saying: “The west as we knew it no longer exists.”View image in fullscreenIn Munich, JD Vance delivered a landmark speech openly pandering to Europe’s far right, accusing European leaders of “running from their own voters” and saying: “America can do nothing to help you.”A backlash has begun. Last month the EU presented an €800bn ($913bn) plan on the future of European defense, a putative step in what would be a herculean task to overcome internal divisions and onshore European defense manufacturing. The UK and other US allies have considered other efforts, such as limiting intelligence-sharing with the US. “We still need America now, but there is a vision [of a time] when we won’t any more,” said one European diplomat.Meanwhile, the Trump effect is beginning to sway elections as well – though not as he might hope.In the western hemisphere, Trump has terrorised US neighbours and tacitly declared what some have compared to a new Monroe doctrine, saying the White House planned to “take back” the Panama canal and annex Greenland, while regularly calling Canada the future 51st state.In an extraordinary bit of election-day meddling, Trump wrote a social media post suggesting that he was on the ballot in Canada’s vote, repeating that Canada should become the 51st state in order to avoid tariffs and reap economic awards.Canadians responded by duly electing the liberal candidate Mark Carney, completing a 30% swing in polling that has largely been explained by opposition to Trump’s tariff war and territorial menaces.In Europe, populist parties seen as Trump’s ideological allies are also on the defensive. While Trump was popular in terms of his ideological and anti-woke agenda, the trade war has made him “quite toxic, just in the last month or two, with a lot of the populist voting bases”, said Jeremy Shapiro, the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.Nowhere has the shift in US foreign policy been felt more acutely than in Ukraine, where the sudden cutoff in US military and intelligence sharing confirmed the Trump administration’s goals of pressuring Ukraine to accept a deal with the Kremlin, rather than the other way around. Those frustrations boiled over into an Oval Office meltdown fueled by Vice-President JD Vance that one former US official close to the talks called “disgraceful”.Trump has swung wildly on the war, on certain days targeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and then quickly pivoting to call out Putin for continuing to rain down missiles on Ukrainian cities. His theatrics have produced symbolic moments, including a sudden recognition that “maybe [Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war” after speaking with Zelenskyy this weekend in the baptistry of St Peter’s Basilica. But in terms of hard results, Trump has not fulfilled a promise to end the war within 24 hours or produced a clear path to peace many months later.View image in fullscreenThe Russians have said they largely tune out what he says in public.“We hear many things coming from President Trump,” said Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a television appearance this weekend. “We concentrate, as I said, on the real negotiations which President Trump supports and instructed his people to continue to engage in these negotiations.”Key among those people is Witkoff, a neophyte diplomat who has spent hours in conversation with Putin, often with no other adviser present. One person close to the Kremlin said that Witkoff was viewed as a reliable negotiator in Moscow with “a chance to make an agreement”, but added: “There is a chance it will pass by.”Much of the burden of international diplomacy now rests on Witkoff, who is also running point on other key negotiations. Trump has tasked him with reaching a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, in effect renegotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that he scuttled in 2018. Both the US and Iran have played up the talks, although “differences still exist both on major issues and on the details”, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told state television this week.And then there is the Middle East, where the Trump administration scored its greatest early success by negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza but then failed to prevent its collapse, with Israel cutting off new aid to Gaza as the fighting continues.“There now seems to be less focus on ending the devastating conflict,” wrote Stefanie Hausheer Ali, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs. “Trump’s threat in February to Hamas to release the hostages or ‘all hell is going to break out’ has, in practice, meant Israel restarting the war and blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Without an alternative to Hamas rule, the militant group may hang on and continue to fight as an insurgency, replenishing its ranks by recruiting desperate people.”Trump’s most extreme remarks have turned out to be bluster: he stunned the world when he claimed that he would turn the Gaza Strip into beachfront condos and said that the local Palestinian population would be forcibly removed. Months later, the initiative is largely forgotten.While attempting to close three landmark negotiations at once, the Trump administration has also launched a trade war with the entire world, establishing sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports before abruptly reversing course and cutting tariffs to 10% save for those against China.With so many major efforts ongoing, observers say that the government is largely paralysed to deal with smaller but still crucial issues in foreign policy and national security. As part of a blanket ban on refugees, tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted US troops against the Taliban are left waiting for relocation to the United States, a promise that was extended by previous administrations.“The lack of clarity and the chaos are the things that are causing so much pain,” said Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, a group that works with the state department to help resettle Afghans.He said he was critical of both the Biden and Trump administrations for failing to relocate the tens of thousands of Afghans who were far enough along in the vetting program to be relocated before Trump came into office.“The truth is, is that when America makes a promise, you should be able to trust our word,” he said. “If our flag waving over an embassy in Tunisia or Baghdad or Kabul, or Kyiv doesn’t mean this is the place where there’s truth, where there’s justice … well, then what are we even doing here?” More

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      Son of CIA deputy director was killed while fighting for Russia, report says

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      An American man identified as the son of a deputy director of the CIA was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2024 while fighting under contract for the Russian military, according to an investigation by independent Russian media.Michael Alexander Gloss, 21, died on 4 April 2024 in “Eastern Europe”, according to an obituary published by his family. He was the son of Juliane Gallina, who was appointed the deputy director for digital innovation at the Central Intelligence Agency in February 2024.The story of how the son of a top-ranking US spy died fighting for Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is an unlikely tale of how homegrown anger at the United States and online radicalisation led from a middle-class Virginia childhood to the killing fields of eastern Ukraine.On a VKontakte page attributed to Gloss, a high school football player born to parents who both served in the military, he described himself as “a supporter of the multipolar world. I ran away from home. traveled the world. I hate fascism. I love my homeland.” He also posted the flags of Russia and Palestine.According to the investigative website iStories, Gloss is one of more than 1,500 foreigners who have signed contracts with the Russian military since February 2022. The database for the enrollment office was later leaked, exposing him as having signed the contract in September 2023. Sources told iStories that Gloss had been deployed with “assault units”, those engaged in harsh frontline fighting, in December 2023. An acquaintance said that he had been deployed to a Russian airborne regiment sent to storm Ukrainian positions near the city of Soledar.“With his noble heart and warrior spirit Michael was forging his own hero’s journey when he was tragically killed in Eastern Europe on April 4, 2024,” his family wrote in the obituary, which did not mention Russia and Ukraine or discuss the circumstances of his death.In university, Gloss was active in gender equality and environmental protest circles. He joined Rainbow Family, a leftwing environmental protest group, and in 2023 traveled to Hatay, Turkey, to assist in the recovery following the earthquake that killed more than 56,000 people. He had also become increasingly angry at the US for its support of Israel and the war in Gaza.While in Turkey, Gloss began expressing a desire to go on to Russia. “He was usually watching videos about Palestine and was so angry at America,” one acquaintance told iStories. “He started thinking about going to Russia. He wanted to war with the USA. But I think he was very influenced by the conspiracy theory videos.”After receiving a visa to Russia, he traveled around the country before arriving in Moscow, where he joined the military shortly before his documents expired. Photographs and videos obtained by iStories showed he was sent to a Russian training camp, where he mostly trained alongside Nepali contract soldiers. Three months after enlisting, an acquaintance said, he was deployed to Ukraine as a member of an assault battalion.A number of acquaintances told the outlet that he had not been interested in fighting, but hoped the army would allow him to receive a Russian passport and stay in the country.The circumstance’s of Gloss’s death are not known. A friend said that his family had been informed by the Russian government of his death but were given little other information. “It was announced that he died within the borders of Ukraine,” the friend wrote. “We do not know whether he participated in the war. They did not provide any other detailed information.”It was not clear whether the Russians performed a background check on Gloss or knew the identity of his mother. The Guardian has approached the CIA for comment on the reports. More

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      The question no one dares ask: what if Britain has to defend itself from the US? | George Monbiot

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      All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.As Keir Starmer visits the orange emperor’s court in Washington, let’s first consider the possibilities. I can’t comment on their likelihood, and I fervently hope that people with more knowledge and power than me are gaming them. One is that Donald Trump will not only clear the path for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, but will actively assist him. We know that Trump can brook no challenge to his hegemony. Russia is no threat to US dominance, but Europe, with a combined economy similar to that of the US, and a powerful diplomatic and global political presence, could be.Putin has long sought to break up the EU, using the European far right as his proxies: this is why he invested so heavily in Brexit. Now Trump, in turn, could use Putin as his proxy, to attack a rival centre of power. If Trump helps Russia sweep through Ukraine, Putin could then issue an ultimatum to other frontline and eastern European states: leave the EU, leave Nato and become a client state like Belarus, or you’re next. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán might agree to this. If Călin Georgescu wins in Romania in May, he might too.What form could US support for Putin in Ukraine take? It could involve intelligence sharing. It could involve permanently withdrawing Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service from Ukraine, which is strategically crucial there, while making it available to the Russian armed forces. Already, the US government has threatened to nix the service if Ukraine doesn’t hand over its minerals, as reparations for being invaded. This is how Trump operates: blackmailing desperate people who are seeking to defend themselves against an imperial war, regardless of past alliances. In the extreme case, Trump’s support for Russia might involve military equipment and financial backing, or even joint US-Russian operations, in the Arctic or elsewhere.Now consider our vulnerabilities. Through the “Five Eyes” partnership, the UK automatically shares signals intelligence, human intelligence and defence intelligence with the US government. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that the US, with the agreement of our government, conducts wholesale espionage on innocent UK citizens. The two governments, with other western nations, run a wide range of joint intelligence programmes, such as Prism, Echelon, Tempora and XKeyscore. The US National Security Agency (NSA) uses the UK agency GCHQ as a subcontractor.All this is now overseen by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, in charge of the CIA, NSA and 16 other agencies. After she recited conspiracy fictions seeded by the Syrian and Russian governments, she was widely accused of being a “Russian asset” or a “Russian puppet”. At what point do we conclude that by sharing intelligence with the US, the UK might as well be sharing it with Russia?View image in fullscreenDepending on whose definitions you accept, the US has either 11 or 13 military bases and listening stations in the UK. They include the misnamed RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, actually a US air force base, from which it deploys F-35 jets; RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, in reality a US NSA base conducting military espionage and operational support; RAF Croughton, part-operated by the CIA, which allegedly used the base to spy on Angela Merkel among many others; and RAF Fylingdales, part of the US Space Surveillance Network. If the US now sides with Russia against the UK and Europe, these could just as well be Russian bases and listening stations.Then we come to our weapon systems. Like everyone without security clearance, I can make no well-informed statement on the extent to which any of them, nuclear or conventional, are operationally independent of the US. But I know, to give just one example, that among the crucial components of our defence are F-35 stealth jets, designed and patented in the US. How stealthy they will turn out to be, when the US has the specs, the serial numbers and the software, is a question that needs an urgent answer.Nor can I make any confident statement about the extent to which weapons designed here might be dependent on US central processing units and other digital technologies, or on US systems such as Starlink, owned by Musk, or GPS, owned by the US Space Force. Which of our weapons systems could achieve battle-readiness without US involvement and consent? Which could be remotely disabled by the US military? At the very least, the US will know better than any other power how to combat them, because our weapons are more or less the same as theirs. In other words, if the US is now our enemy, the enemy is inside the gate.Much as I hate to admit it, the UK needs to rearm (though cutting the aid budget to find the money, as Keir Starmer intends, is astonishingly shortsighted). I reluctantly came to this conclusion as Trump’s numbers began to stack up last July. But, if they are fatally compromised by US penetration, rearmament might have to begin with the complete abandonment of our existing weapons and communications systems.This may need to start very soon. On 24 February, the UN general assembly voted on a Ukrainian resolution, co-sponsored by the UK and other European nations, condemning Russia’s invasion. Unsurprisingly, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary and several small and easily cowed states voted against it. But so did the US andIsrael. This, more clearly than any other shift, exposes the new alignment. An axis of autocracy, facilitating an imperial war of aggression, confronts nations committed (albeit to varying degrees) to democracy and international law.For many years, we have been urged to trust the UK’s oppressive “security state”. Yes, this security state is yanked around like a fish on a line by the US government, with such catastrophic outcomes as the US-UK invasion of Iraq. Yes, it is engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens. But, its defenders have long argued, we should suck all this up because the security state is essential to our defence from hostile foreign actors. In reality, our entanglement, as many of us have long warned, presents a major threat to national security. By tying our defence so closely to the US, our governments have created an insecurity state.I hope you can now see what a terrible mistake the UK has made, and how we should have followed France in creating more independent military and security systems. Disentangling from the US will be difficult and expensive. Failing to do so could carry a far higher price.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Dianne Feinstein obituary

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      The US senator Dianne Feinstein, who has died aged 90, was long cherished by the CIA and others in the defence and intelligence community as someone whose staunch support they could rely on. Until one day they could not: on 11 March 2009 she launched an investigation into the CIA’s torture of detainees post-9/11.That investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, which she chaired, turned into a bitter struggle with the agency and it tried to block it. She did not buckle and finally, in December 2014, she published her report, revealing the scale and brutality of what the CIA had done and its repeated attempts to mislead Congress and the White House. On top of all that, the report found the torture had proved counter-productive in obtaining valuable intelligence.On the day of publication, she told the Senate: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say ‘see what Americans did’, and they will try to use it to justify evil actions or to incite more violence. We cannot prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again’.”Her fight was dramatic enough to interest Hollywood, and the film The Report was released in 2019, with Feinstein played by Annette Bening.What made her fight with the CIA so surprising was that it was out of kilter with her career before and after, as a Senate hawk. She voted for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – though she later expressed regret over the former – supported Republicans in defence procurement projects and defended the spy agencies in controversies such as illegal mass surveillance in 2013.Her reputation as a hawk frequently put her at odds with the Democratic left and this disillusionment with her grew rapidly in the latter part of her career.In February this year, facing calls to stand down as her physical and mental health declined, she said she would not seek re-election in 2024.There was much in her life she could look back on with pride: a trailblazer for women in politics; the calm leadership she displayed as mayor in San Francisco after the killings of her predecessor, George Moscone, and of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to an official position in the US; her success, albeit limited, in getting gun control through the US senate in 1994. But it was the torture report she cited as the achievement she was most proud.The first she heard of the torture was in September 2006, when Feinstein and other members of the intelligence committee were privately briefed by the then head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. Although Hayden played down what the CIA euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, Feinstein was troubled by what she heard.When she became chair of the intelligence committee in 2009 – its first female head – she launched the investigation. The final 6,700-page report remains classified, but she got around this by publishing a 500-page executive summary and that was damning enough.Between 2002 and 2008 the CIA had detained 119 men at “black sites” – secret locations around the world – and of these 39 had been subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions and “rectal rehydration”.In 2015, Feinstein worked with the Republican senator John McCain in steering through the Senate an amendment that reinforced a ban on torture. The McCain-Feinstein amendment was the kind of bipartisan consensus that Feinstein, a centrist, valued. But, as US politics became more polarised, her attempts to work with Republicans increasingly grated with fellow Democrats.When Donald Trump, as president, began to pack the supreme court with rightwingers, Democrats complained that Feinstein, who was the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, did not put up enough of a fight. After the 2020 confirmation hearings of a Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein left Democrats seething when she hugged the chair, Republican Lindsey Graham.Born in San Francisco, Dianne was the daughter of Betty (nee Rosenburg), a model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Her family was affluent but she had a traumatic childhood: her mother was unstable and given to sudden rages due to an undiagnosed brain disorder. According to David Talbot, in his history of San Francisco in the 1960s through to the 80s, Season of the Witch (2012), Betty once chased her daughter with a knife around a dining table.Dianne attended a convent school before going to Stanford University, where she graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history. She went on to secure a job on the state parole board. Although politics was overwhelmingly male-dominated, she was elected in 1969 on to the 11-member San Francisco board of supervisors, basically the city and county council. Runs for mayor in 1971 and 1975 proved unsuccessful.In 1976, she was the target of a bomb attack on her home claimed by a California-based leftwing terrorist group, the New World Liberation Front. The bomb was planted in a window flower box but failed to go off. A few months later, another group, the Environmental Life Force, claimed responsibility for shooting out the windows of her holiday home with a BB gun.She began to carry a concealed handgun for protection. In 1978, dispirited by the combination of the mayoral defeats and being targeted, she told a reporter she was on the verge of quitting politics.Only hours after this exchange, the mayor of San Francisco, Moscone, and Milk, a fellow supervisor, were shot dead in City Hall by a former supervisor. Feinstein was the first into Milk’s office. She told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “It was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life.” Checking Milk for a pulse, one of her fingers slipped into a bullet hole.As president of the board of supervisors at the time, she was well placed to take over as mayor, which she duly did, becoming the first female to occupy the post.She served until 1988. With Aids rampant, she supported many initiatives to help the gay community. She secured federal funding for an overhaul of the cable car network, which proved popular with residents and tourists.Influenced by seeing the damage to Milk’s body, she introduced in 1982 a local ordinance banning most residents from owning handguns. She had her own gun and 14 others that had been handed over in a buy-back scheme melted down and turned into a cross and given to Pope John Paul II on a visit to the Vatican.After an unsuccessful bid to become governor of California in 1990, she was elected as a US senator from California in 1992. She quickly made an impact, guiding through in 1994 the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, outlawing civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms, though with a proviso that it would expire in 2004 if not renewed, which it was not.She was ranked in 2018 as the second wealthiest senator, with her fortune estimated at about $88m (about £74m).Feinstein married three times: Jack Berman in 1956, with whom she had a daughter, Katherine, divorcing in 1959; Bertram Feinstein in 1962 until his death in 1978; and Richard Blum from 1980 to his death in 2022.She is survived by Katherine, three stepdaughters, and a granddaughter, Eileen. More