Welcome to Threat Status: Share it with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich appeared in a glass cage with his head shaved as his trial began in Moscow Wednesday on espionage charges viewed as an attempt by Russian President Vladimir Putin to obtain leverage over the West.
…South Korean military officials say a suspected North Korean hypersonic missile exploded in flight on Wednesday.
…President Biden just pardoned U.S. service members convicted under a military law that banned gay sex, paving the way for millions of veterans to receive benefits that were withheld.
…And a GOP House version of the 2025 defense bill that would ban spending on “woke” military policies has sparked a veto threat from the White House.
The federal government’s premier anti-hacking agency has revealed that its own systems were breached earlier this year by hackers seeking to steal details on how the U.S. government collects information from facilities with dangerous chemicals that could be weaponized by terrorists.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) says it has alerted participants in the agency’s “Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards” program about the digital intrusion and potentially exposed information. CISA said on its website this month that the breach occurred in January 2024. The agency said an investigation found no evidence that data was stolen, but there may have been “unauthorized access” to key information.
CISA also published sample notification letters to victims of the breach that it translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Tagalog. The agency has not identified the hackers responsible, but said the vector for the breach involved Ivanti appliances, including Ivanti Connect Secure. Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm, has tied recent problems with Ivanti Connect Secure to China-linked cyberattackers.
Michael Brown, a former special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, says the shadow war operation involves laundering drug money for the cartels so the gangs can fuel the deadly overdose epidemic and sow discord in American institutions.
Beijing’s silent partnership with Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel came into focus last week when U.S. federal prosecutors said a California-based money laundering scheme had wealthy Chinese nationals exchanging currency to conceal the Mexican criminal organization’s drug profits.
Prosecutors said they had no evidence that the Chinese nationals knew they were dealing in dirty money. However, former Mr. Brown questions how Beijing could be in the dark about the tens of millions of dollars moved by the operation, given that China aggressively monitors its citizens at home and abroad.
“The Chinese basically are stirring the pot to keep America addicted … keep them divided,” Mr. Brown, currently the global director for counternarcotics technology at Rigaku Analytical Devices, told Washington Times reporter Matt Delaney in an interview. “It’s part of a larger strategy, I believe, on the part of China, to weaken American ethics, morality and their ability to push back,” he said.
Thailand, which sustained the highest losses among foreign nationals in the bloody Hamas rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, is allowing 10,000 impoverished citizens to fly to Israel for better-paying jobs in the desert “safe areas.” Imported Thai workers were used extensively in Israeli agriculture and construction before the attack.
Times Special Correspondent Richard S. Ehrlich writes in a dispatch from Bangkok that the first flight carrying 100 Thai laborers flew from the Thai capital on Tuesday. Thai officials said a second flight has been booked for next month.
During its terrorist attack on Israel in October, Hamas killed 41 Thais and took dozens more hostage. Six Thai nationals are thought to be among those still held in the Gaza Strip as the war with Israel rages.
U.S. Homeland Security claimed success at the southern border Wednesday, saying the Border Patrol has seen a 40% drop in its arrests since Mr. Biden announced tougher asylum rules earlier this month.
Agents are now averaging about 2,400 arrests a day, which is still high by the standards of the two previous administrations but is far from the 10,000 a day that agents saw late last year.
“As a result of the decisive executive actions to secure our border that President Biden announced on June 4, unlawful border encounters have plunged by more than 40% over the last three weeks,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a memo touting the latest numbers.
The mutual defense pact that Mr. Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed on June 19 was a victory for the Russian president and a major component of his strategy for Eurasia, writes Joseph R. DeTrani, a former member of the Senior Intelligence Service of the CIA and a regular opinion contributor to Threat Status.
The language is “similar” to that of the 1961 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance between the then-Soviet Union and North Korea, a treaty that was downgraded in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, writes Mr. DeTrani, who asserts that “North Korea’s new strategic partnership with Russia is a game-changer for the Korean Peninsula, Northeast Asia and the U.S.”
“An emboldened North Korea will get Russia’s sophisticated technical assistance for its nuclear, ballistic missile and satellite programs,” he writes, arguing that it’s “time for South Korea and Japan to work even more closely with the U.S., enhancing joint military exercises and the U.S. recommitting to the Washington Declaration and U.S. extended deterrence assurances to South Korea and Japan.”
Mr. Biden’s list of foreign policy failures is long. But what is former President Donald Trump’s doctrine and how will it be different if he returns to the White House?
Foundation for Defense of Democracies President and Threat Status columnist Clifford D. May highlights an article in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs by Robert O’Brien, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser from 2019 to 2021.
Mr. O’Brien “predicts that a ‘second Trump term would see the return of realism with a Jacksonian flavor’ — the reference is to Andrew, not Jesse — and that ‘Washington’s friends would be more secure and more self-reliant, and its foes would once again fear American power,’” writes Mr. May.
“Is Mr. O’Brien reading Mr. Trump correctly? Did Mr. Trump approve Mr. O’Brien’s article before it was published? Will there be a second Trump administration?” Mr. May writes. “These are just some of the questions that keep me up at night.”
• July 1 — Cyber Scams and Human Trafficking in Cambodia and Vietnam, U.S. Institute of Peace
• July 2 — Force Design: A conversation with Gen. Eric Smith, 39th commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Brookings Institution
Thanks for reading Threat Status. Don’t forget to share it with your friends, who can sign up here. And listen to our weekly podcast available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
