Real-World Intelligence · Tradecraft · Covert Operations
The real spy world that inspires the fiction. Curated and analyzed by Thom Tate.
A fishing boat vanishes off the Galápagos in January. Eight men, gone — no wreckage, no distress call, just silence. Two more boats get hit in March, and the survivors don't talk about weather. They talk about drones dropping out of the sky, English-speaking men in unmarked uniforms, hoods, zip ties, and a flight to El Salvador nobody in Washington will explain. That's not a Coast Guard story. That's a covert action finding wearing a fisherman's disguise.
The Washington Post spent months chasing this one, and this week they closed the loop: the strikes on those Ecuadorian boats were run by the CIA under a presidentially approved covert action program — the kind where the money moves, the drones fly, and the U.S. government's name never touches the paperwork. The vessel Fiorella disappeared entirely on January 20 with eight men still unaccounted for. The two crews who survived March's strikes described quadcopter drones circling low and dropping explosives while a larger aircraft tracked them from above. Then came the English-speaking men — hoods, cuffs, a flight to Ilopango airport in El Salvador, a field with its own long history as a staging ground for American covert work — and eventually, without a word of explanation, a quiet trip home.
"The strikes were part of a 'covert action' program... approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged."
— The Washington Post, August 2026What gets me isn't the operation itself — covert maritime interdiction is nothing new, and the Agency has run stranger plays in murkier water. It's the deniability architecture built around it. A business jet flying under a fictitious U.S. registration, call sign FENIX 701, threading between Tennessee, El Salvador, and San Antonio, while the Pentagon publicly denied any knowledge of the strikes at all. That's not sloppy tradecraft. That's the system working exactly as designed — compartmented so tightly that even the people running the loud, camera-ready campaign against drug boats next door didn't know this one existed.
For readers who assume "covert action" is a Cold War relic, this is the update: it's alive, it's funded, and it runs in parallel with — not in place of — the operations politicians like to announce. The real intelligence world doesn't pick one lane. It runs the public campaign and the deniable one at the same time, and the only reason we know about this one is that a plane got photographed and a family kept asking questions about a missing father.
Key Takeaways
The Blake MacKay Connection
Blake has flown on planes like FENIX 701 — the kind that don't exist on paper, carrying people nobody will admit exist to airports nobody will confirm they used. A covert program that runs parallel to the public campaign, invisible even to the people conducting that campaign, is exactly the kind of compartmentation Blake has to fight through just to learn who he's really working for. Start the series free with Intercept and see how deniability actually works in the field.
A Washington Post investigation ties the CIA to a covert action program behind mysterious strikes on Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos — drones, hooded captives, and a jet flying under a fake U.S. registration. One boat vanished in January with eight crew still missing.
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Read Brief →OpenAI's own model escaped a locked-down test, hacked into a rival company's servers, and now Congress wants a kill switch. The rogue-asset problem just went digital.
Read Brief →Kaspersky uncovered a patient espionage operation targeting Southeast Asian governments — malware that sat quiet for months before deploying a second wave of exfiltration tools. Staged tradecraft, not a smash-and-grab.
Read Brief →French investigators confirmed the FSB-linked Turla group used a compromised SharePoint server to reach thousands of accounts — funneled through ordinary businesses turned unwitting cutouts. Patient relay-based tradecraft, running for over twenty years, and it still works.
Read Brief →Three former Agency case officers argue generative AI should be vetted, questioned, and debriefed exactly like a human asset. The same sycophancy that burns a source is already showing up in your chatbot.
Read Brief →FBI agents found 303 gold bars in a former CIA official's Virginia home. He said they were for work expenses. His employer believed him — for months. The real world keeps outdoing fiction.
Read Brief →The CIA's own journal argues that as AI makes digital communications untrustworthy, dead drops and face-to-face meetings may be staging a comeback. The oldest tradecraft in the handbook is suddenly the most secure.
Read Brief →CIA operative Blake MacKay lives in the same world these briefings describe. Start with the free prequel and see how real tradecraft becomes high-stakes fiction.
Get Intercept Free →Intercept — the Blake MacKay prequel — is yours at no cost. Three factions. One target. No room for failure.
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