US naval blockade is working

It has only been going for three days but so far the US naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Gulf waterway seems to be working pretty well. At least a dozen warships are involved and they are cluttering up the outgoing end of the Strait of Hormuz. Only friendly ships are getting through. If this continues, Iran's economy is going to tank very quickly. It's already stretched thin by sanctions and war. But a successful blockade could finish off the economy. Inflation will go mad, the cost of living will rocket and the poor Iranian people are going to suffer. But the crucial thing, will this massive economic pressure bring down the hateful Islamic regime or will it survive whatever the strain? So far there has been no real hint of a collapse in determination to hold off the US. The country is effectively being held topgether by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and it's very much in their interest that the keep the regime going against all the odds. So this means they will let the Iranian people suffer for as long as it takes to force the Trump administration to agree concessions. Donald Trump won't be looking at it this way. His objective is to destroy the Iranian economy beyond help and force the Tehran clerics and military leaders to give in to all of his demands. The next week or so will show whether Trump or the IRGC are going to win this war. It still could go either way, although the naval blockade could well prove to be the president's best trump card. BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER PAPERBACK. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES.

Will Europe regret the anti-Trump line?

Until now the position adopted by most members of the European Union and European outsiders such as Britain has been slowly becoming more and more anti-Trump. Rachel Reeves, the UK Chancellor now in Washington, has described Trump's war with Iran as a "folly". That sure won't go down well when she meets with US officials. Trump won't see her, that's for sure. Keir Starmer began his relations with Trump by being over-flattering and then switched to distancing himself from everything Trump said and did. President Macron has gone down the same route, and previous supporters such as Georgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, has attacked Trump for being rude about the Pope. As for the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, he is in a league of his own, coming out from the very beginning as anti-Trump once the war with Iran began. The German chancellor Friedrich Mertz has tried to be statesmanlike but has effectively denied Trump the support he was after over Iran. But will all these leaders come to regret their opposition? They have let the US and Israel take on one of the biggest threats facing world security, a nuclear-armed Iran. They may say it's Trump's war of choice but the fact is, Iran poses a threat to everyone and if the military action eventually gets the result Trump wants - a free and fair democratic Iran with no uranium-enrichment, no bomb and no state terrorism - then he will not be thanking Europe. He will be disdainful of Euorpe's lack of foresight. I know it is highly unlikely Trump will get everything he wants but if it turns out that Iran drops being a revolutionary pain in the neck and allows its people to enjoy a better future, the Trump will get all the kudos. New talks being planned for later this week suggest there may be a deal upcoming which just might end the war and bring peace for the Iranian people which they deserve. If that happens, Starmer and co are going to look pretty spiteful and humbled. It may not happen but if it does there are going to be a lot of humiliated faces in European capitals. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER IN PAPERBACK. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.

Nuclear impasse between the US and Iran

It has come down to Iran's nuclear programme. All the other objectives declared by Donald Trump have either been sort of achieved or are in the process of being achieved. The US Epic Fury attacks, backed by Israel, have destroyed a good proportion of Iran's ballistic missile launchers and missiles, and missile-production plants, air defence systems, most of the navy and air force and command and control infrastructure. But the nukes question is unresolved, although of course the US and Israel together have set back the enriched-uranium programme by at least a year if not more after persistent strikes on the main nuclear sites at Isfahan, Fordow and Natanz. But the 440 kilos of 60-per-cent-enriched uranium is still in Tehran's hands, albeit buried under the targeted plants. Trump is still talking about sending in special operations troops to grab this near-bomb-grade material, but right now he is hoping Tehran will just hand it over. That seems highly unlikely. The talks in Islambad broke down because of this issue and because of US demands that all uranium-enrichment be suspended for 20 years. Iran has come back with "ok, but only for five years". Trump will mever agree to that. But I can see a situation in which a compromise is made and Iran agrees to suspend most of its enrichment for 15 years. If that happens, then it will be exacty the same deal reached by Obama in 2015 through diplomatic rather than military force means. Surely Trump could not go with that! PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER PAPERBACK. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.

Trump gives the go ahead for a naval blockade of Iranian ports

Donald Trump has now announced he WILL launch a navl blockade of all Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday aAfter noting the suggestion of a blockade by two of his favourite military analysts, General Jack Keane, former vice chief of staff of the US Army, and Rebecca Grant of the Lexington Institute think-tank, Trump posted on Truth Social that it would “begin shortly”. Following the failure of the talks in Islamabad to find a solution to end the war, the notion of a blockade to outsmart the IRGC has already begun to take shape. On Saturday, two American guided-missile destroyers, USS Frank E Petersen and USS Michael Murphy, briefly entered the Strait of Hormuz from the Gulf of Oman to begin “setting conditions for clearing mines,” US Central Command said. The short, uninhibited excursion into the Gulf waterway was not a precursor to the imminent arrival of a blockading convoy of warships. But it underlined the threats that will confront the US Navy if Trump has given the go-ahead for such an operation. It’s not just mines, some of which, it is feared, have been dropped indiscriminately, but the IRGC’s surviving stocks of suicide airborne drones, anti-ship cruise missiles and sea drones packed with explosives, all of which could target oil tankers and other commercial ships as well as US Navy vessels protecting them. “Convoy operations will entail having active optical and electronic surveillance overhead, with an immediate response capability, covering potential mobile launcher firing points along at least 250 miles of Iranian coastline and its hinterland, from Abu Musa in the West to Jask in the East.,” said the Maritime Executive, the shipping industry’s leading information source. Such a challenge would require a heavy concentration of firepower in the Gulf waterway for months on end, a commitment which would have repercussions for Central Command’s main Epic Fury operation against Iran which, if Trump orders a second phase of bombing, could include the seizure of Kharg Island, location of 90 per cent of stored and exportable Iranian oil. Could the US mount a full naval blockade at the same time as relaunching Epic Fury? Both Jack Keane and Rebecca Grant indicated it was feasible and necessary. The current US naval presence consists of around 26 warships and submarines, including two aircraft carriers, USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R Ford, now returned after repairs in Croatia following a fire on board, and 16 guided-missile destroyers. A third carrier, USS George HW Bush, is on the way from jts home port in Norfolk, Virginia. However, there is a serious shortage of US minesweeping vessels in the region. Four left the Gulf before the war started. Two are currently in Malaysia for repair and modernisation. Will Trump call on his much-maligned Nato partners to provide mine-clearance capabilities and tanker escorts? During his recent trip to the Gulf region, Sir Keir Starmer emphasised the importance of reopening the Strait of Hormuz. But a US naval blockade would likely be defined by the prime minister’s lawyers as an act of war. He has made a point of pledging not to involve the UK in Trump’s war. President Macron of France has already said French warships would not escort vessels through the Strait of Hormuz while the war was on. Tne former top Pentagon official warned that the idea of a naval blockade was premature because of the continuing threat posed by IRGC coastal missiles and drones. “I think we are still several weeks away from degrading the Iranian capabilities sufficiently and bringing in our limited mine counter measure vessels,” said Eric Edelman who was the Pentagon’s defence policy chief for four years in President George W Bush’s administration. “The seizure of Kharg Island could be a part of efforts to clear the Strait since it would provide a chokehold on Iran's export capabilities and give the US a bargaining chip to trade with the Iranians,” he said. About 3,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division and two marine expeditionary units, 4,400-strong, as well as hundreds of special operations troops are in the region, ready for a land-grab operation. “A separate matter would be to blockade and presumably seize Iranian ghost fleet tankers coming out of the Strait. That is something I think the US Navy could do but the administration would have to weigh the disruptions that might cause to the international oil market and the fact that much of that oil is headed to China where Trump is supposed to be meeting Xi Jinping in May,” Edelman said. This raises a potential challenging scenario. What if China were to send its own warships to protect oil tankers bound for Chinese ports? Would the US Navy be under orders to let them through the blockade? “The US Navy could have seized the handful of tankers that have left the Strait over the past few weeks but it appears the administration was not willing to do so then, perhaps they are willing now,” Edelman said. Naval blockades have a mixed history. Trump has leapt at the idea for the Gulf because of the perceived success of the operation against Venezuela. An armada of US warships blocked oil tankers from leaving Venezuelan ports, but the naval siege was not leak-proof., and there was no war underway. To guarantee safe passage for ships in the Strait of Hormuz and stop Iranian oil tankers from getting through, the US Navy will have an embittered enemy across the other side of the chokepoint. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.

A US naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz on the way

The US military under Donald Trump is certainly getting action, action, action. For a president who doesn't like wars, his second term has been almost nothing else. After the huge success of the Venezuela op in January and the bombing mission against three Iranian nuclear (bombmaking) plants in June last year, Epic Fury, the ultimate Tehran-bashing war, has now taken another turn. After the talks headed by Vice President JD Vance, failed to deliver anything worth mentioning in Islamabad (no surprise there), Trump has turned his attention to launching a naval blockade of the Gulf to prevent any Iranian oil tankers from heading down the waterway. It could involve dozens of ships and take months. Will this calm the oil market or make it go even wilder, upwards? And will Trump's so-called but no longer respected European allies offer to chip in with the odd warship to help protect the non-Iranian countries' tankers from using the Strait? It seems highly unlikely. The UK, for example, doesn't really have any available ships to join a convoy mission and even if the government did decide to deploy something, lawyers would point out that a naval blockade against shipping breaks international law which could make it tricky. Perhaps the naval blockade threat is just bluster to scare Tehran. But it has to be said, the clerics don't seem to have revealed the sort of fear they were supposed to have shown when the bombs started falling and their leaders kept dying. So, a blockade might not go the way Trump wants it to go. The ceasefire has another week and a few days to go. So, let's see what happens in that time. Perhaps Tehran will say, "hey let's have another talk". I expect that's what Trump is hoping because a naval blockade would be a mammoth and very expensive task. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps doesn't want peace with the US

Donald Trump's worst enemies in the Middle East are the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and they denifitely don't want peace with the man they refer to as the Satan. They don't want any deal unless it favours their longevity, their ability to maintain dominance across the Middle East with terror, threats and arming of proxy militias and no doubt the continuing ability to develop a nuclear bomb, however long it takes. So, with that understanding, JD Vance and his two supporters, Steve Witkoff and the ever-present Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, have a thankless task ahead of them as the negotations, allegedly for peace, beginning today in Islamabad. Some in the Tehran regime might just want the war to come to an end properly and for good, so that they can remuster, get the people back on their side and, with the lifting of sanctions, get the economy sorted, and plan for a much stronger military-style regime. That would be good for the IRGC as well, but the mere thought of doing business with the US and coming to some sort of compromise arrangement will never satisfy them. They want the US and all its forces out of the Middle East, and they are not going to get that. So the IRGC will remain a hostile presence at the talks, reminding the clerics in Tehran that they are the ones who keep the Islamic revolution going, never mind who the supreme leader is. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. yOU'LL LOVE IT. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS

The CIA's Ghost Murmur hearbeat-detection system: fact or fiction?

The colonel, one of a two-man crew of an F-15E Strike Eagle shot down by an Iranian shoulder-launched missile, had spent two days trying to conceal his location from enemy search parties, while letting his would-be rescuers know where he was. Apart from intermittent radio contact, all he had was his personal “come-and-get-me” beacon signal. And he dared switch that on only occasionally, for the Iranians would surely be monitoring the conventional means of rescuing him. What ultimately led to salvation, however, was far from conventional. One of the most intriguing secrets of Operation Epic Fury is how, using an “exquisite” piece of classified technology, the CIA succeeded in finding the injured airman in Iran by detecting his heartbeat, the tiniest evidence of human life concealed in a narrow crevice up a 7,000ft mountain ridge. The technology that led to the airman’s rescue by Seal Team Six commandos has now been outed as a CIA “tool” called Ghost Murmur. But is it fact or cleverly-woven fantasy? It was reportedly developed as a highly classified “blue skies” invention by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, the famous laboratory where young, brilliant scientists and engineers devote their time to finding solutions to impossible concepts. Hunting for a heartbeat to confirm the airman’s location, CIA “human assets” inside Iran are said to have relied on Ghost Murmur to select out all other environmental noises across the barren landscape to pinpoint the position of the weapons systems officer, the colonel, call-signed DUDE44 Bravo. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, hinted at the new technology in a press conference this week. “We deployed both human assets and exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service in the world possess to a daunting challenge, comparable to hunting for a single grain of sand in the middle of a desert,” Ratcliffe said. The US intelligence community is keeping quiet about the revelations. One American intelligence source said: “If we’ve done something in secret, it’s for a good reason.” On the face of it, a futuristic magnetic sensing device — Ghost Murmur in simplistic terms — pinpointed the missing colonel’s heartbeat across a 40-mile stretch of land. Such a system defies the laws of known physics. However, when Trump was contacted about the CIA’s exotic heartbeat detection system by the New York Post, which first broke the story on Ghost Murmur, he appeared to confirm the accuracy of the extraordinary achievement. “It was very important, the CIA was fantastic. Nobody even knows what it is. Nobody ever heard about it before. We have equipment, the likes of which nobody has ever even thought about,” he told the newspaper. The CIA is now more than ever linked up to private industry to benefit from technological breakthroughs. But Ghost Murmur, as described, would appear to push the boundaries of physics beyond even the most exceptional human brain or computer. Intelligence sources would not confirm or deny the existence of Ghost Murmur. But reportedly the “CIA tool” relies on what is called quantum magnetometry, which can find signals of human hearts, aided by artificial intelligence to separate out all the other noises getting in the way. On the night of the rescue operation, there would have been multiple heartbeats because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was out in force in the same region searching for the downed airman. “Ghost Murmur finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI,” says Scientific American, a magazine that specialises in advances in science and technology. “Quantum magnetometers are real, they are ultra-precise in detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields produced by the cardiac muscle. But the heart’s magnetic field is weak,” it reports. “At the surface of the chest, where you’re about ten centimetres away from the source, the magnetic field is just barely detectable,” John Wikswo, a professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Vanderbilt University, said. In other words, the further away, the heartbeat signal becomes progressively weaker, so detection of the missing colonel’s heartbeat from 40 miles away would seem to be a scientific stretch too far. Yet the CIA director’s “single grain of sand in a desert” image would appear to back it up. When the missing colonel finally stood up on the mountainside, which was covered in bushes and trees, as the rescuers got closer, his heartbeat was revealed in technicolour. The hint of movement 40 miles away was enough for Seal Team Six to board AH-6 Little Bird special forces helicopters and head for the spot. The commandos were strapped to outer benches attached to the helicopters for quick disembarkation. It was not the CIA’s only breakthrough achievement. The agency launched an elaborate deception plot to fool the IRGC into thinking the missing colonel had already been rescued and was being taken to safety in a road convoy for exfiltration by sea. No details of the deception mission have been released. But it is believed the CIA used Pegasus spyware developed by an Israeli company to hack into multiple Tehran leadership and IRGC command mobile phones to spread reports that the airman had been found. Pegasus, widely used by US intelligence services and special forces, was developed for eavesdropping on mobile phones and harvesting data without detection. But it can also be used for spreading false information, sending out apparently genuine messages via WhatsApp and Signal under the name of the phone account holder. In the end, the operation to save the missing colonel involved more than 150 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters and hundreds of special operations troops. However, it was secret technology and CIA spookery that made it all possible. PLESE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.