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.

Prepare for Epic Fury Part II

It could be the shortest negotiations in history. The United States and Iran, with their respective peace plans, are so far apart it is difficult to imagine how their differences can ever be squared. A two-week ceasefire, which has already been broken, brought relief after five weeks of war and steadied the oil and stock markets. But the agreed ceasefire is looking fragile, as US Vice President JD Vance admitted. If there is any hope of a permanent deal, both Washington and Tehran are going to have make significant concessions. Judging by the 15-point plan presented by President Trump and the ten-point counter proposal delivered by the Iranian regime, neither side has even hinted at compromise. Trump has stated that Iran’s ten points might form the basis of a workable settlement. But only last week he effectively dismissed the Iranian demands, saying the package of peace proposals was “not good enough”. It’s not hard to see why. Tehran wants an acceptance of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment programme, the withdrawal of US combat forces from all bases in the region, full reparation for the billions of dollars of damage caused by the five weeks of US and Israeli bombing, Iranian military control of the Strait of Hormuz, and the lifting of all sanctions. In his 15-pointer, Trump demands an end to all uranium-enrichment, including for civilian purposes, the handover of the 440.9 kilos of uranium enriched to 60 per cent grade (30 per cent away from fissile fuel for a nuclear bomb), the decommissioning of nuclear facilities at Isfahan, Fordow and Natanz, and a halt to Tehran’s arming of proxy militia forces, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen. Key to both peace-settlement packages is the future of the Strait of Hormuz, with Trump wanting free and safe passage for all ships through the choke point, and Tehran insisting on having a supervisory role and, furthermore, introducing tolls for every vessel to the tune of at least $1 million-a-go. The cash flow, potentially up to $100 million a day would be used to cover the costs of rebuilding everything demolished in the war., although half the toll money would go to Oman, sitting on the other side of the channel. If Trump were to accept this toll system, it would undercut one of the principle reasons why he decided to go to war with Iran. Could he even consider allowing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to hold sway over the Strait? What would shipping companies, let alone insurance brokers covering the trips down the waterway, think of such an arrangement? Pakistan which will mediate the first round of negotiations in Islamabad on Friday, has put forward its own five-point plan, and its wording for the Strait of Hormuz matches Trump’s, not Tehran’s vision for shipping in the Gulf waterway: It calls for the restoration of “normal passage through the Strait as soon as possible”. In other words, no IRGC checkpoints and no tolls. Most of Iran’s ten points cannot be acceptable to a US administration which went to war in order to remove for ever the possibility of the cleric-run regime possessing nuclear weapons and to bring about regime-change through a combination of mass bomb strikes and leadership assassinations. Trump claims he has achieved both these objectives: the 60-per-cent enriched uranium is buried beneath the rubble caused by last June’s bombing and the five-week war’s retargeting of nuclear sites; and the regime is not the same as it was on February 28 when Operation Epic Fury began. However, Iran is effectively beginning the peace negotiations by ignoring the realities of what Trump has achieved in the last five weeks with the bombing campaign. If Iran maintains this position in Islamabad, it is difficult to see how the two sides can even agree a framework for a peace deal, let alone get down to actual negotiations. It took two years for President Obama and a team of brilliant nuclear experts led by US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz to construct a deal under which Iran agreed to limit its uranium-enrichment to only 3.67 per cent and reduce its stockpile by 98 per cent. The 2015 deal was signed by Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany and the European Union. Trump, on the other hand, is a broad-brush negotiator, not a detail man. He is not sending nuclear experts to Islamabad. He has given the job to Vance. along with Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. This means he will expect Iran to cave in to his demands, particularly on its uranium-enrichment programme. If he doesn’t get what he wants, Trump will return to Operation Epic Fury Part Two. Pete Hegseth, the Defence (War) Secretary, has already indicated the president night still authorise sending invasion troops into Iran to dig out the highly-enriched uranium. So, there is little room for optimism that the ceasefire will survive beyond two weeks. PLEASE BUY AND ENJOY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.

Can the ceasefire last?

Two weeks will be over so quickly. If the talks due to start in Islamabad on Friday to find a peace settlement to end the war in Iran get anywhere it will be a miracle. The Iranian negotiators will arrive in an angry mood after the five weeks of bombing and assassinations of leaders, and are unlikely to want to make any concessions to the main US negotiator, Vice President JD Vance. However, the agreement to hold a two-week ceasefire was a surprise. So maybe the Tehran regime might want a deal more than they are currently saying. But the signs are not good. We don't know how good a negotiator Vance is. He's an unknown. He will have a script written by Trump and won'thave any leeway. So the Islamabad talks could end pretty quickly. The trouble is, the whole world is so relieved about the ceaefire that if it all goes wrong, and the war takes up again, much of the blame could fall on Trump, rather than on the Iranian regime. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.

Trump says he can obliterate Iran in four hours

The rhetoric has become more and more belligerent and apocalyptic. Now Donald Trump is warning he can destroy every bridge and power station in Iran in four hours if the Tehran regime - what's left of it - doesn't reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Will the surviving leaders in Iran give in, facing such a massive blow to the whole country's existence or will they bluff it out, suspecting the US president will do no such thing. The brinkmanship game being played out from the White House means that no one knows what will happen. Has Trump actually ordered the US military to destroy every bridge and power station? Is it even legal to carry out such an operation? As far as we know, the main leaders in Iran right now are the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the speaker of the Iranian parliament and possibly the head of the Basij police militia force. The new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is lying unconscious in a hospital in Qom, according to The Times today. So who is going to make the decision whether to give in to Trump or suffer the consequences by retaining control of the Strait of Hormuz? This is a critical moment for Iran and for the war. If Trump does give the order, will he also authorise a ground war while Iran suffers the biggest blackout in history? We may or may not know the answer this week. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS.

Diplomacy or hell?

There are so many conflicting and contradictory signals being sent at the moment it is difficult to make any sense of it. The war in Iran will end in two weeks, the war will carry on, diplomacy will bring a ceasefire, Iran is to be hit into the Stone Ages. Which one of these various scenarios is going to be the accurate one? Does anyone know? Does Donald Trump know? The Iranian people, the ordinary folk who hate their cleric-run regime, must be in constant panic mode. They want the Americans to succeed but the Islamic Rebolutionary Guard is holding on. Tomorrow is the latest of Trump's deadlines: open the Strait of Hormuz or face hell. By that he means he will authorise the bombing of oil and gas plants and electricity-supply stations and cripple the whole country. But Trump promised the Iranian people that he would come and help them after the security forces killed thousands of protestors when they dared to demonstrate in the streets against the regime. Turning the lights out won't help them. It will just make their lives more miserable. So, hopefully, this is all empty threats. Yet Israel has today bombed an Iranian petro-chemical plant. So it may actually happen from tomorrow night. This will escalte the war beyond any hope of redemption. Tehran will retaliate by sending drones and missiles against every energy facility in the Gulf states, and there will be fiery bedlam everywhere. By the end of this week we will have a diplomatic plan under genuine discussion or a cataclysmic energy war. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, WATERSTONES, ROWANVALE BOOKS