A U.S. official told the Washington Post that the intelligence on an Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump was “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.” Israel passed the warning to the CIA before the president left the NATO summit in Ankara on July 8. CIA analysts did not find it compelling, and they said so to administration officials.
The Secret Service ran the deception anyway. Trump boarded Air Force One, slipped off it into an airport catering truck, transferred to a military C-32A and flew to Britain under F-16 escort, and his location stayed hidden for hours from White House staff as well as from reporters. The New York Times, citing two U.S. officials, described the same threat differently: several streams of reporting, a plan to fire a surface-to-air missile at the presidential aircraft, a man seen near the summit with a shoulder-fired launcher, and Iranian knowledge of Trump’s exact floor in Ankara. Senator Chris Van Hollen asked publicly whether the Israeli material had been independently verified.
A week before that report, on August 6, Channel 12 reported that Mossad director Roman Gofman had removed the head of the agency’s Iran division and the head of its intelligence directorate, who had held that post since December. The two men wrote the operational plan to bring down the government in Tehran. Benjamin Netanyahu used that plan to persuade Trump to go to war in February, and it was never carried out on the ground. A source told Haaretz that Gofman himself, as Netanyahu’s military secretary, had been “one of the key supporters of the plan to change the regime” in Iran, which places the dismissals on the outcome rather than on the design.
The other end of the same war is the USS Abraham Lincoln. The carrier left San Diego on November 21 for a Pacific deployment, was diverted to the Middle East, was due home in May, and by August had been at sea for more than 250 days. Between its only two port calls, Guam in December and Oman in July, where those allowed off stayed inside a secured compound, the ship went more than 200 straight days without touching land, a modern record. It carries roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines.
Stars and Stripes and Navy Times, which cover the U.S. military with editorial independence from it, reported this week that several sailors tried to take their own lives and were stopped by shipmates, and that one sailor was recovered from the water in August. The Navy said it has “not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship,” citing onboard counselors, chaplains and medical staff. War Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters in Panama on August 13 that conditions on the carrier had been “completely misrepresented.”
Democratic lawmakers have written to the Pentagon about the ship and its crew. Families were told the Theodore Roosevelt would relieve the Lincoln. The Wall Street Journal reports the relief will be the Japan-based George Washington, whose strike group was transiting the Strait of Malacca on August 13 after a Vietnam port call that ended on August 5. The Pentagon calls the swap a previously planned rotation, and the run from Malacca to the Fifth Fleet area takes about two weeks.
The equipment bill runs separately. Three U.S. officials told the Washington Post the military has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones since the war began on February 28, roughly a quarter of the fleet, at $30 million to $50 million per airframe and more than $1.3 billion in total. The prewar inventory was about 185 aircraft, 165 in the Air Force and 20 in the Marine Corps, and Lieutenant General David Tabor told the Senate in May that about 135 remained, which puts the drawdown by May near 50 airframes, above the August loss figure. Losses concentrate around the Strait of Hormuz, and not all were shot down, because some crashed after losing the data link to their operators.
The White House is falling back on economic pressure. Iranian year-on-year inflation reached 77 percent according to Iranian central bank data, and the naval blockade has choked oil exports. A White House official told Bloomberg that sanctions and the blockade have left Iran broke and that Trump has many levers to pull in the coming months.
Washington buys those months with a carrier group taken off its Japan station and with a quarter of the Reaper fleet already spent. Neither comes back within months, and a blockade without persistent air surveillance over the strait does not hold itself shut. The pressure now runs on the Pacific account.
