The Sentence
At a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Oct. 5, the president defended the war with Iran by saying the economic pain is "a small price to pay for keeping the world safe." Then: "They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego." The crowd cheered. The White House said he meant that a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten those cities if he had not gone to war. That reading is plausible and deserves to stand next to the quote, and the Old Goat covered the rhetoric in The Grievance Swap. This dispatch asks a different question. Whatever the sentence meant, who is positioned to stop the thing it describes?
The Empty Chair
CNN reported on March 3, days after the war began, citing two anonymous sources, that FBI Director Kash Patel removed about a dozen people from CI-12, the Washington-based counterintelligence unit that tracks foreign threats including Iran, in the days before the first strikes. CBS reported that many of the agents fired worked on a squad handling global counterintelligence cases that included Iran. Reps. Bennie Thompson and Seth Magaziner wrote to Patel on March 4 asking why. The FBI declined to discuss personnel but said it keeps "a robust counterintelligence operation." CNN's sources said the people pushed out had worked on the investigation into Trump's retention of classified documents. That is a different explanation from negligence, and it is the one the Old Goat finds more worrying, but it is the sources' account and the Justice Department has not confirmed it.
A second strand predates the war. On Dec. 23, 2025, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi wrote to Patel that "nearly a quarter of the FBI's roughly 13,000 agents nationwide, and up to 40 percent in the largest field offices," remained assigned to immigration enforcement, and that counterterrorism and counterintelligence specialists were working immigration cases on rotation. The figure is the congressman's characterization, not an audited count. In June 2025 ABC and Reuters reported the bureau discussed moving agents back, with exemptions for Iran-related work, and the FBI does not comment on operational adjustments. The Old Goat does not know today's number. Nobody outside the bureau does, which is part of the point.
The Threat Was Not Hypothetical
Whatever the quality of the staffing, the threat environment is on the record. The New York Times reported, citing officials, that commanders received new intelligence of a possible drone attack ordered by Iran's Revolutionary Guard against aircraft at RAF Fairford, and the 12 B-1 bombers left the base over a weekend and have returned to the United States. President Trump confirmed there was a threat and said Iran was connected; Vice President Vance said the move was "out of an abundance of caution" and declined to give details. British police had arrested people after a Sept. 27 incident involving vans near the base that held petrol and no explosives; no one has been charged. The Old Goat laid out what is and is not known in Twelve Bombers, Five Vans. The Times' reporting on the wider campaign says personnel were pulled from bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar after Iranian missile and drone damage, and that naval supply now runs through Diego Garcia, more than 2,000 miles away. That is the Times' account from officials; the Pentagon has not confirmed the details.Iran →
So the sequence the Old Goat can document, without inference, is this. The unit that watched Iran inside the United States lost about a dozen people before the war. Iranian-linked plotting against an American base on allied soil was serious enough to move twelve bombers. On Oct. 5, at a rally, the commander in chief said Iran could "take out" two American cities and called the cost "a small price to pay," in a sentence the White House says was about a nuclear-armed Iran.
The Admission And The Date
Two more facts belong here. In his Time interview, published around Oct. 1, asked why the war ran longer than he had said, the president told the magazine, in Axios's quotation, "I could have stopped then, but I wanted to go further." He also said it was "possible" he would ramp up the bombing after the midterms. On Sept. 25 the Wall Street Journal reported that he rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days and told aides he expects to resume bombing after the November elections. Reuters could not confirm the Journal's report.
None of that proves a plan to provoke an attack. Presidents say things at rallies and in interviews, yet the Old Goat's INFERENCE is one the record supports: a war continued by choice, with escalation reportedly expected after the vote, is a war whose defensive posture at home should be the most scrutinized thing in Washington, and not one where the counterintelligence bench is thin.
Two Lenses On The Same Door
Two threads from the Old Goat's later dispatch A Promise With a Date On It belong beside this one, because both are counterintelligence questions. The first is oil. A May 27 Senate letter to the CFTC cites more than $580 million in oil futures traded by one trader about 15 minutes before the president's March 23 post postponing strikes on Iran's energy sites, an approximately $950 million bet on falling oil hours before the ceasefire announcement, and more than $700 million in Brent and WTI contracts traded in five minutes on May 6, an hour before an Axios report. Bloomberg reported a CFTC investigation. The Old Goat has found no public finding of who made the trades. An oversight system that cannot say who knew first has a hole in it.
The second is influence. Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower and author of Mindf*ck, told House Democrats that Steve Bannon asked the firm to study ways to reduce Democratic turnout (NBC News, 2018), and FEC records show the 2016 Trump campaign paid the firm $5,912,500. This is the Old Goat's opinion, labeled as such: the same playbook now has AI tools, an administration that openly makes AI imagery, and a motive. Nobody has shown it is happening, and nobody showed Cambridge was until an insider talked. If a foreign government wanted to shape American opinion before Nov. 3, a thin counterintelligence bench would be the place to start. The Old Goat has no evidence that anyone is doing so and is asking who is looking.
Four Questions For The Record
- Has the president been briefed on a specific threat to Southern California, and if so, what is being done about it?
- How many agents who worked Iran counterintelligence before February are working it today, and how many were returned from immigration duty?
- Why were the CI-12 personnel removed, and is the reason the CNN sources gave the reason on the paperwork?
- Will the administration commit publicly that no attack, whatever its scale, will be used to delay or federalize the Nov. 3 election? (See The Referees Leave the Field.)
You can tell what a government fears by what it staffs. The Old Goat is asking what the bench looks like.
The Old Goat will update this dispatch if the FBI or Justice Department answers on CI-12, if Fairford charges or attribution change, or if the post-election bombing report is confirmed or withdrawn. The Oct. 8 pledge not to strike before the election is set beside the earlier statements in A Promise With a Date On It.