Intel Update — April 11 — Dire Strait

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for April 5th through the 11th, 2026. Hope everyone has had a good Easter week or Holy Week, respectively. Christ is risen indeed, and I hope everyone got some downtime to take a little bit of rest this week because around the world, it has been a rather tense roller coaster of events over the past few days. Of course, in the Middle East, the ceasefire has gone into effect, but it has been hanging by a thread since its inception, which we'll get into later. Throughout Western Europe, protests continue to grow in size and scope in Ireland due to both the fuel crisis and also the growing concerns of government overreach. Protests have become more kinetic throughout the day, and as I'm recording this, things have gotten a little bit spicy, so we'll have to cover this uh once things calm down a little bit and see how it works out. And on the home front this week, general crime and terrorism concerns remain as crime season throughout the United States is well underway. So, starting off with the homeland this week, there have been a series of brutal murders and attacks carried out by the usual suspects. While we have been focused on the Middle East, there have been several items of note that took place last weekend and also throughout the week. In Maine this week, more details have come to light regarding four men who were apprehended by Border Patrol in the vicinity of the St. Zachary Port of Entry on Golden Road shortly after crossing into the United States from Canada. At the time this story was announced, it did not get much traction due to most headlines beginning with four British men detained or something like that. However, a few days ago, more details were released, and it turns out that the four British men were actually four British men after the Border Patrol released their names, which are as follows: Ali Muhammad Ali Abdullah, Hamid Muhammad Nagui, Ibrahim Ayub Khan, and Muhammad Sultan Salah. Additionally, all four men were found hiding in a concealed position by sugar maple workers who were operating in the general area near the actual port of entry. The suspects had bypassed the checkpoint on foot and attempted to hide after hearing people in their general vicinity, but ended up getting caught anyway. After search of the surrounding area, Border Patrol agents tracked their position back to the Canadian side of the border where they found a vehicle which had run out of gas, and after they searched the vehicle, they found a handgun under the driver seat. One of the main reasons as to why we know so much about how this incident unfolded is due to the suspects recording the entire illegal border crossing on a GoPro camera. The footage from this GoPro confirms that they were indeed attempting to cross into the United States illegally, and they confessed all of their series of crimes on the video. The suspects also Googled how to get to Boston using their phones that were found on them at the time of their arrest. Considering the sheer amount of incriminating evidence the suspects compiled on themselves, it's possible that these guys were not exactly terrorists, but more like freeloaders who have been known to cross into the US from Canada knowing that the southern US border is much harder to penetrate nowadays. It's not impossible, but it's far easier to get into Canada and from there into the United States just by walking through the woods, which appears to have been the case here. So, despite the immediate reports saying that these guys were just lost hikers who accidentally stumbled into the United States, well, Border Patrol's testimony is that they've got a video of the guys uh them talking themselves about how they knew they were trying to get into the United States illegally. So, we can't really be sure what uh details have not been conveyed to the public yet, and it's quite likely that we can't see the whole story. So, definitely something to keep in mind, especially if we're uh going to be on kind of heightened alert for terrorism attacks over the next few months. The northern border with Canada is most certainly porous, and if these idiots got found, I can only imagine that somebody with more experience and more deliberation who's not going to be walking and talking loudly through the woods recording their crimes for Instagram on a GoPro might have a little bit of better chance of success. Nationwide, around the country, murder season is well underway, unfortunately. In Fort Myers, Florida, one suspect was arrested after murdering a woman with a hammer outside a gas station a few days ago. This extremely graphic murder was captured on the security cameras at the gas station, and it's so graphic that I can only show one frame from it. The murder took place after the suspect was observed hitting the victim's car with a hammer, and when the victim exited the store to confront the suspect, she was murdered in an exceptionally brutal manner. The suspect has been identified as Robert Joachim, an illegal immigrant from Haiti who was released into the United States in 2022. Over in Ohio last week on Easter night, a potential terror attack was reported in Franklin after a very suspicious series of events. Initially, the situation began after one suspect drove his vehicle into the driveway of a private residence seemingly at random. The suspect exited his vehicle and began Islamic prayer in the driveway. After some time and after security cameras notified the homeowners that there was someone outside their house, the suspect approached the front door of the residence and attempted to make entry. After being denied entrance by the homeowner, the homeowner eventually exited the residence to confront the suspect. The suspect then threatened the homeowner with a knife and told him that he would kill him in the name of Allah. The homeowner retreated, and the suspect departed the location. A short time later, the suspect was apprehended after ramming or attempting to ram his vehicle into someone else in Clear Creek. The suspect was eventually identified as Anthony Long, and very few details have indicated what this entire situation was all about. This could have been a just random crime sort of thing, or it could have been something more organized. I don't know. There really hasn't been any comment from the local authorities on this one, so we're going to have to keep this one on the back burner and flag it roughly as being a just a random crime until we know more information. Moving to North Carolina this week, DeCarlos Brown Jr., the assailant who murdered Irina Zurutsky in Charlotte back in August of last year, has been found mentally incompetent to stand trial on state murder charges. This finding actually took place back in December, but just came to light this week after his public defender filed court documents requesting a continuance based on this designation. The federal charges still stand, and right now, there are conflicts between the state and the feds regarding how to proceed with this trial because the state is arguing that since he's in federal custody, he can't be evaluated by the state, and since he can't be evaluated by the state, the competency hearing can't go forward. As to what this means for this very high-profile murder case, it's not entirely clear at the moment. This is Charlotte, after all, and it's become quite a unique place to be since there is a lot of emotion and uh social attention on this case, and there's no telling what might happen. So, this is something to keep an eye on just in case this individual ends up getting the slap on the wrist that everyone is expecting. Moving to Texas last week on Easter Sunday, one assailant attempted to carry out a mass shooting at a church in Houston. Local authorities state that Emmanuel Mombevi initially gained entry to the church and began handing out flyers to congregants during the service. After being approached by security on site, he was removed from church grounds, but after some time, he returned to the church armed with a firearm and 100 rounds of ammunition, and after he attempted to draw the firearm in the church, he was tackled by the security team. During the fray, he also allegedly attempted to detonate an IED with his cell phone, but afterwards, it became clear that he did not have any explosives on him. So, quite a kinetic week for the United States this week. Don't want to dwell on it too much, but the risks are quite paramount. Whether or not you want to call these terrorism incidents or just the state of what general crime has transitioned into is uh going to be up to you, but the brutality of these kinds of things has uh definitely become quite paramount this week. Moving to the Middle East, so far, the ceasefire continues as well as to be expected for a ceasefire in the Middle East, which is a huge caveat. For those who are not aware of the cultural traditions of the region, ceasefires don't usually mean a whole lot, and they don't usually mean a total ceasefire, but rather a cessation of major attacks. Since the ceasefire went into effect, several drone strikes have been reported in both the UAE and in Kuwait, and the UAE did conduct some targeting efforts after the ceasefire went into effect as retribution for the Iranians hitting their oil refineries very hard. The UAE was not going to sit back and let the Iranians hit their oil facilities and then the ceasefire go into effect the next day. The UAE was definitely going to settle the score on that front, and that took place after the ceasefire went into effect. And of course, the Israelis have been carrying on targeting as usual, though they weren't really carrying out that much targeting within Iran over the past couple of weeks anyway because they are fighting a very hot war in Lebanon, so their forces are spread pretty thin. Concerning the terms of the ceasefire itself, or really, we should probably be causing calling it more of a pause than a ceasefire because nothing has been written down. Not much is known regarding the exact details of what this ceasefire or pause is all about, and there's certainly really no indication of how the general state of peace talks might go. Historically speaking, this is perfectly normal, and one of the reasons as to why ceasefires are usually transitioned into a lasting peace agreement to settle a conflict. Perhaps the most notable exception to this rule would be the Korean War, which is mostly just a ceasefire which was put into place without really hammering out a complete and final settlement to the conflict. So, considering the history of the past, I don't know, half a century or so of warfare, ceasefires normally transition into some kind of peace agreement or some kind of peace understanding over a period of time, but not always. The fighting can always resume as has happened several times in Ukraine, for instance. There have been several ceasefires in Ukraine which have taken effect, they have gone into effect, and they have ended, and the fighting has resumed. So, the same thing might happen in Iran. In terms of the tactical situation on the ground, there are a few items of note that I'm keeping an eye on this week. First and foremost, the minefield in the Strait of Hormuz. This is the bounding box for where the Iranians have stated that they have laid mines, but as the United States is finding out this week, the Iranians don't really have any demining capability. So, they can place mines, but they can't recover them. And the White House has stated that the Iranians don't exactly know where their mines are located within this zone. As strange as it sounds, this Wile E. Coyote mine-laying operation is actually part of standard Iranian doctrine because remember, when the Ayatollah was taken out and their comms were severed at the beginning of the war, their decentralized command structure entered into its fight to the last man mode. So, they were not expecting to ever win the war. They were expecting for everyone to fight to the death, essentially. When this level of defense doctrine is is in any nation, not just Iran, but any nation that is pushed into a corner like this. You don't really care so much about picking up mines later on. In the initial days of the war, the Iranians were fighting for their very lives and certainly were fighting a state of unrestricted warfare where nothing was off limits, at least on the first couple of days. This was by design and after a few days the higher-ups were able to get control again. I suspect, and this is total speculation, that in those early days of the war individual commanders at bases were acting independently and they probably deployed some of their mines out while they could assuming that they might be dead in a few days anyway. Thinking from the perspective of a local IRGC commander, that's what I would have done. You're sitting in a dusty bunker watching the Americans bomb everything in your country, comms are severed, reports are coming in of Tehran being hit, the Ayatollah's dead, and we're on our own here, right? So, get on the boats and get our munitions out there based on the plans that have been cooked up decades ago. It's a fire sale, everything must go right now. Or at least that's what these guys would have been thinking. The drone launchers send everything they have. Anybody who can do so gets in the fight and the small boats with one or two mines on board put to sea and get their mine in the water knowing that they probably won't see the sunrise the next day. That's the mindset these guys were operating from during the early days of the war. Fast forward to today when the Iranian regime has not collapsed and the world has not ended for them and their military posture can be more measured. Well, at this point the mines are already in the water and when Abdul was burning out the engine in his small boat to get his crew's mine in the water in the dead of night, he probably wasn't looking so closely at his GPS, which was probably being by his own people anyway. Now, other means of implacing mines probably came from submarines because a huge mission of their submarine fleet is to emplace mines underwater in the strait. Rumor has it, again, I don't have photos to show you, but rumor has it, at least a lot of the long-standing doctrine that has existed before this war was put into the mainstream civilian consciousness, it has been an assumption that a lot of the IRGC's mini submarines are actually launched from James Bond Dr. No style like caves that they've cut into the side of the waterway there on the coast of the Persian Gulf so that you can't really hit them. They're like submarine pens during World War II. Very hard to target, very hard to get at, and the submarines are so small they can just go out into the comparatively shallow Persian Gulf and do whatever they want to without really being detected very easily. Now again, maybe the US sunk every single one of these mini subs during the initial phases of the war. I don't know. Maybe we struck all these places. I don't know. That's the whole point of all of this is an unknown. And for sure this was certainly a multi-layered approach that we don't have a lot of fidelity on simply because we don't know what the Iranians did during the initial phases of the war. And honestly, at this point it's quite possible that the Iranians themselves don't know either because if a little miniature submarine goes out and lays two or three mines or if a fast boat goes out and, you know, lays one mine and they get sunk with an airstrike before they get back to base, it's pretty likely that nobody, not even the Iranians, are going to know where that mine is actually located because they didn't make it back to base to tell everybody, "Hey, we put the mine at this grid." You know? So, suffice it to say this is a major concern that can only be alleviated by the US Navy. Lloyd's of London, the main insurance corporation that underwrites high-risk insurance policies such as those for ships transiting the strait, is not going to approve a single policy unless the US Navy clears the minefield and very publicly transits through the minefield area with their AIS transponder turned on so that the whole world can see that the route is safe. This is the bare minimum expectation for returning to normal in the strait. And I say that because this morning when I'm recording this, there are reports of US Navy vessels, which have been in port in the Persian Gulf this entire time, that may be moving toward the Strait of Hormuz. If that is the case and if they can start ensuring the freedom of navigation through the alleged minefield, this would be a very positive development for getting things back to normal. However, it's also possible and quite likely that the Iranians will tell them to turn around or fire anti-ship missiles at them and then we're back at this again. But once again, this is a developing situation that is going on right now, so more details are to be expected later on. Another situation I am monitoring is the buildup on all sides during this lull in the war. The Iranians have claimed to have repaired several of the bridges that were struck just a few days ago, which is hard to believe, but construction projects in the third world go rather quickly when you don't have to worry about OSHA, and the Iranians are heavily motivated to put down their rivals and grab their e-tools while they still have time. Similarly, the United States has been pouring resources into the Middle East replenishing resources as best they can. As a result, we will have to wait and see how the ceasefire works out. If it turns into a full-fledged peace plan, that's good. There's no harm, no foul, and maybe we can put this all behind us. But if a deal cannot be reached and the fighting resumes, it's going to be intense if things pop off once again. As a result, for those who may be breathing a sigh of relief that the war is over and, you know, the Trump tacoed and it's all over, I wouldn't be so sure about that just yet. Let's not count our chickens before they hatch here and I very highly doubt that the forces that have driven this war so far are going to be looking to let go from this conflict so easily. This conflict has been half a century in the making at least and I don't think this is over just yet. Of course, the war in Lebanon is a complicating factor for all of this as well, but by and large, at this point the strategic goals for all parties, but particularly the United States, is simply to undo the effects of the war and return to the normal state that existed before hostilities commenced. That seems to be the strategic goal, to get back to the way things were before we started this war, which is not necessarily a good sign, but that's what we seem to be trying to do, to get back to the way things were in terms of the strait being considered to be international waters, back to the merchant shipping carrying on as usual, back to the US being able to have military bases in the Middle East, and back to the way things have been for decades. However, even though this is clearly a goal at this point, in many ways there will be no going back. Iran maintains a lot of power right now and over the next few weeks the United States is going to have to play catch-up with regards to achieving their military objectives, which the United States might be preparing for as resupply and rearmament efforts continue around the region. In short, we are most certainly not out of the woods just yet and not only is peace not a certainty, but it's looking pretty unlikely on the diplomatic front unless the United States and Israel are willing to accept a lot of concessions and by default allow the Iranians a strategic victory. This does not seem very possible at the moment unless the war actually went way worse for us than we thought it did and we're willing to now make a lot of concessions, but otherwise doesn't seem very possible in the in the short term at least. But again, staying on the hopeful side of things, anything can happen. There are a lot of moving parts and things are changing by the hour, so hopefully we can see how things work out on the diplomatic front over the next few days. And on that note, that's all I have for today. So, let's finish up with the intercepted Ghost Net reports for this week. For those who are not aware, I don't just make PowerPoint slides and maps, I also manage another line of effort called the Ghost Net, which is a project to bring a more informational side to the world of radio. If you do not physically own the wires, you do not own the communication. And if your communications, your messages, your DMs, your emails, your newsfeeds, all that stuff, if all that's going over somebody else's cable, then they have the ability to influence it somewhat. Though it may seem to be an odd combination to try to smash together the world of geopolitics and the world of amateur radio, this is a good way to ensure that resiliency is possible even during more contingent situations. In short, if Twitter goes down or there's some kind of cyber attack that takes out a major data centers, we'll still be able to have some sort of effectiveness in exchanging information during a crisis. As a side note, that's one of the ways that the world of intelligence is separated from the world of journalism. Journalism is supposed to convey just the raw facts of what happened in the past. They may not do that these days, but that's what they're supposed to do. Whereas intelligence is a career field that uses those raw facts to figure out what's going to happen next so that people can make decisions for the future. Journalism is facing rearwards to the past and intelligence is facing forward to the future, which is a major difference. Sometimes we get so caught up with what we think is just political commentary because we're so oversaturated with that sort of thing most of the time from the mainstream media, but in reality what we want to do is help provide information and that dreaded opinion to help make decisions. In the professional world, intelligence analysts are almost never asked by their bosses for source material or raw information. That just That just never happens. Decision makers want purely their opinion on what to do or what is going to happen next. But it's also a constantly evolving process that requires a solid bedrock of communications infrastructure to even work. Of course, in the civilian world expectations are radically different and no analysis will be accepted without first providing the raw source material. That's just kind of where we're at right now, I think. Opinions and organic thought is just not really allowed in nearly all cases unless a primary source is provided. And to do all of this, we need an ecosystem for exchanging that information that is very resilient and hard for malign actors to take offline. When it comes to having that forward-facing ecosystem, we need to have capabilities to help make decisions even when everything is failing around us. Nobody would expect a Fox News anchor to take off their suit and tie, fire up a ham radio, and transmit a report from the field. Nobody would expect an ambulance driver to be the same guy who builds that ambulance in the factory or fixes it when it breaks down. But for the prepared citizen, that might be an expectation for us because we're not moving information to improve ratings, but rather to save lives sometimes. In our world, he who has the information or analysis has the responsibility to ensure that it can make it into the hands of whomever needs it. In our case, we have to not just be responsible for gathering information and processing it into intelligence, but also providing that analysis in a way that allows others to make decisions. And on top of all of that, we have to make sure that this flow of analysis can take place when all communications networks are down. It's a tall order. It's a hard thing to do, but the Ghost Net is a decent starting point toward building out that ecosystem. And now that there is an Android version of JS8Call, the main software package that we use for this, it is now even easier to become involved and start sharing information. So, this week I did pick up many of your transmissions via this method, and I'm starting to get a little bit more familiar with the Android app of JS8Call. I was able to get it to work with one of my radios, but not the other, unfortunately. Uh and it's going to take a little bit of work around to get a receive-only arrangement working for those of you who don't have any kind of interest in ham radio. If you just want to receive the news via radio, you can still do it. It's just a little bit of work around for the moment. So, just to test this out on Thursday night, I set up one of my phones via audio coupling, as in I literally just laid my headphones on top of my phone's microphone, so that the signals could be transmitted from the speaker in the headphones to the microphone on the phone, and it was decoded that way. So, that did work. A very, very ad hoc way of doing it. Seemed to work decently well enough. That's not That's not normally how you'd want to do it, but it can work. Longer messages did not decode, but again, this is a work in progress, and I hope that we can get this working even better over the next few months. So, please stay tuned for that. I'm going to do a little bit more testing on this and try to get this working a little bit better, so that we can have even better tools to exchange information. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you all for sticking around, and we'll get back at it next week. Thank you again to all of you on Patreon who keep the project going. I really do appreciate it. I could not do any of this without you. So, thank you again, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.