Intel Update — May 10 — Unraveling Loose Ends

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for May 4th through the 10th of 2025. So let's get right to it. Starting off with the wavetop level. It has been once again a pretty busy week as pretty standard this time of year. However, a lot of loose ends have been tied up this week and a few others have begun to unravel. As one might expect this time of year. Summertime violence throughout the United States has started to pick up. It's hard to determine if this is any more elevated than usual for this time of year. But anyway, it's just something to keep an eye on, especially considering the more more serious kinetic events that seem to be happening around the country. Overseas, there have been some major developments in the Middle East, but most of them come from a more rhetoric ccentric standpoint and not something that we can really sink our teeth into. There really isn't anything set in stone. And there's just been a lot of rumors and mumbling, of course, going back and forth between various nations in the Middle East, but mostly between the United States and Israel regarding the Gaza issue. So, President Trump is scheduled to make a visit to the Middle East. So, I'm certain that by uh Monday, we'll have a lot more uh fidelity on what's actually going on, what the United States official stance is, but right now there's a lot of rhetoric going around. There's a lot of rumor and I personally don't really believe a whole lot of what I'm hearing, but I guess we'll have to see. Regarding the brief war that broke out between India and Pakistan, it is over just as quickly as it started after both nations traded missile strikes back and forth and a few dozen dead or so on all sides. A ceasefire agreement has been reached as of uh last night. So, we'll get more into that in just a bit, but for right now, that seems to be pretty much over and done with. Regarding strategic movement this week, not a whole lot of change from last week, at least with regards to uh US Navy aircraft carriers and carrier strike groups, but there has been some major strategic movement at Diego Garcia, which we'll get to at the end here. Moving to the kinetic activity tracker for this week. Again, pretty hot summer. Uh it's already starting to get pretty violent in certain places around the country. Quite a few small arms attacks, quite a few bits of rioting and civil unrest around the country, but but that's fairly standard at this point. And regarding all the other layers I have turned on year to date, it's starting to be a little bit of a full map. So hopefully this will help organize things a little bit to kind of break things out into different layers. But again, I'll uh I'll have a better update on the mapping project when I get through my next hurdle of uh how to organize the data. So with that out of the way, let's get into the regions themselves and we'll start off with the Northeast region. Starting with New Jersey first. There was again another instance of systems outages at Newark airport, specifically in the air traffic control tower at that airport. All of the screens in the entire tower went dark for about a minute and a half the other day. It's the same thing that happened last time uh about a week ago or so. So, this is becoming a rapidly serious thing. It's hard to determine exactly what's going on. There have been a lot of a lot of outreach being done by air traffic controllers in this particular sector trying to urge the general public to pay attention to what's going on here so that we can more or less get to a solution. Suffice it to say, things are not all right at Newark airport. And there have been quite a few uh leaks of information that have really encouraged people to just not fly out of Newark. A lot of these are hard to verify because they're from confidential sources or whistleblowers or things like that who would like to remain anonymous, but for the most part, there's not a whole lot of uh confidence being instilled in the air traffic control abilities at Newark Airport. I hope that we have uh some more fidelity on that next week. Really, all I've got is a bunch of unconfirmed rumor that I I don't really have any ability to confirm. The only thing that seems relatively certain at this moment is that it's a very risky time to be flying in and out of Newark. So that's something to keep in mind. Moving over to Pennsylvania, there was a new story that was of course varied by the legacy media which involved the detonation of an IED inside St. Terresa of Kolkata Catholic Church in Manoy City. Once again, anytime there's an attack on a Christian center or a Christian church, most media groups, even a lot of independent media will want to bury the story. So I did want to highlight it, especially considering the asalant was caught at the scene. And as we can tell by the physomy of this guy's mugsh shot of what this dude was all about. Local police said he was a known troublemaker. That's the quote they gave to the local media about this guy. So apparently he's known for this kind of thing. So something to keep in mind. Uh this will probably keep happening. I'm certain that a judge will probably let him out at some point if he isn't already out. But yeah, it was fairly it was a fairly kinetic blast in the church. It destroyed a good chunk of the altar and blew out a few windows. So, it was definitely something to to keep in mind, especially considering this was a 24-hour uh church. They were actually open uh all the time uh for people who needed to pray in the middle of the night or something like that. You know, a lot of churches have these kind of facilities, which is normally a very wholesome thing uh to allow people to worship at whatever time of day they they uh they need to. But unfortunately, malign actors take advantage of this and uh we either have thefts or um like this guy just wanted to attack the place. So, once again, something to be aware of. It's unfortunate that we do have to be aware of this, but this is kind of the thing that tends to happen nowadays. So, moving over to the Midwest, it has been a rather interesting week for the Midwest this week. There have been two revenge killings, or at least one killing and one attempted killing. And we'll start with the one in Cincinnati first. This was a little bit more high-profile. And this resulted from a shooting instance that occurred last week. This case really arose from your fairly standard u police shooting that seems to be quite justified based on the body cam footage. But this is again a tale as old as time. Cops were on the lookout for a stolen car. They've located the stolen vehicle. It was full of black males. They attempt to of course apprehend the individuals inside the car. They all scatter and one of them attempts to shoot at the police officers while uh he was trying to escape. Police officers open up and fire on him, kill him. Uh and that was pretty much the first police shooting. So, this was the shooting of Ryan Hinton. Well, as you might imagine, uh this became a rather high-profile shooting and uh they were preparing the body cam footage for release to show that this was a legitimate thing. So, the Cincinnati Police Department decided to show the uh body cam footage to Mr. Rodney Hinton Jr. here. Again, the father of the individual who was shot by police. I'm not entirely certain if this is a standard thing showing the family first uh or if they were just trying to kind of quell uh any kind of social unrest over this. Either way, that's what happened. Uh they showed Rodney Hinton Jr. the footage and he promptly left the police station and proceeded to murder the first police officer he could see. So, he intentionally drove his vehicle into a traffic control officer uh killing him at the scene. So, that's where things kind of stand at the moment in Cincinnati. This will probably be a fairly high-profile instance. Uh both the original shooting and this instance as well, mostly because they're trying to go for an insanity defense. Uh the attorneys for Mr. Hinton here have essentially said he wasn't in his right mind. Um and that's their defense. So, we'll see how that works out. I think we know how this is all going to go, but I guess we'll have to see. Over in Indiana, a very, very different type of revenge killing was attempted to be undertaken just outside of Indianapolis a few days ago in Hendricks County. So to understand this one, we have to go back a little bit further a few months ago in which the individual Sedani Pettis here was arrested after a high-speed chase. Once again, man tries to flee from police in a stolen car. Tail is old this time again, but in this case, he decided to flee and engage in a high-speed chase with two infant children uh in the car with him. Of course, this guy ended up crashing the car, killed one of the uh infants and uh wounded the uh other child who was a little bit older. So, he was arrested at the scene. Fairly open and shut case with regards to that. However, a few days ago, he was due to be in court uh to face charge the official uh charges for this. And the great-grandfather of the child that was killed and the child that was wounded uh decided to try to kill him as he was being brought into the courthouse uh that morning. So, for what I can gather, uh the local media is stating that Pettis was not actually being transferred at that time. So, this uh attempted vigilante killing uh revenge killing situation wasn't really effective. But either way, Mark Vulture here, the great-grandfather, he took out a pistol and um tried to fire into the crowd of inmates being brought into the courthouse. Of course, police promptly shot and killed him at the scene as well. So again, rather tragic stories this week coming out of the Midwest, but uh unfortunately this uh appears to be fairly common these days. So that's pretty much what I have for the United States. Let's move over to the IndiaPakistan conflict for a bit. Uh because I know that's been kind of a tense situation for a lot of people to to follow. But overnight there were significant targeting efforts by both India and Pakistan. I have not been able to verify uh what Pakistan struck in India. But from what I can tell, Pakistan mostly struck sites that are fairly remote in Kashmir. Maybe some Indian outposts or something like that. I will try to drill down and figure out what what they targeted a little bit more accurately just for posterity sake so I can put it on the map. But uh what was a little bit easier to verify are the photographs from what was struck in Pakistan. So uh three major air bases were struck by India overnight uh with surfaceto-surface cruise missiles. And this was following whatever Pakistan did in India. So just as a very very rough and brief timeline of events, terror attack occurs in Kashmir killing a couple of dozen Indians uh tourists up there. India promptly blames Pakistan, more specifically their intelligence services ISI for supporting insurgent groups and terrorist groups in Kashmir. India then conducts missile strikes in Pakistan striking around nine or so different targets in in that country. Pakistan responds at the moment of those strikes by shooting down a couple of Indian aircraft. Couple of days goes by till last night in which Pakistan decided to launch some missiles of their own to strike unknown targets in India. Whatever they hit, I will I will figure out. But as soon as Pakistan launched, India launched as well and they struck a few air bases in Pakistan. A few hours after that, so early this morning, 2 or 3 in the morning, uh, Eastern time here locally, the White House announced that uh, a ceasefire had been reached between India and Pakistan. So, essentially, it's an immediate effect ceasefire. So, I know we were all kind of waiting on whether or not this is going to fit the definition of a war. Uh, I don't know if you'd call it a war or not. I suppose you probably should uh considering the events of last night, but wars between India and Pakistan are very very interesting in that they tend to not have that many casualties. So all total over the past week or so from what I can tell again casualty figures are impossible to confirm with any accuracy. But since this entire thing started there were around 30 to 40 victims of the initial terror attack. And after that the strikes between India and Pakistan all total we're talking less than 50 fatalities on all sides. And this is after a week of heavy heavy artillery fire on the border. This is after multiple cruise missile strikes between both nations. And of course, most of the casualties are civilians. So there's probably 36 to 40 uh civilian casualties throughout both countries. So heavy fighting, few casualties. That's just kind of the way things work between India and Pakistan. So that's it for the subcontinent. Let's move down to the Indian Ocean proper and talk about Diego Garcia. There have been some pretty significant movements there this week. As we can see from the world's bluriest open source satellite imagery, we have some new arrivals. Uh, so as of May 7th, there were two B-52 strata fortresses that had arrived at Diego Garcia. And from what I can tell, there were two other B-52s headed to Diego Garcia as well. I don't really know what these B-52s are doing here. Maybe it's just a standard deployment training exercise, something like that. I don't know. But it does continue the trend of force buildup in the region. However, there is another major change that occurred this week. It's not on this image, uh, but in the wee hours of the morning yesterday, three of these B2s were picked up off the coast of Hawaii. So, the B2s are going home. From what I can tell, the other three followed very shortly after. And as of this briefing, uh, the the B2 spirits, the six bombers that were deployed to Diego Garcia, and thus the source of much consternation over the past few weeks, they're all home. Uh they're all back at Whiteitman Air Force Base. So make of that what you will. I hope that over the next few days we'll get some more satellite imagery to confirm that they did in fact go home. Uh we know they went home because we can we can track them. They took a very public route and it's not like they were trying to hide their presence uh when they were coming home. But I'm personally more curious about the B-52s at this point because this is a non-standard deployment for these guys. I want to know if those B-52s are still there, if they've kind of hot swapped out and uh the B-52s are going to be running out of there from now on for, you know, carrying out targeting in either Yemen or wherever uh they're needed. I don't have any commercial uh paid imagery of this uh over the past few days. There haven't been any passes that I could see, and it would take uh far too long for me to task the satellite myself, and it'd be a little bit uh little bit on the costly side as well. So, we're just going to have to make do with the free stuff we've got for now. But I think this kind of shows us uh that there's uh a lot of movement and a lot of uh things changing with regards to the Middle East rhetoric. And what it all means, I don't know. I can just tell you where the aircraft are or are not. And for now, it looks like the B2s have gone home. And before we wrap things up today, I briefly wanted to show you guys some of the imagery that I got back last week. As I mentioned before, there are a few sites I'm I'm watching around the world. as hard and as subjective as it is to do from from my own wheelhouse. I'm trying to just kind of keep feelers out there and see if uh see if anything interesting is is taking place around the the world. And one of the places that I have been covertly watching for a while is Tinian Island. Now, once again, this is certainly not groundbreaking. I have not located some kind of secret lost u US military base in the Pacific. A lot of other people have been aware of this and have been kind of tracking this for a while. The US Air Force in particular is actually quite public about what they're doing here, but uh I think it's interesting, so I thought I would share it. And I had the image anyway, so I might I paid for it. I might as well show you guys what I got. So Tinian Island is the site of an old Japanese air base uh that was originally created during World War II. Now, Tinian Island itself is located just south of Saipan and just north of Guam in what we generally call the second island chain. The island chain theory really goes back to I think the 1970s and really is uh to describe what might happen if China decides to expand uh their territorial aspirations into into the Pacific. And these aspirations are best clearly benchmarked I suppose by what we call islands chains. Generally speaking the Pacific Ocean is a very very big body of water. And it turns out that even in our modern age, even with all of our strange and horrific tools of war, we still need some dry land to put our feet on, right? Generally speaking, the prevailing theory for a while now is that if China invades Taiwan, they're not going to stop at Taiwan, but they're going to have to push through the First Island chain. Taiwan being one of the islands in this chain. some of the um southern islands of Japan, the Philippines, all of these are in the first island chain and they will have to progress uh outward across the Pacific if they are to to hold that that first uh island chain. So, this gets really complicated. It gets very hotly debated. People uh get very very very strong opinions about this sort of thing. But all of this is to say that the United States is certainly aware of China's aspirations and is taking efforts to counteract it somewhat. And one of those efforts is to bolster the American presence in the Pacific. We also refer to this as the Pacific pivot. The shift from a fighting wars and deserts GWAT, you know, global war on terrorism kind of era in into a war in the Pacific kind of mentality. The US Marine Corps is most uh heavily involved in this, but the Air Force is definitely getting involved as well, particularly U ASOC. Obviously, the Air Force is going to have to have a lot of planes to shuttle a lot of people around. So, one of the things that they have been doing is building airfields. And if we take a look at the image that I have, uh, this brand new shiny image shows all of the progress they have made at Tenian Island. Now, I'm not entirely certain if this actually has a name yet. I'm just going to call it Tenian Island Airfield until we have a official name for it. But, uh, right now it's not operational, but you can see they've made some pretty good progress. And just to show some of the work that's been done over the past few uh weeks and and months, uh you can clearly see they're trying to build a camp here in the northern uh side of the base. We're just going to call that northern camp for now. They've also got similar efforts down in the south. You can see very clearly they've staged an awful lot of logistics down there. That's uh a pretty substantial deployment of logistics to this to this base. And uh we can also see there's been a lot of work on the runways and airfields and taxiways and all that stuff. So, I thought this was a very cool image. It took me a long time to get it. The first few passes of the satellite were rejected. I had to retask and uh it was just kind of a nightmare getting this image, but I I was able to actually get it. And I think it's uh really in informative with regards to what the United States priorities are in the Pacific. And just for a comparison sake, we can look at what Google Earth has and what Google Maps has for this specific location. And you can see that it was essentially an abandoned air base uh for many many decades and now uh it's getting pretty close to being functional. So I would be willing to bet over the next few weeks this this air base is probably going to uh be functional again. So how useful it will be, I don't know. Guam's not that far away. Um but again, the United States Air Force is going to need every stretch of dry land they can get to uh to carry out a a war if they so choose uh to carry out a war in the Pacific. Whether or not that's the plan, I don't know. I can just show you the pictures. So, I guess we'll have to see how this works out over the next few weeks. And um I'll try to see if I can get another image to maybe compare uh in a few weeks time. But it it takes a while to task a satellite. It takes sometimes generally speaking, if you don't want to pay too much, it generally takes about a month or so to task a satellite. So, I'm still waiting on a few images to come back. And of course, uh cloud cover is a problem. So, we've got to wait for weather. So, a lot of images get rejected due to cloud cover. So, this was the first good clear shot that I've had uh of this location so far. So, I haven't seen anybody uh who has this image before. So, you are definitely seeing it here first. So, with that, I think we'll roll things up today and talk about the intercepted ghost net reports. Again, another great week for the ghost net. Uh quite a few people talking about local uh news in their area. Uh somebody sent a message out to the ghost net uh tag. You can actually uh send radio messages out to whoever is following a certain tag. So, even though I got this screenshot from my receive only rig, I was using my web SDR to, you know, monitor a radio through the internet, I was able to actually get the message in my inbox because someone sent their news as a message. So, I thought that was pretty neat. Uh, it's a little bit hard to understand how this all works together, but again, I hope to have a lot more on the ghost set in the future, especially now the weather's getting nice. people are more motivated to get outside and start testing and uh making sure they don't get complacent with regards to communications. As we all know, outages are are not too far away sometimes. So, keeping on top of your skills and uh doing the best you can is is a very good thing to do. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you all for watching. Thank you for all of your support. I really do appreciate it. It's certainly always good to see a week where things are are calming down a little bit, but uh I definitely will uh be watching out for whatever escalations occur this this coming week and we'll see how it goes. So, thank you all again and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.