Intel Update - August 29 - Deception Abounds

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for August 23rd through the 29th, 2026. This week the Cold War is back once again as the shadow war continues on and many strange things have been observed on the strategic front this week. The war in Ukraine is becoming increasingly more serious as the opening of another front might be on the menu and the war in Iran has settled in for the long haul as today we hit the six-month milestone. Both of these conflicts have resulted in direct impact to the homeland this week, mostly in the form of cyber attacks and the energy crisis. So, let's start here at home and take a look at the cyber attacks that have taken place this week within the United States. Obviously, some of these are more national level and since they are in the cyber realm, it's hard to depict them on a map, but these are the agencies and organizations that have been affected by cyber attacks over the past week. Missing from the map are the three national laboratories which were affected by cyber attacks earlier this week. I don't know which laboratories these were, so I can't plot them on the map. They're keeping that information obviously secret for now, but this is what we've got for now. Unfortunately, there's not much more than that. All we can do is just say, "All right, this agency or this company or this entity had a cyber attack," and that's pretty much all we know because they usually don't disclose the details of the ins and outs of how a government agency gets hacked for obvious reasons. It is important to note, however, that a few of these incidents took place actually a couple of weeks ago, which have only either been discovered recently or they're only being disclosed this week. That's the biggest problem with data breaches or cyber attacks that don't actually affect the end user immediately. If the taxpayer is not directly affected immediately, the powers that be can conceal that incident for a while. So on the cyber front, this is what we have for this week. Cyber attacks have come to the forefront and will probably remain persistent threats for a while. Within the Middle East for this week, everything's pretty much the same. No real major update here. However, there have been some developments which may seem massive, but in reality are almost completely irrelevant in the way that the information is being presented. And there is one thing in particular that I woke up this morning and decided that I wanted to get ahead of because this is going to hit the mainstream media in a few days and it's going to cause me a lot of headache when many of you tag me in posts that are going to annoy me greatly. So, let me explain. Yesterday, one account on social media made a post which seemed groundbreaking at the time alleging that the United States had been engaged in a super secret way to get ships out of the Gulf. The post alleges that the US has actually dredged a secret route through Omani waters, threading the needle between two islands, or technically the peninsula and an island. Previously, this route was too shallow for ships to transit through. So, the United States has allegedly secretly dredged out this waterway to allow ships to sneak out of the Gulf and bypass the straight of Hormuz altogether. Or so the report claims. This individual, the account that made the first post on this, also made a 14-minute video talking all about it and how this is such a great win for the United States. So hooray, the day is saved. Right. Right. Well, no. Right now, the evidence as presented does not indicate that any dredging is actually happening or has happened. So, right out of the gate, the report of dredging appears to be false. For a proper confirmation to be made, you would need a hydrographic survey of the seabed, which cannot be obtained from satellite imagery. They're working on it right now. I was actually just a few months ago reading some white papers on the ability for satellites to actually survey shallow waters instead of actually putting a boat in the water. So they're working on that kind of capability right now. So I don't want to discount this as a crazy idea right to start with. But right now looking at sentinel imagery which is what is being pushed in this post. You're not going to be able to see the depth of the water there. So using the imagery that is provided you actually can't see how deep the water is anyway. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, we would have seen dredging boats on satellite imagery itself. This channel, this waterway between these two land masses is about a third of a mile wide. So, it would literally take years to dredge this waterway out. And if this was real, if this actually did happen, this would be one of the largest engineering projects that humankind has ever conducted. And the best part is that you don't actually need to dredge it anyway because the draft of the average VLCC tanker is about 20 m with a full load of oil, which would mean that it can actually float over the seabed here anyway, even without dredging. So you don't even need to dredge it. That's why the story makes no sense. Even more so, the screenshot provided by this account is actually showing the depth that has been in place since the dawn of time. We can verify this using British Admirality nautical charts which were created centuries ago. If we zoom in to this exact area on chart number 3172, we can see that the decad's old admirality chart places the depth of this channel, which is by the way called the fak alasadada channel quite literally at a depth of about 30 m, which is within the margin of error for a channel where sand bars shift a couple of meters over the years. If you don't believe me, here's another chart, a Royal Navy chart from 1945, which also shows the channel as being about the same depth, in this case 24 m. So over the past century, the margin of error for this particular waterway is about 24 to 30 m according to the Royal Navy. In the screenshot provided by this one account, they themselves list the depth as 28.5 m at best. So even their own screenshot confirms that no dredging has occurred. What I think happened, and this is pure speculation and opinion, is that this one account saw some sentinel imagery of a ship going through the channel and made the analytical leap of the century, or this was something else, which I will leave to your imagination. For legal reasons, I do not want to make any accusations regarding why this report is so incredibly wrong. But addressing the data alone, this report is 100% false. So, this theory is already dead in the water, so to speak, and the evidence is strong enough for me to classify this as not a genuine report. I personally think it is fabricated from the ground up. Not a single detail of this is accurate whatsoever. I don't mean to dunk on this one account so hard, but this one post, which is verifiably false in many different ways, has over 19 million views. Everyone from Bill Aman to major celebrities have reposted this and all of you who believe this are I go to this original post made on this and pretty much every comment is just salivating at this idea calling Trump a military genius for this plan and it's just completely false. It's completely made up from the ground up. And that's one of the biggest problems of the war. We saw the same thing in Ukraine and unfortunately now it's even worse with the war in Iran. Incorrect claims get made on social media and they get a lot of traction right to start with. But those who try to figure out the truth rarely get listened to. Even this video you're watching right now will never even come close to 19 million views. That's just the name of the game. But man, I've got so many mutuals who believe this report from this one account. It's insane. I honestly wish it were true. I really do. But wishing does not make it so, which is the theme of this entire war. But because I want to be thorough, I want to salvage this a little bit. Let's war game this out because I have quietly been expecting this attempt for a long time, just in a different place. Based on the way that the war has been fought so far, I was expecting them to try this or actually something slightly different but kind of in the same vein. So, let's dive back into the original false claim of dredging out this waterway. Perhaps me lingering on the extreme close-up of my map while explaining this instead of zooming in and out while I'm narrating. Maybe that's a little bit of a clue. Maybe all of you can guess that me zooming the map in so far is quite misleading. In fact, if we zoom out, we can see that this dredging report is not just dubious. It probably would not work anyway, even if it were true. As we can see, opening up this channel does absolutely nothing and offers minimal protection for any vessel trying to leave the Gulf. There have been theories, apart from this erroneous report that was published yesterday. Apart from that report, there have been general theories that maybe somehow the United States could chisel away through the rock through the Musandam Peninsula somewhere down here, which would actually make more sense and actually be more viable. I don't think it would personally work, but I can see where someone in the position of making decisions would think it might work. So, that would be a little bit more believable than way up here at the very top where it actually makes no difference whatsoever. But for those of you who actually did the maze game on the back of the Wedies box as a kid, you can clearly see if you just take 5 minutes and zoom around this peninsula, you can very clearly see that despite what it looks like, there actually is no clear way for a ship to make it through. You have to go around. If you're just glancing at this from a very zoomed out map, yeah, it looks like you might find a way through there, but no, there actually is no way through there. If we were talking about cutting a canal through this one specific spot down here, which has been proposed and theorized for a while now, I would totally buy this as being a viable option, maybe. But again, that would still be an infrastructure project that would take years and not something that can be done in a couple of months. But even then, that's not what's happening. The reports of a secret route through Hormuz are detailing this path to the north, where it is essentially taking a minuscule detour that isn't really doing anything. And as we can see from my maps, the ships already have to sail through the minefield anyway, directly in the path of where two confirmed mines were found months ago. Remember those reports of mines in the straight of formulas? Remember how they found a couple of mines? Yeah. This is where those mines were located, right directly in this path of of using this allegedly new route. So trying to skirt the border of the minefield won't work because the Iranians have been laying mines in this exact shipping channel because the Iranians knew that we would try this. But my favorite part about all this, the best part about all of these claims is that it actually doesn't matter at all. Let's just say, let's just theorize for a moment. Let's say that the magic route does exist way down here. Let's say that it's way down south in the southern Musandum Peninsula. And let's say that the US has actually cut a brand new Hormuz Canal right through the rock, right through this mountain. And let's say that ships are able to sail in this waterway through a canal and out the other side free and clear out of the Gulf without ever going through the straight of Hormuz. Well, here's the problem. Look at where Iran has been striking ships. Even if you cut a Panama Canal through this mountain, you will still come out the other side in the exact area that the missiles have been hitting ships. So, you did all that for nothing. So, this report, while erroneous or outright false, however you want to phrase it, is actually helpful for allowing us to kind of war game this out a little bit and figure out exactly why this would not work. I didn't want to war game this out during the beginning of the war because I was thinking at the time hopefully that maybe they could actually find a way to make this work. And because of that, and because my content is public, I wanted to give these guys the best chance of success, even though I thought that chance was fairly minimal. Anyway, call it professional courtesy. I thought about this idea months ago when the war first started. I even bought the nautical charts. I downloaded everything. I went through and I tried to find a way through. It just doesn't exist. So, now that this has hit the timeline and has become kind of a, you know, apparently quite viral, I thought it would be worth talking about how difficult of a challenge this really is. The claim that was made on social media is verifiably false. We can verify that false in many different ways. However, more broadly, let's just examine the idea of cutting a new straight of Hormuz through something. Is this possible? And if it's possible, is it feasible? Yes, it's possible. But no, it's not feasible because it's not going to grant you that much of a shortcut. If there were some kind of magical mystical way to cut actually through like Dubai and the UAE, then yeah, we we might have something to talk about. But let's not forget the Iranians have the ability to strike ships way out way down off the coast of Oman. So, you know, we're dealing with a pretty significant problem here. So, so anyway, I hate to rain on everybody's parade with this who was kind of celebrating the genius of this, right? It might actually make for a decent Christopher Nolan movie for once, but right now the truth is that this is just false. It's just not true. So, with that rather unfortunate bit of information out of the way, let's move over to Ukraine where we have even more unfortunate news on the horizon. And this week, the war in Ukraine has remained rather serious. Ladies and gentlemen, once again we are starting to get into concern maxing territory as the youth say these days and those pesky cortisol spikes are likely because another front may be opening up. So what is going on in Ukraine? Over the past few months, the war in Ukraine has been escalating as both sides have shifted to targeting the energy sector, commercial logistics hubs and shipping lanes within the Black Sea. For those that have been following the war for some time, it has been common for every year or so, sometimes twice a year, the conflict will bring about some change in the way that the war is being fought. Some new development, some new front, something new. Generally speaking, about once a year. This year, the major change has been Ukraine conducting long-range drone attacks on Russian oil refineries deep into the interior of Russia. This targeting effort combined with the recent strikes on Russian shipping in the Black Sea have indeed resulted in some impact. Though the exact nature of that impact is debatable because nobody is telling the truth on any side. Ukraine is of course claiming that nearly all Russian refineries are destroyed and that Russia is on her last leg. And Russia of course claims that the impact of this targeting is minimal and that they are able to get back to normal fairly quickly. The truth as always is probably somewhere between these two extremes. In some ways, the Russians are probably suffering more than what they say they are, but in other ways, the effect is probably minimal. Same thing on the Ukraine side. Ukraine can certainly get their licks in right before the Russians figure out what's going on. But once the Russians figure out what the Ukrainians are doing, they steal the Ukrainian tactics and then use them against Ukraine. Well, Ukraine tends to deamplify or downplay those negative uh aspects of targeting within their country. So, that's the way the war has been since the dawn of time. That's why it's been very hard to determine what the truth actually is during this war and so on. However, these recent targeting efforts do not mean that the war is just carrying on as usual. Over the past few weeks, pressure has been mounting within Russia to end the war. This has been building for some time, and it's not that groundbreaking of a revelation. Some Russians want to just sign a deal, and others want to finish off Ukraine because at this point, there is very little stopping Russia from conducting a major advance that would take more ground than they otherwise would have had early on in the war. I'm sorry that it worked out this way. Since the start of the war, I have been decently neutral about the whole thing. My only gripe has been that the United States has sent a lot of tax dollars to Ukraine to continue a war that was not in our best interest. And because of that, we depleted a lot of stock piles for our homeland. So, that's really my perspective on that. Has been since the start. I'm also not the only one who had this perspective. Many people called this at the time and they were shouted down as some kind of like pro-Russian, you know, bot or whatever. I don't know. But the chickens are coming home to roost now and the clarity of reality is starting to settle in. This is why it would have been less bad for Ukraine to sign a deal back when they still had some negotiating power. Definitely before the United States got involved in a war in the Middle East that showed the world that we here in the US are not prepared for the threat that drones bring to the modern battle space. Now Ukraine is in a bad spot. It's not fair to them. It's not fair to us because their main backer, the United States, has no more munitions to give them. and the senior advisers who would be helping them fight their war have probably been transitioned to sitcom or some other theater. And because Ukraine is now more vulnerable than they ever have been and because they have kept their horse hitched to NATO at the strategic level, Russia is now very motivated to launch another major offensive similar to the one that they launched at the beginning of the war. I hate to say it. I'm not saying who's the good guy or who's the bad guy. I'm just setting expectations because we tend to put things in Marvel comic book universe language by saying good guy and bad guy in conflicts when people who have been around a while know it's not that simple. It's interests and spheres of influence. That's all it is. And right now those spheres of influence are expanding. Uh indications are growing that Russia might open up another front on the Bellar Russian border bringing Bellarus more directly into the fight. Over the past few weeks, President Lucenko has taken more of an interest in their military readiness and they've actually ordered an increase in SNAP exercises along with Lucenko and Putin having more public meetings and talks related to their, you know, strengthening of their mutual defense packs. The good news is that right now there has not really been any observable troop movement by Russia into Barus more than the, you know, the little green men, the little advisers that they have already in Barus just kind of protecting the border. We're not seeing hundreds of tanks line up at the border like we saw uh when this all kicked off years ago. So, this is all really just gut feeling at the moment, coupled with a lot of rhetoric that has been flying around in European media. As a result, this will be something to watch over the next few weeks. Even though we don't have anything right now, this may develop. This may change over time. It's going to get very interesting because of the compounding effect of what's been happening on the strategic front over the past few weeks in the United States. Jumping back to the homeland for this week, I did want to mention the rather odd series of strategic events that have taken place this week. At this point, I really do hesitate to even mention stuff like this because anytime people hear the term doomsday plane, they get all spun up for nothing. And the absolute grifters out there will clip my analysis and make it out to be a bigger deal than it really is. Just like the one uh analyst who made my life a living hell because he was so obsessed with the New Jersey drone incident from a couple of years ago being an alien invasion. I don't know if you guys remember that one, but that was an absolute nightmare for like two months there. Same story with any kind of strategic radio stuff like on the HFGCS, the American kind of strategic radio, nuclear radio stuff, or the Russian bayonet. Anytime this stuff gets mentioned, people who don't understand the context of how normal this stuff is always tries to grift and incite panic, which is what I do not want to do. Now, with that being said, there have been some major moves this week within the US regarding the ever famous E6B Mercury Doomsday Command and Control Fleet. For those that don't know, these aircraft are very interesting because they are part of the Takamo program, which stands for take charge and move out. This program is a continuity of governance operation that is intended to allow communications between leadership in the event of a nuclear war. In short, if the US and Russia launch ICBMs at each other, these aircraft will scramble and be in the air to coordinate comms between various military commands around the world. These aircraft can communicate with submarines underwater and issue the GO codes to launch nuclear missiles, even if the homeland United States is destroyed. These aircraft are also part of the Looking Glass mission, which does the same thing for land-based missiles, issuing the launch command just in case the US gets nuked and ground bases are destroyed. This week, on three separate days, including just yesterday, a total of five E6B aircraft were airborne all at the same time. Just to cut right to the chase, this is really weird and it's very uncommon. It is not uncommon to see five or so E6Bs airborne at once for like an exercise. And since as of a few years ago, these aircraft have been flying a lot more often lately. So, our baseline has kind of shifted for what's normal. I am aware of these flights being semi-regular once every couple of months or so, maybe once a month during exercise season, but five airborne on three days this week. That's abnormal, especially since one of these days was the same day that the CIA director flew to Moscow. So, what is going on officially? We don't know. What I speculate this is is a very large and undisclosed exercise. Is this a pre-planned thing or is this a snap readiness drill that has been ordered to take place due to an enhanced threat posture? That I do not know, but I speculate that it's probably something like that. Of course, the time to be worried is when you do not see these aircraft on tracking websites because if they're going to have their transponder turned on, this probably means that we're not going to war. But it's still not exactly comforting, is it? Think of it like this. You're sitting at work and your company has a fire drill in the building where your office is located. So, you grab your coffee and walk out to the parking lot staging area for 20 minutes before heading back inside. Now, how many fire drills would you have to do per month before you started asking questions? If you had three fire drills in a week, you might ask, "What is going on?" And if you get a vague answer or the higher-ups say that we've got to be ready, well, I might be inclined to think that they're planning for the building to burn down. When regular citizens are preppers and like to prepare for really rare and obscure threats just as a hobby sort of thing, at the very most it might make you a little weird. I say that as a fellow weirdo, so don't worry about it. But when your government is preparing for oddly specific contingencies, way more than the baseline of regular preparedness, I might be inclined to be a little bit concerned. Same story last year when companies like Sweden and Finland just out of the blue for no reason whatsoever just decided to update their civil defense manuals detailing what to do in the event of a ground invasion. So yeah, that's a little bit concerning. Um again, it's good to practice and it's good to be ready. I would never want to discourage that at all. I'm a huge fan of readiness, huge fan of preparedness, all that kind of stuff. But when a government does it a little bit too much, we should probably pay more attention, which is what I plan to do. If you want me to just tell you when to worry, I would not worry just yet. Not even close. But my own interest is peaked enough that I want to dedicate time to monitoring this situation as usual. So, and on the preparedness front, let's wrap things up today with the ghost net reports for this week. How's that for a segue? I picked up a lot of transmissions this week, including a bunch from Western Canada, which is pretty rare for me. I almost never hear from Western Canada, so radio conditions must have been a lot better than expected, which is good. This week, the general news as shared by most of you revolved around the wildfires out west and the concerns regarding the beef imports into the US and the impact that federal orders are going to have on the cattle industry. So, that was really informative to see, really outstanding to see a lot of people getting into some, you know, good use of the net. Otherwise, I have been working on a few secret communications projects that I hope to get to a point of stability pretty soon. More generally, I've been experimenting with what Open Manet can really do. And I've been trying to integrate a bunch of sensors and other stuff across the network. So, for those of you who don't know what Open Manet is, I did a video on that a while back. I'm going to be doing a lot more on that very soon. I just don't have anything worth sharing just yet. I need to get to a point of stability before I feel, you know, comfortable in sharing what I've been working on. But I 100% have an update in the works regarding my old talk in a box concept because a lot has changed. If you are interested in conducting activities outside and you have a need for managing a lot of data in more of an off-grid environment, a lot has changed. We do not need a heavy Pelican case anymore. I can run an entire open manet based communications network, a suite of perimeter sensors, surveillance cameras, even a few sig sensors all in a much smaller package that serves as a base station for even smaller manet nodes on each person in the team. So much more to come on that later on. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, fear not. I will explain very soon because I think that many different technological advancements in the world of communications lately have made it so that we can have a lot more capabilities than in years past which is good for being aware of what's going on in the world around us. So that's all I have for today. Thanks again everyone for watching. Thank you for all of your support while I tinker with things and build the moreformational tradecraft kind of stuff and test out new capabilities. And I will be back again soon with some pretty interesting stuff I think. So thanks again and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.