Intel Update - April 25 - Surging Again

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for April 19th through the 25th, 2026. Once more into the breach, dear friends, we find ourselves at the end of another rather busy week both at home and overseas. So, let's get right to it. The focus this week has mostly been crime in the United States, the war in the Middle East, and the shadow war that might be playing out quietly around the world. And this week that shadow war has been brought above the fold by the White House acknowledging the mysterious deaths and missing persons cases that have taken place among the scientific communities that feed the defense industry. This has taken the internet storm couple of weeks and various committees in Congress have now begun the investigation into these strings of missing and deceased scientists or senior military technical staff. The high-profile murder of Karl Grillmeyer at his home a few months ago and the extremely suspicious details of that case prompted a lot of closer attention and the disappearance of retired General William McAskilland, also under mysterious circumstances, widened the spotlight even more and once the internet started looking for other links, it turns out that a suspiciously high number of people affiliated with top secret research projects have gone missing or were discovered deceased under very suspicious circumstances over the past two to three years. As it stands, the DOJ and the Pentagon are investigating these cases and that's really pretty much it. Not much else has been made public. Due to this lack of information, various media groups have just speculated on most of these links and they've also included a lot of people in the total count of missing scientists that are very loose links or otherwise not really a link. Again, when we're getting into these shadow warfare side of espionage, murder, and very classified strategic programs and cutting-edge research and stuff like that, it's a very dangerous game and most media groups don't have the inside baseball knowledge to know which deaths or missing persons that really are suspicious and which ones are just coincidental. A custodian who worked at Los Alamos 10 years ago is not the same as the director of NASA's materials processing group going missing. So, from a data analysis perspective, we really have to wait a lot of these missing persons reports, but overall, I think we can read between the lines to figure out what's really going on here. More to come on this later though. I'm I'm working through my own investigation on these missing persons and suspicious deaths and right now I'm focusing on the four that appear to be the most suspicious, at least to me. The full list is much longer, but these are the four I'm focusing on right now, so we'll see what links come out of it. Creating a link analysis chart of the entire defense industry takes a little bit of time and if at least some of these people are being murdered or being disappeared, it's pretty obvious that very serious things are happening. It is going to take some care and deliberation to dig into. So, more on that later. This is a very complex and time-consuming investigation and now that the feds and the media are on it, the water becomes more muddy when it comes to finding out other potential targets for mysterious incidents happening to them. If these people are being targeted, we need to get ahead of this and prevent the next incident instead of just being retroactive and that takes a lot of time, in some cases time we don't have. Moving to the Middle East for this week, the surge continues as before. This most clearly illustrates the sharp discrepancy between the statements and vibes in Washington and what is really happening on the ground. The general attitude throughout Washington is that this is now more of a business deal kind of arrangement because the ceasefire is still on and it has been extended and it feels like the war is winding down. Rhetoric on all sides has focused on this simmering down with Trump supporters stating that he's won and is looking to wind things down and everybody else saying that he's looking for a sort of slow speed off ramp for the war and he has been looking for that off ramp for some time. This gets into the political realm and opinions are going to vary widely. It's kind of a knife fight these days with regards to what's actually going on, so not really helpful to wade into, honestly, but the general sentiment on all sides is drawdown. That's what is being put out there in the media by the White House, by everybody involved. However, the truth of what is actually happening on the ground is vastly different. Both the United States and Iran have been rearming and resupplying to an extreme degree. Iran has continued to mine the strait, which has been confirmed by President Trump himself. There's been a lot of speculation on whether or not the Iranians have actually laid mines in the strait as in maybe the Iranians are just pretending that they have laid mines so as to create fear instead of a genuine threat, but no, this is not a deception operation. The Iranians have absolutely mined the strait and even the Pentagon is confirming this at this point. How many mines, nobody knows, but satellite imagery confirms that the Iranians do retain a lot of naval capability. Despite President Trump stating that their navy is completely and totally destroyed every other day, this is only a half-truth. Iran has two navies and the United States has severely degraded their blue water navy, the IRIN. The IRGCN, the fast boat navy that is the main force that would mine the strait, this navy is largely intact. There are hundreds of small boats in the strait every day and even though it's debatable as to how much sea power this equates to, you can you can debate that all day long. What is undeniable is that the Iranians control the strait, they just do. Concerning the American blockade, the US Navy is starting to get more organized with the Indian Ocean now serving as one big interdiction zone for Iranian tanker ships. The United States has begun the more indirect targeting of Iranian-linked vessels in addition to sanctioning about 40 different Chinese companies that are helping Iran export their oil to the global market. That's a big deal and we're going to have to see how that works out because the Chinese becoming a little bit more directly harmed by this is going to be a big deal as this drags out. The Strait of Hormuz, otherwise known as Schrödinger's Strait at this point, is both open and closed depending on who's asking. Local traffic continues to sail through without any problems just as it has since the start of the war and the flow of non-Western aligned ships transiting through the Rock Island route has increased over the past few days. Some of these vessels have been caught by the American blockade and compelled to turn around, but others have been allowed through. It's really a case-by-case basis as to who the Iranians are letting through and who the Americans are letting through at the moment. Otherwise, the situation remains pretty tough for any Western or American-aligned shipping companies throughout the region. These companies like Maersk and MSC, they're going to be settling in for the long haul over the next few weeks and most of this is being demonstrated in the grand and fantastical world of money and the economics of what's been happening is pretty crazy. Over the past month, crude oil futures have experienced a sharp departure from the physical delivery price of the oil that is being sold and this is going to matter quite a bit when it comes to gas prices in the long term. Normally, there is some discrepancy between futures trading and the price of oil upon delivery, which is normally more than when it leaves port to be sold on the international market. Futures prices are for predicting, you guessed it, the future. So, the future prices of oil are going to be based on what the oil is speculated to be in about a month's time or so. So, normally under the best of times during peacetime, there is a bit of a discrepancy between the two because ships take a few weeks sometimes to get to the far-flung regions of the earth with their cargo. However, these discrepancies have become extremely out of touch with reality. For example, upon the announcement of the ceasefire in the Persian Gulf a couple weeks ago, oil futures plummeted to about 80 to 90 dollars per barrel, so we were doing pretty good. However, in Singapore, some distillates were actually being pumped off of tankers and sold at a price of approximately 290 dollars per barrel. Granted, this is the worst-case example from the IEA's April report, which they just put out earlier this week and therefore it's a bit like comparing apples to oranges. We don't really have a perfect comparison here, but this does illustrate how serious the difference is between the on-paper economics and reality. Major geopolitical events that are shaping the future of humanity are underway right now with a land war in Europe being fought alongside a regional war in the Middle East, which has choked off a large percentage of the global energy supply and like I mentioned in the wire a few days ago, now refineries are catching fire all around the world and because all of this, the markets are barely reacting at all. One of the main theories for this is that the futures markets are expecting the war to end soon and since futures are going to be speculating on the price of oil in a month or so, the whales are expecting the war to end before then and everything's all fine and dandy, right? But in reality, the current pace of production just cannot keep up with the loss of the Middle East and it doesn't look like things are going to even out anytime soon. From the very, very wave top level, this definitely looks like a case of if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound sort of thing. If a war happens in the Middle East and everybody pretends that there isn't a war in the Middle East, does that affect oil prices? Like does that just mean that oil's going to stay fine forever, i don't know. I find it very hard to believe that oil is ever going to hit like 300 dollars a barrel like President Trump said his advisors told him would happen before he launched the war, but there is some elasticity in the petroleum sector, meaning that when something catastrophic happens, it takes some time for the effects to be felt and this is most certainly a variable factor. It's not like we have a firm date where, oh okay, if the Strait of Hormuz gets closed for 62 days, we're going to have complete, you know, gasoline outages in the United States. It's not going to work like that. How much of a timer we have, that's going to be anybody's guess and of course, some places are going to be hit harder than others much more quickly. Europe, for example, is hurting when it comes to fuel prices and airlines around the world are tightening their belts and canceling tens of thousands of flights simply because they can't afford the fuel. Does this mean that all air travel stops overnight? Of course not, but it does mean that the impacts are becoming much more substantial with each passing day. Looking to the future to attempt to look past the short-term impacts, right? So, we don't just doom and gloom on the present, right? What does this mean for the future? This also means that it's going to take some time to return to normal whenever the crisis reaches a conclusion, which in this case might not happen for a very long time or even at all. It is possible, this is speculation, but it is possible that the Iranians never open the strait again, at least not in the way that it was open. At the very minimum, it's quite likely that unless something major happens, the world is not going back to the way things were on February 27th. That seems to be the general mass consensus, no matter what side you're on in this conflict, that seems to be the general assessment moving forward. We're not going back to February 27th. We live in a new world now when it comes to the way trade works around the Middle East and how this works out is going to vary and it can take many different avenues of approach, but we're not going back to the way things were. One potential theory for how this is all going to work out is that in the long term this may result in a sort of Hormuz DMZ situation, similar to what happened in Korea, where the conflict was never really settled formally, and the situation is tense all the time, and both sides are pointing guns at each other, but life continues kind of around them nonetheless. Right now that seems to be the most likely outcome for at least the next few months. The Pentagon has already alluded to it taking probably 6 months or so to de-mine the Strait of Hormuz, and that's after the war ends or after they are able to get into the strait. The International Energy Agency is saying that the impacts of this will be felt potentially at least within the next year or two. Various think tanks are assessing that depending on which facility you're talking about, the whole Middle East might take 6 months to 2 years to come back to normal production levels simply based on the damage that has been sustained. It's hard to factor in repair times for stuff like this because repairs are are happening. It's not like these these sites were destroyed and we just left them. No, we're actually repairing a lot of this stuff during the ceasefire for sure, but you can't fix decades worth of damage in 2 weeks, and it's going to take a lot more time to return to normal even if peace were to happen spontaneously right at this moment. Iran has learned that they have way more power than they thought they did, and most of that power lies with their control of the strait. It's kind of morbidly ironic, but to the Iranians the Strait of Hormuz is probably more valuable than a nuclear weapon because it's serving as a form of mutually assured destruction. You mess with us and we'll nuke the global economy, so to speak. I doubt that even the Iranians themselves would have known how effective this would be before the war began, but we're here now and they know what power they have, and there's not a whole lot the US can do about it because even if the US walks away, which the US might have already tried to do, the Iranians will still have power. Even if both sides pull up their blockades, let's just assume for a moment that we can magically make all those mines disappear, the Iranians stop charging a toll, everything goes back to the normal shipping lanes, and everybody's free to come and go as they please. Even if they do that, both sides know that the Iranians control the strait, and they can shut it off again whenever they want. That is the proverbial grenade pin that has been pulled. You can't put that pin back in the grenade because now we know. It has been theoretical for a very long time as to whether or not the Iranians could actually control the strait. A lot of the US Navy's technical and tactical drills and exercises have been focused on that sort of eventuality, and every time a carrier in the years past went through the Strait of Hormuz, that's what all the transit briefings focused on. You know, swarm ships, the Iranians are trying to, you know, poke and prod, but we still control this this waterway. Well, now it's quite clear the Iranians through their little gunboats are able to control this body of water, whether we like it or not. The Iranians might not be able to do much more than that, but they can certainly project power within their own sphere of influence and make everything more costly for the United States than we thought it would be. China and other BRICS nations, which are also on the hook for this conflict, are probably perfectly fine with this arrangement as long as their own cargo can get in and out of the Persian Gulf. This was most clearly illustrated last week when the Chinese state media claimed that Xi Jinping called the Saudi Crown Prince, which was probably an indirect message to the Iranians, to urge an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire along with an opening of the strait. Obviously, this is a complicated web of diplomacy, but we can see that China is getting involved, and a statement this forthcoming is honestly shocking for Xi, who basically never makes a direct statement like this. So, how all of this is going to work out is anyone's guess. It's not entirely terrible news after all, a ceasefire is going on, and ceasefires are good for putting peace on the table at some point. But, things are also not going super well, and we're tightening our belts, and a lot of big fish like China are starting to become more actively involved in reaching some level of stability. The world can probably adapt to the loss of a major shipping route being heavily impacted in the long term, but until we get there it's going to be very very tenuous if this goes on for the long term. Remember, it's not just up to the United States. It's not even totally up to Israel, either. In warfare, the enemy gets a vote, and the Iranians have proven that just because the United States might back away, they will be there to stay simply based on the fact that geography makes it hard to root them out. So, once again, another week passes where the world is in a pickle, and there's no easy way out. And on that foreboding note, that's all I've got for today. So, let's wrap things up with the Ghost Net reports for this week. It was a great week for getting messages out to the world, and I saw a lot of people exchanging information in an off-grid manner so that we can be prepared no matter what crazy stuff happens around the world. Perhaps it is fate that my Windows 11 desktop computer seems to be disintegrating around me at the exact moment that I get JS8Call working on Android, but I think this is pretty slick, and I have much more content and tutorials planned that is going to make the Ghost Net even more practical for field use. We can now take our radios outdoors, plug our phones into the radios, and send the news reports or tactical reports around the world no matter what happens. No more heavy laptops required, so we can streamline comms quite a bit. Fear not, more to come on this later along with the other secret projects I have surreptitiously been working on slowly while trying to also manage the daily reports. Now that the war has settled down for a couple of weeks, I've made a lot of progress on the other stuff I've been trying to build, so hopefully I'll have that stuff finished up within a couple of weeks. Lots of cool stuff coming this summer, that's for sure. All that remains is for us, ourselves, to keep at it, do the best we can every single day, and to get a lot more serious about what we are doing and how we can help keep civilization on the rails through these crazy times. So, thank you all for watching, and thanks for sticking with me through these shorter reports while I'm trying to work on far too many things simultaneously, and I'll see you all next time. And as always, fight in the shade.