Sean Wiswesser spent three decades in the CIA’s clandestine service. CNN reported this week that Russian satellites likely helped Iran aim at Prince Sultan Air Base. On Narativ Live on Thursday, Wiswesser did not hedge. “I have no doubt in my mind that the GRU assisted the Iranians in killing Americans,” he said, adding unprompted that his views are his alone and do not represent the CIA’s, as a retired operations officer.
Then he described the machine. Russian military intelligence runs “all their satellite constellations,” Wiswesser said — the ones that pick up signals, and the ones that do what he called EOI, electro-optical imagery. “Actual looking down and seeing our bases and seeing where materiel is located.” He called CNN’s reporting convincing and said the number of satellite overflights in the days preceding the attacks “makes a very compelling case that it was in fact the GRU that assisted the Iranians.” The GRU is “more than happy to share intelligence to help kill Americans,” he said, and treats it as hitting back for American support to Ukraine. “The Iranians have no such capability, Zev, to target us in that way.”
Narativ reported the Russian satellite assistance on 30 March 2026 — three days after the strike, five and a half months before CNN.
Zev played new ABC News video. ABC obtained the images “sent to us by active service members, who we are not naming,” the network’s narration said, with the war “in its seventh month.” “Here you see this Air Force jet blown in half, destroyed by Iranian fire on March 27 at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, buildings torn apart,” ABC reported. Then a second frame. “This image shows extensive damage from an Iranian attack at a U.S. Army base in Kuwait. The date unclear.” CNN put the number wounded in the 27 March attack at twelve.
Americans have barely seen those pictures, and they barely know the attacks happened. Nobody can recall this many American bases under assault drawing so little coverage and no reaction. Iran hit those bases again this week. Nobody answered.
Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, traced how Iran got the capability. IRGC commanders arrived in Crimea within weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she said, to train Russian troops on the drones Iran was supplying. Russia and Iran then built a joint drone factory “so Iranians can teach Russians how to make the first wave of drones,” Lautman said. Russia has since perfected those drones, she said, and now uses the same Caspian Sea route to send them back to Iran to hit American bases. Russia is helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles, she said, and she cited an investigation mapping the movements of Russian and Iranian scientists and flights into Iran on its nuclear weapons program. Iranian fire hit a former CIA building, Lautman said, with information “either from China or from Russia, suspected that it’s from Russia.” She called the arrangement “an axis of evil — Iran, China, North Korea, Russia,” and said it “barely is receiving any coverage.”
Wiswesser has a name for the Western answer: “I call it empty deterrence.” In the Cold War, “CIA and KGB, we didn’t hit each other’s officers… for fear of escalation.” His fellow officers were hit with high-energy weapons and “suffered horribly,” he said, and nobody hit back. “They understand strength,” Wiswesser said. “We’re not projecting strength. We’re projecting weakness.” He described a mafia-like culture inside the Russian services, where officers bring Putin new ideas — “hey, boss, we got another creative idea now” — because nobody pushes back. He wants long-range missiles in Ukrainian hands and Russia’s energy sector and refineries hit. “Make it count with some sort of kinetic effect.”
Lautman also put a name to the money behind Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations and went where no American outlet has gone. Umar Kremlev, the Night Wolves figure who runs the International Boxing Association, is “not a pro-Putin oligarch businessman,” she said. “This is an intelligence operation at the highest level. This is even a higher level than FSB.” Wiswesser read it the same way. “This is more than information warfare. This is a breach of the inner sanctum.”
Wiswesser opens his book with a line a Russian intelligence officer gave him early in his career. “You were the main enemy during the Cold War. You are the main enemy now. You always will be the main enemy.
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