The intelligence war is turning against the Houthis

The collapse of Yemen’s western front was not primarily the result of sheer Houthi numbers. It resulted from a fused Russian-Iranian command system in which elements of Russia’s space-based geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities were integrated into an Iranian-led command-and-control (C2) system supporting Houthi operations. Human penetration of Tariq Saleh’s National Resistance Forces gave that system the access required to turn technical collection into a battlefield advantage.Through Project AURORAH, the GEOINT and SIGINT fusion system I created, I identified and sequenced Russian military reconnaissance over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, the UAE and Jordan during the Iran-US war. A compartmented special-access programme (SAP) within the project reconstructed Russian orbital collection as a single multisensor system, including the sequences that preceded Iran’s precision strikes on countries across the region and on US military assets. That work later considerably assisted a major CNN investigation into Russian military geospatial satellite support for Iranian precision targeting across the Middle East.The underlying...