Halloween in the Strait

It’s Halloween in the Strait of Hormuz, and you know it because the IRGC ghouls are lurking between the swells.

The latest incident report from the UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) involved a tanker exiting the Strait, 25 NM Northeast of Khasab, Oman, that “was approached on the port side by a small boat which attached two explosive devices to the hull above the waterline.”

These are called limpet mines. I think I can safely guarantee that the “small boat” that deployed them was not some local skipper out fishing for marlin.

The UKMTO reports rarely mention the flag of the ships being attacked. We have been told that Iran is not attacking Russian or Chinese ships, and while that may be true, we just don’t know.

What is clear is that the endless Iranian claims that ships are hitting IRGC sea mines are categorically false. These are “scare-me” reports aimed at increasing insurance costs and compelling shippers reluctant to appeal for US Navy protection to pay Iran’s blackmail safe transit tax to sail through Iranian territorial waters.

CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper went on a helicopter tour of the Strait and the Persian Gulf earlier this week, and showed footage of U.S. helicopters, fighter jets, and sea drones patrolling the international shipping lanes.

Admiral Cooper specifically denied Iran’s claims to have re-mined the Strait, saying that the U.S. has “successfully cleared” all sea mines from international shipping lanes, “which remain free and clear.”

Thanks to U.S. military operations, 1.5 billion barrels of crude have exited the Gulf since the summer, he said. And zero barrels of Iranian crude.

“What I didn’t see,” Cooper said. “I didn’t see the IRGC out there at all…They were not out there because Iran’s navy is all at the bottom of the sea.”

Okay, I hear you. We may have sunk the big surface combatants, but we haven’t destroyed the IRGC’s fleet of mosquito boats, which could number in the thousands. Nor will we ever be able to do so.

What we must do is destroy the IRGC’s will to use those small boats. And that is a very different matter, indeed.

How do we destroy the IRGC’s will to fight? That is THE big question that U.S. war planners, war fighters, and our Commander in Chief have not yet answered.

I put forth my ideas in an essay published the day before the war began at Frontpage mag, the online publication started by my friend David Horowitz more than two decades ago. It’s pinned to the top of my Twitter feed if you haven’t seen it.

Force is important, since it makes lower level IRGC commanders weigh their own survival against the dwindling perks the regime can provide.

But ultimately, we need to delegitimize the regime in the eyes of the Iranian people. And that happens two ways: by showing just how bankrupt the regime has become thanks to Scottie Bessent’s extraordinary economic war to choke off their revenues, and by empowering the mullahs who reject the founding ideology of the regime, the velayat-e faghih, or absolute clerical rule.

Before you purse your lips and tell me there is no good mullah but a dead mullah, let me tell you that I learned this strategy from a dissident mullah I first met in Paris in the 1980s. He so impressed me that I brought him to Bolling Air Force Base in 1997 to brief top leaders at the Defense Intelligence Agency. That’s right, nearly thirty years ago.

No one took him seriously then, and the Iran “experts” don’t take it seriously now. (You can read the full story of that visit in chapter 10 of The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, entitled “Black Turban at the White Hotel.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D, Tehran), told Washington, DC, policy wonks on Wednesday that he had received CENTCOM’s latest classified briefing on U.S. war plans and found it “insane.”

“It will lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law,” he said, whatever that means.

Now, while Murphy’s comments do not amount to an unauthorized release of classified information, they do tip off our enemies that a resumption of the war is imminent — so imminent, in fact, that the Pentagon felt it necessary to brief lower level Senators, not just members of the Gang of Eight, to which Murphy does not belong.

It could well be that the war plans Senator Murphy saw were insane, if they had been crafted by the three-star in charge of plans (the J5), Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia.

As always happens in Washington, DC, unauthorized leakers have been talking to reporters whose only goal is to make the administration look bad (and I’m being polite). This has been going on since Trump first took office.

Then, we learned that many of the leakers resided in the Executive Office of the President, and specifically in the National Security Council, such as the Vindman brothers and Eric Ciamarella, a CIA detainee.

Pistol Pete Hegseth just fired General Sylvia, reportedly after Sylvia failed three polygraphs questioning him on his ties to Washington, DC, reporters. If your top war planner is spilling the beans to the Wall Street Journal and Axios, it shreds any notion of opsec.

I discuss all of this, as well as Melania Trump’s brokered ceasefire in Oleshky, the French riots, and the JD Vance letter to Mohsen Rezai, who I probably know better than anyone outside of Iran (including Mossad and the US Intelligence Community), in this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend.

As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday in the Jacksonville, Florida, area on 104.9 FM or 550 AM or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. You listen later to the podcast by clicking here.

©2026 Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

Website: kentimmerman.com