The President's Daily Brief - PDB Afternoon Bulletin | November 7th, 2025: Iran's Brazen Plot To Assassinate Israel's Top Diplomat In Mexico & Putin Turns To Africa For Fresh Recruits

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

In this episode of The PDB Afternoon Bulletin:  First—U.S. and Israeli officials say they’ve foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Mexico. It’s just the latest epi...sode in Iran’s shadow war on the west, one that now stretches across the globe. Later in the show—The Kremlin’s war machine is running low on soldiers — and now it’s looking to Africa to fill the gaps. We’ll examine reports that more than a thousand African fighters are on the frontlines in Ukraine, and what it says about Russia’s growing desperation. To listen to the show ad-free, become a premium member of The President’s Daily Brief by visiting ⁠PDBPremium.com⁠. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of The President's Daily Brief. YouTube: ⁠youtube.com/@presidentsdailybrief⁠ Rugiet: Ready to give Rugiet a try? Get 15% off your first order by going tohttp://rugiet.com/PDB and using code PDB. Rugiet prescriptions are compounded medications, available only if prescribed following an online consultation with a licensed clinician. Compounded drugs can be prescribed by federal law, but are not FDA-approved and have not been reviewed by the FDA for safety, effectiveness, or manufacturing. Individual results may vary. Full safety information available at Rugiet.com. Birch Gold: Text PDB to 989898 and get your free info kit on gold Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Looking to diversify and protect your hard-earned assets, well, schedule a free consultation with the Birch Gold Group. They're the precious metals specialists. Just text PDB to 989-89-898-8-8. And you'll receive a free, no-obligation information kit. And you'll learn how to convert an existing IRA or a 401k into a gold IRA. Again, text PDB to 989-89-89. It's Friday, the 7th of November. Welcome to the PDB afternoon bulletin. I'm Mike Baker. Your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. First up, U.S. and Israeli officials say they foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate Israel's ambassador to Mexico. I'll have those details. Later in the show, the Kremlin's war machine is running low on soldiers, and now it's looking to Africa to fill the gaps.
Starting point is 00:01:02 We'll examine reports that more than a thousand African fighters are now on the front lines in Ukraine, and we'll look at what it says about Russia's growing manpower struggles. But first, today's afternoon spotlight. We begin this afternoon with details of an Iranian plot against an Israeli diplomat in Mexico, exposing just how far the Mullah's shadow war against the Jewish state now reaches. News broke on Friday that agents linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, engineered a plot in late 2024 to assassinate Israel's ambassador to Mexico. U.S. and Israeli officials say the scheme which remained active into Iranians.
Starting point is 00:01:42 early 2025 was ultimately foiled over the summer by Mexican security services working with U.S. intelligence. That's according to our report from Axios. Sources familiar with the matter say that the shadowy unit 11-3-0 of the IRGC's goods force hatched the plan. That's the same unit behind recent plots against Jewish and Israeli targets in Australia and Europe. To lay the groundwork for the assassination, operatives with Unit 11-Tripple-Z reportedly spent years recruiting Iranian agents across Latin America, using Iran's embassy in Venezuela as their base of operations. When the plans were finally ready to be set in motion, the recruits assumed operational control, while the Quds Force operatives returned to their headquarters in Tehran, likely in an effort
Starting point is 00:02:28 to give the Mullahs some plausible deniability should the scheme come to light. Anonymous U.S. intelligence officials say the threat is now fully contained, but additional details remain thin. They declined to say exactly how the operation was stopped, citing operational security, though Israel's foreign ministry publicly credited Mexico's law enforcement agencies for disrupting, quote, a terrorist network directed by Iran. The assassination plot is part of a familiar playbook from the Mullis, one that's focused on targeting their adversaries in areas where they ostensibly feel safe.
Starting point is 00:03:02 By waging a covert war on the West, far beyond Iran's regional boundaries, through shadowing networks of intermediaries, the Mullahs are able to pursue their subversive agenda while simultaneously insulating the regime in Tehran from diplomatic lowback. A U.S. official told Axios, quote, this is just the latest in a long history of assassination attempts by Iran around the world, targeting diplomats and journalists, dissidents, and anyone who disagrees with them, something that should deeply concern every country where there is an Iranian presence, end quote. No surprises here, but Iran's mission to the UN and New York declined to comment on the reports. In the past, however, Iranian officials have blasted allegations that their forces and
Starting point is 00:03:44 proxies are engaged in a global campaign against Iran's opponents. Oh, how would they do such a thing, calling it nothing more than politically motivated propaganda? And they managed to say that with a straight face. But as has been documented over the years, the Iranian regime regularly makes a mockery of the international rules-based order, whether it's through their nuclear enrichment program, funding of terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, or campaign of transnational repression. In late August, for example, leaders in Australia abruptly severed diplomatic ties with the government of Iran, accusing the Mullahs of paying local criminals to carry out anti-Semitic attacks in a brazen
Starting point is 00:04:24 attempt to sow discord and spread fear among the country's Jewish population. They took the unprecedented step of expelling Tehran's ambassador to Australia, marking the first time since World War II that Australia has expelled a foreign diplomat. And earlier that same month, the U.S., the U.K., and 12 other countries issued a joint statement denouncing the Iranian regime for engaging in an ongoing campaign to kill and kidnap people in Western countries, including dissidents and journalists and senior political figures. The plots often combine espionage tradecraft with leveraging organized crime networks to carry out their dirty work. again, all in an effort to create distance between their attacks and the mullahs in Iran.
Starting point is 00:05:08 As our regular listeners may recall, Britain has become a target of particular focus. Over the summer, a UK Parliamentary Committee found that Iran has targeted, quote, prominent Jewish individuals in Britain for murder or abduction on at least 15 occasions since 2022. Separately, MI5 director Ken McCallum previously disclosed that British agencies actively thwarted more than 20 Iran-linked plots in 2024 alone and foiled an Iranian-backed terror attack in Birmingham just back in May. In the U.S., we know of multiple regime-backed plots that have been disrupted since 2020, including thwarted assassination attempts in New York and Maryland against Iranian defectors, as well as, of course, their efforts to target President Trump and former members of his administration for assassination.
Starting point is 00:05:58 Coming up next, facing more than 1.1.1. million casualties since invading Ukraine, the Kremlin is now looking to Africa to fill the gaps in its depleted ranks. I'll be right back. Hey, Mike Baker here. Let me take just a moment to talk about protecting your hard-earned assets. Now, did you know that the gold is up around 40% this year? That's not speculation. That's just reality. And if a portion of your savings isn't diversified into gold, well, you could be missing the boat. Here are the facts. Inflation is still too high. And the dollar is still too weak, and the government debt seems almost insurmountable, and that's why central banks are flocking to gold, and they're the ones who are driving prices up to record highs.
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Starting point is 00:09:49 Even better, it's lactose-free and has zero added sugar. It's not every day you find a protein shake you actually want to finish. Catch rock and protein in the dairy cooler at a store near you. Rock and Protein and Shamrock Farms are registered trademarks of Shamrock Foods Company. Welcome back to the afternoon bulletin. This morning on the PDB, we highlighted the high casualty rates, suffered by the Russian military since the start of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Now I want to spotlight one of the ways in which they're coping with those staggering losses,
Starting point is 00:10:20 particularly the recruitment of Africans. On Friday, Ukraine's foreign minister revealed that more than 1,400 citizens of 4,000, 36 African countries are fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine, many funneled into high-risk assaults in the Donbass. They're often lured under false pretenses to fight, given promises of high salaries for non-combat-related work ostensibly far away from the front lines. But once they arrive into Russia, they're forced to sign contracts in a foreign language, briefly trained, and then shipped to regions where the fighting is deadliest. That's according to a report from Reuters. The Ukrainian foreign minister said the deceptive.
Starting point is 00:10:57 of recruitment tactics are part of a broader strategy by the Kremlin to augment its fighting force amid their staggering losses, which now surpass 1,000 per day. He described the contracts presented to new recruits as, quote, equivalent to a death sentence and urged African governments to issue public warnings to their citizens. In a post on X, he said, quote, foreign citizens in the Russian army have a sad fate. Most of them are immediately sent to the so-called meat assaults where they are quickly killed. The comments came up to South Africa's government said Thursday that they had opened an investigation into how 17 of their citizens ended up joining Russian mercenary forces after the men sent distress calls pleading for help to escape Russia and return
Starting point is 00:11:42 home. And just last month, the government in Kenya said a number of their citizens have been detained at military camps across Russia after getting tricked into joining Moscow's military. Ukrainian officials say the total number of African recruits is likely far higher than the 1,436 that they've identified to date. The foreign minister said Kiev would soon release more specific information regarding the various countries and different regions where the Kremlin is mining for fresh manpower. We already know, however, that the tactic is not contained to just Africa. Over the past two years, Moscow has turned to recruiting mercenaries and unsuspecting foreigners wherever they can find them, including Asia and the Middle East. Reports last year indicated
Starting point is 00:12:25 that Russia was actively luring men from India under false pretenses to fight in Ukraine, though it remains unclear how many they ultimately recruited. There were also reports that some 15,000 men from Nepal had been enlisted into the Russian military. Generally, Russia has focused their efforts on impoverished nations, where promises of lucrative jobs in Russia are often too enticing to ignore. Of course, the Kremlin has also turned to foreign fighters through more formal partnerships, like with North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom has sent an estimated 15,000 troops to bolster Putin's ranks. Those forces were mostly deployed to the Kursk region near the Ukrainian border in an effort to claw back territory that had been seized by Keeve. Earlier this year, Britain's Ministry of Defense
Starting point is 00:13:12 said roughly 6,000 of those North Korean soldiers have been killed or wounded, accounting for nearly half of the initial 11,000 troops that were sent. The overall lesson here is that if you're a foreign fighter, the Kremlin will happily send you to the bloodiest areas of the front lines. For the Putin regime, the strategic benefit of this tactic is clear, particularly given the 1.1 million casualties that the Russian military has suffered since invading Ukraine. By outsourcing the dirtiest fighting to recruits with limited rights,
Starting point is 00:13:42 the Kremlin can partially mitigate its domestic casualty. count and keep its wartime messaging at home tighter, all while, of course, grinding forward on the offensive. And that, my friends, is the PDB afternoon bulletin for Friday the 7th of November. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at pdb at thefirsttv.com. And don't forget to check out our latest episode of the weekend show, the PDB Situation Report. We've got former UK ambassador, Edmund Fitton Brown, joining us to review the current state of the Gaza ceasefire, such as it is, as well as military veteran and former CIA officer Adam Hardidge. We're discussing disinformation and misinformation and the impact of AI on Generation Alpha.
Starting point is 00:14:27 You can catch that show on our YouTube channel, at President's Daily Brief, and of course on podcast platforms wherever you get your podcast stuff. I'm Mike Baker, and I'll be back over the weekend with the PDB Situation Report. then stay informed. Stay safe. Stay cool. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this,
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