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At 1am on Saturday, Hunterbrook reported that B-2 stealth bombers had taken off — before they had even left Missouri.
By midday, it was the top story across the NYT — which cited Hunterbrook — and several other major outlets, including the WSJ, Fox, Reuters, BBC, Washington Post, and Bloomberg.
By Saturday night, the US had used B-2s to bomb three nuclear facilities in Iran.
Shout out to our reporter Blake Spendley — @OSINTTechnical on X with >1 million followers — for scooping the story, and for including evidence of both the real and decoy missions.
THE CONTEXT
Blake covered US deployments to counter Iran in April amid the campaign against the Houthis. We also broke the story that the European Union had restricted access to satellite imagery over the Red Sea.
Then, earlier this week, Blake was the first journalist to correct dangerous misinformation about a strike on oil tankers off the coast of Oman after three ships caught fire. The fires were the result of an accidental collision, not a strike by Iran against the Strait of Hormuz.
Hunterbrook’s mission is to expose and stop wrongdoing through media, litigation, and finance. Our core beats have become housing, healthcare, and habitat, where our investigations range from mortgage fraud by America’s largest home lender to environmental harm in communities across the world.
But the tools we use for our investigations — open-source intel, on-the-ground reporting, advanced data analysis, and the latest AI models — are powerful and adaptable.
This story, in particular, was a testament to OSINT: shipping data; flight data; scraping social media. That’s how a scrappy startup with a journalist working past midnight on a Friday beat all of the world’s major publications to a critical scoop on the biggest story in the world right now.
HOW WE BROKE THE NEWS
It began with flight tracking.
Eight US Air Force tankers had taken off from a base in Oklahoma, not far from the Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, which is known to house B-2 bombers.
The tankers were in formation, suggesting they were conducting refueling. This is critical for long-range missions and bombers loaded with heavy ordnance like bunker-buster bombs.
The refueling mission was confirmed by Air Traffic Control audio, which stated: “Nitro61 flight cleared to conduct aerial refueling along 309 westbound, west MYTEE21 flight.”
We then found that MYTEE21 is a known B-2 stealth bomber callsign, as you can hear in this video from 2019.
At this point, we had part of the story. But then, we got another credible data point — which was both confirmatory and contradictory.
The Facebook and X accounts of a Warsaw, Missouri resident had posted: “9 b2’s just flew over Warsaw headed due east.”
Same kind of jets — headed in a different direction.
While other media outlets slept on the story or called the government to confirm whether it was true, we had gone live with both stories: B-2s were flying west, according to flight tracking data; and they were flying east, according to a local first-person account.
And it turned out both stories were right — because the government claims it planned a decoy.
The B-2s headed west were intentionally noisy as they made their way across the Pacific, according to a Pentagon statement made to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the B-2s that ultimately led the strikes had gone east, in line with the local Facebook post that Hunterbrook had identified in the middle of the night.
The timing adds up, too. The bombers that struck Iran launched shortly after midnight, according to timelines released by the Department of Defense after the attacks. That means the jets — real and decoy — took off less than an hour before Hunterbook confirmed the operation was underway.
It was a perfect example of the value of open-source intelligence. Even as governments look to deceive the media, with the biggest stories in the world, the truth is out there somewhere.
You just need to know where to look.
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Sam Koppelman is a New York Times best-selling author who has written books with former United States Attorney General Eric Holder and former United States Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal. He helped build Fenway Strategies into one of the preeminent strategic communications firms in the country—with side quests speechwriting for Michael Bloomberg, running the surrogate remarks operation on the Biden-Harris campaign, and co-founding Mayday, which is now one of the leading information providers on how to access reproductive health care in states with bans. Sam has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Time Magazine, and other outlets — and occasionally volunteers on a fire speech for a good cause. He has a BA in Government from Harvard, where he was named a John Harvard Scholar and wrote op-eds like “Shut Down Harvard Football,” which he tells us were great for his social life.
Blake Spendley joined Hunterbrook from the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), where he led investigations as a Research Specialist for the Marine Corps and US Navy. He built and owns the leading open-source intelligence (OSINT) account on X/Twitter, called @OSINTTechnical (over 1 million followers), which also distributes Hunterbrook Media reporting. His OSINT research has been published in Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, among other top business outlets. He has a B.A. in Political Science from USC.