Like many a good Florida tale, this one begins in a watering hole with all the trappings of a Carl Hiaasen novel. The date was May 14, 2023, and Joseph Assad had taken his wife, Michele Rigby Assad, to the Sandbar Sports Grill in Cocoa Beach, a kitschy beachfront dive, to celebrate her 50th birthday. Scattered clouds and a gentle breeze offered pristine conditions for a Hurricane (the rum and triple sec sort) and a late-nightrocket liftoff.

A dozen miles north, looming along the Atlantic, wasCape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. As last call beckoned at the Sandbar, the crowd thinned out. Yet a few stragglers, drinks in hand, watched the horizon, waiting for ignition. When the Falcon 9 finally lit, it tore a bright seam through the night. This was SpaceX doing what it now does best: lofting a stack of Starlink satellites into low earth orbit. That evening’s mission was a milestone. SpaceX sent up a record-tying payload (56 satellites at 17.4 metric tons), using its highly proprietary rocket, designed to fly again—separating, arcing back, and returning for a controlled landing.

For the Assads, rocket launches—routine to most locals—had never lost their luster. The pair relished the fiery spectacle. And the intrigue. Often, the mission cargo is highly classified. The Assads had settled in Florida after a decade of working in the world’s hot spots—from Africa to Latin America to the Middle East—as a tandem couple with the CIA. Assad was a counterterrorism case officer responsible for spotting, assessing, and recruiting spies; Rigby Assad was a counterintelligence interrogator. (Disclosure: In the 1990s I worked as a CIA attorney before becoming a journalist and producer.)

After leaving the spy game, the Assads founded a boutique security firm advising clients—sports teams, defense contractors, houses of worship—on how to confront potential threats. They bought a waterfront spec house, a speedboat, and cycled through a collection of Aston Martins and McLarens in eye-catching colors. “It’s a little James Bond and a little ‘Florida Man,’ ” Assad told me.

The ex-spies blended in nicely among the engineers, techies, and tanned retirees from law enforcement and government-adjacent jobs. They’d adapted to life along the so-called Space Coast, a palm-dotted shoreline roughly 70 miles end to end, from Titusville down through Cocoa Beach and on past the guarded gates of Patrick Space Force Base, where NASA’s old infrastructure still hums, even as the privatized rocket era now sets the tempo.

At the center of it all, with its estates and postcard vistas, isMerritt Island(population around 35,000), projecting an air of serene insularity. Florida’s tourism bureau bills it as “an ideal destination for space enthusiasts and outdoor adventurers.” They neglect to mention another, more invasive species drawn to the area: spies.

That night the Sandbar featured an ’80s cover band, six salty guys with dad bods. As they pounded out Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny,” Assad excused himself for a bathroom break. En route, he noticed an attractive woman, whom he believed to be Chinese, striking up a conversation with one of the many “space nerds” crowding the bar. “Are you an engineer? Do you work atSpaceX?” he recalls her asking.

On his way back to the table, he spotted the same woman posing the same questions to a different guy. “What is this, a fucking census?” he muttered as he relayed the encounter to his wife.

“The Space Coast is like a small town where big-city things happen,” Rigby Assad later told me. “The guys, who literally wear their corporate affiliation on their sleeve, share an optimism bias. Why would anyone be interested in me or my company? But the reality is this is a target-rich environment.”

To the Assads, the timing was a tell. On the night of a major SpaceX mission, a stranger was working the room like she’d been tasked. “She was cold-bumping men a stone’s throw from launch control,” Rigby Assad said, using spy slang for approaching someone without an introduction or cover. “It was blatant.” Blatant enough that they quietly snapped her photo and forwarded it to the authorities.

Source: Drudge Report