Of all of the Central Intelligence Agency's activities, paramilitary operations might remain the least understood. This, in part, is both a cause and a consequence of inaccurate portrayals of such work in prominent movies; it's also because fewer memoirs come from the CIA's Special Activities Division than from traditional human intelligence collectors and from analysts. David Priess chatted with former CIA officer Ric Prado about the fiction and the reality of CIA paramilitary operations, inclu...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 48
You don't have to look very far under the surface of the average game in the National Football League to find cloak-and-dagger machinations worthy of governmental intelligence agencies. During the past several decades, teams have used both myriad spying tactics to gain extra advantages and extensive counterintelligence techniques to thwart them. The line between traditional espionage and NFL methods is surprisingly thin. David Priess chatted with author Kevin Bryant about historical and present-...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 47
This week, we take our listeners back to November 18, 2021, when we were just starting Chatter, to bring back one of our very special episodes. David Priess's guest that day was former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (PDDNI) and longtime intelligence officer Sue Gordon, who shared stories about her experiences in team sports, lessons on leadership, her role in creating the CIA’s non-profit venture capital firm (In-Q-Tel), what it was like interviewing with Donald Trump for the...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 46
NASA next week plans to launch the first of several Artemis missions, which collectively aim to land astronauts on the Moon again for the first time in more than half a century, explore the lunar surface more extensively, and establish a long-term presence on the Moon. Controversy lingers over both the launch system selected for these missions and the next step of human spaceflight to Mars. David Priess spoke with science journalist Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today and co-host of Astrono...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 45
Gone with the Wind --the top-grossing movie of all time, adjusted for inflation--remains an iconic influence in American culture, despite its deeply troubling portrayal of social and political dynamics in the South during and after the Civil War. The continued popularity of the film points to a need to examine its influence on nearly a century's worth of American race relations, fascistic movements, and denialism in the United States. And why did Adolf Hitler reportedly love it so much? David Pr...
Aug 18, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Mary Louise Kelly is one of the most recognizable voices in American journalism. A co-host of NPR’s flagship program “All Things Considered,” she has spent years interviewing top newsmakers and traveling the world to chronicle stories about national security and foreign policy. And on top of all that, she’s a novelist. Kelly has written two books that incorporate many of her own experiences covering corridors of intelligence and international intrigue. This week, Kelly talked to Shane Harris abo...
Aug 11, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 43
Climate change and its effects are increasingly recognized as important subjects of national security research and analysis. Few issues of international political economy or international security avoid some intersection with warming global temperatures, evolving environments for human habitation, and/or changing geography. Erin Sikorsky has been studying these and related issues for decades, first within the US Intelligence Community and now at the Center for Climate and Security. David Priess ...
Aug 04, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 42
Fake news has been around for thousands of years in different forms that have changed with media technology, and there's little doubt that it's here to stay. For reasons ranging from human biases to financial incentives to the need for speed, it remains a hard problem. Cindy Otis, who worked for about 10 years at the Central Intelligence Agency as an analyst and a manager, now writes about fake news and related matters in articles and books--including True or False: A CIA Analyst's Guide to Spot...
Jul 28, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 41
This week, Shane Harris talks with international best-selling novelist Daniel Silva, the creator of the long-running Gabriel Allon series. His latest installment in the adventures of the spy/art restorer is out now. Before he became a full-time fiction writer, Silva was a journalist. He produced successful shows at CNN and was a reporter overseas. Those early experiences informed his current career. Silva is known for crafting stories with a meticulous eye to factual detail. In this wide-ranging...
Jul 21, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 40
Mass shootings are now such a frequent occurrence in the United States that reporters like CNN's Josh Campbell sometimes have to travel from one tragic location directly to a second one as news of another event breaks. Josh's experience as an FBI special agent helps to give him a rich perspective on the practical and ethical challenges involved in this line of work. Josh Campbell spoke with David Priess about relations between the FBI and police departments, J. Edgar Hoover's influence on Hollyw...
Jul 14, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 39
Brad Thor is a #1 New York Times bestselling author who has more than twenty thrillers behind him and shows no signs of slowing down. Rising Tiger , just published on July 5, 2022, yet again places his franchise hero - former world-class skier, Navy SEAL, Secret Service agent, and private intelligence operative Scot Harvath - into deadly situations backlit by realistic geopolitical developments. How does Thor come up with his plots full of international intrigue and his detailed settings for Har...
Jul 07, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 38
Working for the Secret Service comes with inherent dilemmas. One of them can arise if agents become partisan actors or allow themselves to even be perceived as such. We heard another one described in shocking terms during this week's testimony before the Jan. 6 committee: A protectee and the agents protecting him or her can disagree with the protectee about the latter's presence in a threatening situation or movement toward it. It turns out a whole lot of training prepares agents for these conti...
Jun 30, 2022•1 hr 48 min•Season 1Ep. 37
This week, Shane Harris talked with historian Tim Naftali about the legacy of Watergate and how we tell stories, fifty years later, about America’s most notorious presidential scandal. What is it about Watergate that still captures our attention? What do historians, journalists, and citizens misremember about the events? And how does the scandal shape our understanding of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol? Naftali was the first federal director of the Richard Nixon library and earned accolades fr...
Jun 23, 2022•1 hr 38 min•Season 1Ep. 36
Freemasonry for centuries has been more influential than any other known secret society. Among its prominent members have been five kings of England, fourteen US presidents (including George Washington), and a veritable Who's Who of writers, artists, and politicians. Masons helped with everything from founding the United States to starting the Sicilian mafia, from connecting distant parts of the British Empire to coordinating revolutions, from being the bogeymen for the Catholic Church and fasci...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 35
When the term "intelligence" comes up regarding an organization, most of us immediately think of government institutions. And there's a good reason for that; nation-states have become the centers of the most prominent intelligence collection, analysis, and direct action. But that's far from the whole story. Increasingly, corporations are developing intelligence units of their own to uncover and assess threats to their personnel and facilities, analyze geopolitical and environmental risks that mi...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 34
This week, Shane Harris talks with journalist Jamie Kirchick about his new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington . Kirchick’s story unfolds over several decades and reveals the secret history of gays and lesbians in the capital, as well as the history of secrecy in which they played pivotal roles. The book is a set of personal stories as well as an exploration of the national security bureaucracy at the heart of power and influence in Washington. And Kirchick explores a provocat...
Jun 02, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 33
This week marks the 80th anniversary of the start of principal photography on Casablanca , the 1942 film that would win Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Curtiz), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Philip Epstein, Julius Epstein, and Howard Koch). Often ranked by critics and the general public in the top five films of all time, Casablanca was first screened just as the city in French Morocco was hitting headlines because of the Allies' Operation TORCH invasion of North Africa dur...
May 26, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 32
This week, Shane Harris speaks to Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman, who co-created the new Showtime series “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” It’s about an alien, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who comes to Earth in search of technology to help save his home planet, which has been ravaged by a changing climate. He seeks out a brilliant scientist, played by Naomie Harris, who has the knowledge to help build the planet-saving device. But she is struggling to care for a young daughter and an ill father on her ...
May 19, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 31
This week, Shane Harris speaks to artist Trevor Paglen, who explores themes of surveillance, security, and secrecy. Shane first got to know Trevor’s work through his delightful and spooky book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World . It’s a collection of patches and insignia used by secretive military units and classified programs. They’re interesting works of art in their own right. But they also use images and numbers to communic...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Millions of hostile rivalries exist between groups worldwide, but their conflicts rarely escalate to protracted violence. Because would-be combatants know that all-out conflict usually proves immensely costly to all sides, they regularly find ways to avoid open warfare. And when it comes to international affairs in particular, we tend to focus on the wars that do occur at the expense of internalizing the core truth that, most of the time, they simply don't happen. Political scientist and economi...
May 05, 2022•1 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 29
This week, Shane Harris speaks to filmmaker Nicholas Meyer about the renewed threat of nuclear war amid the conflict in Ukraine. Meyer directed the 1983 film “The Day After,” which remains the most-watched film in television history. The story follows a group of Kansans before, during, and after a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It shocked hundreds of millions of viewers--including President Ronald Reagan--with its graphic depiction of the ferocious power of nuclear...
Apr 28, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 28
No one understands the surreal aspects of a large, long-established bureaucracy like someone who has worked in it. And few have written satire about the particular bureaucracy known as the Central Intelligence Agency like former intelligence officer, prominent yacht-watcher, and book author Alex Finley. For this episode, Shane Harris and David Priess speak jointly with Finley about her career in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (which became the National Clandestine Service during her tenure ...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Artificial Intelligence algorithms are increasingly being used to make decisions for us. But, as NBC technology correspondent Jacob Ward argues, these are not necessarily the ones we want to perpetuate. Preying upon our brains' evolved shortcuts, biases, and hidden processes, they are becoming ever harder to escape. For this episode, David Priess spoke with Ward--author of the new book The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How To Fight Back --about artificial intellige...
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 26
For decades, humanity has failed to address climate change and prepare for its devastating impact. Without significant changes to our consumption of fossil fuels, the coming reckoning will be severe. But there is hope; the same forces that have confused the public's mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed. And the insurance industry is likely to lead the way. To understand how we got to the cliff's edge--and how to avoid going over it--David Priess speaks w...
Apr 07, 2022•1 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 25
This week, Shane Harris speaks to Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer and astrobiologist at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Walkowicz is the co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance and studies the ethics of space exploration. This was a wide-ranging conversation about the moral and ethical dimensions of humanity’s search for life in the universe and exploration of other planets. We often think about what cities on the moon or Mars might look like, but how should humans live on those worlds and inte...
Mar 31, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 24
This week, Shane Harris talks with journalist Catherine Belton about the rise of Vladimir Putin from KGB officer to president of Russia. Belton’s book, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West , traces how Soviet-era spies siphoned billions out of the state economy, creating vast networks for laundering money and hiding assets. After Putin came to power, he pushed out the tycoons of the post-Soviet era and set up his own cadre of loyal oligarchs. Today, as the West ...
Mar 24, 2022•48 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Russia's most recent invasion of Ukraine is reverberating around the globe--including in the Arctic. An area that had seen increasingly productive cooperation, due in large part to multilateral institutions like the Arctic Council, is now facing even greater uncertainty. To dig deep into all things Arctic as the war in Ukraine continues, David Priess spoke with Marisol Maddox, senior Arctic analyst at the Polar Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and non-resident re...
Mar 17, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 22
This week's episode goes back a decade and a half to the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia--and brings the conversation to today, both with lessons we can learn from the country's digitalization and information security awareness and with discussion of how Russia's earlier aggression previewed its recent invasion of Ukraine. Toomas Hendrik Ilves served as Estonia's Ambassador to the United States, Canada, and Mexico and then its Foreign Minister (twice) before becoming the country's president in 2006...
Mar 10, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 21
This week, Shane Harris talks with professor and author Elizabeth Samet about Hollywood’s portrayal of World War II and how that influences what Americans think about “the good war.” Samet’s book Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness explores how generations of filmmakers have depicted the conflict. Many of their stories, she argues, have inspired a nostalgia for a war that seemed clearer cut and more virtuous than subsequent American conflicts. Contempo...
Mar 03, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 20
This week's episode takes a walk on the dark side, with a molecular look at a prominent international poisonings. Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov died in 1978 after a ricin pellet was shot into his leg, from an air gun disguised as an umbrella. Twenty-eight years later, former KGB/FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko suffered horribly and died after the poison polonium-210 was slipped into his tea. And former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia nearly died in 2018 from the effects of...
Feb 24, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 19
