Nancy Youssef has reported on war and conflict around the world and from Washington. As a young journalist, she went to Iraq and sensed early on that a war most presumed would be over quickly was only just beginning. Her career has taken her to Afghanistan, Egypt, and into the center of power at the Pentagon. Nancy is now a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. In her conversation with Shane, Nancy talks about her Journal colleague, Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested last ...
Apr 13, 2023•49 min•Season 1Ep. 78
Since the days of the USSR, the Russian people have expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of the country's environment. The post-Soviet years witnessed an explosion of grassroots, professional, and government-affiliated groups to advocate in this space, but widespread public support and lasting impact on government policy haven't developed. And now, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, prospects for progress on environmental concerns seem especially dim. David Priess hosted this conversat...
Apr 06, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 77
Misperceptions about nuclear proliferation attempts abound, particularly when we find authoritarian leaders involved. It is easy to picture these determined owners of nuclear weapons as omnipotent, unconstrained micromanagers--willing and able to do whatever is necessary to take their country over the threshold. Political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer disagrees. She conducted extensive research in IAEA and other archives as well as in-depth interviews with senior scientists and regime offic...
Mar 30, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 76
A former president accused of treason. Talk of secession. Concerns about the lack of accountability for insurrection. These issues appear in headlines today, but we've been here before--in the 1860s. For this episode, David Priess talked with legal historian Cynthia Nicoletti about her passion for the intersection of history and law, what the U.S. Constitution says and does not say about secession, differing legal arguments on the topic during and after the Civil War, the government's indecision...
Mar 23, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 75
The Academy loves a good spy flick, and so do we! This week, Shane Harris talks with Washington Post culture critic Alyssa Rosenberg about the enduring power of espionage on the big screen. Movies like Zero Dark Thirty , the Mission: Impossible franchise, and this year’s Top Gun: Maverick and All Quiet on the Western Front , which both took home Oscars, help us understand global conflict as they wrestle with questions of personal morality. How do the stories of James Bond and George Smiley help ...
Mar 16, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 74
Mark Hertling retired from the U.S. Army as a lieutenant general a decade ago, but he's kept busy since then as a CNN military analyst, hospital organization executive, book author, speaker on leadership, and adjunct professor. Most recently, he accepted President Biden's appointment as Chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission. Celebrating its 100th anniversary this month, the commission is a unique institution that commemorates the service and sacrifices of members of the U.S. milit...
Mar 09, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 73
For the past 20 years, Richard Haass has led the Council on Foreign Relations, building on his national security experience in government and his related work in academia and think tanks. Although his efforts have focused overwhelmingly on foreign policy, his central concern has turned to something closer to home: the decline of democratic norms in the United States. He's even written a new book about this problem and something we all can do about it, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of G...
Mar 02, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 72
James Fallows on What is Happening in the Sky It’s been an eventful few months for flying objects. A Chinese spy balloon captured national attention and sparked an international incident--and a lot of hot air. But closer to the ground, there have been two near collisions of commercial jets at U.S. airports. This week, Shane talks to journalist (and pilot) James Fallows about “What the hell is happening in the sky?” to borrow from one of his recent posts. Fallows has been chronicling American lif...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Along with co-editors Peter Feaver, William Inboden, and Meghan O'Sullivan, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley is editor of the new Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama . This unique and massive book contains 30 Transition Memos prepared in 2008-2009 under Hadley's direction by the outgoing George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council staff for the incoming Obama Administration—each with a postscript by these same experts critically assessi...
Feb 16, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Flat earth beliefs have been spreading alarmingly in recent years. They offer plenty of fodder for punchlines, yes--but they also have ties to more nefarious conspiracy theories like QAnon and to other manifestations of political extremism. As a reporter at the Daily Beast , Kelly Weill has been covering it all. And she has written Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything , a book that tells the history of flat earthism, relates many stories from and ...
Feb 09, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 69
A sunken Soviet submarine. A secret CIA plan to lift it from the bottom of the ocean with a giant claw. And reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. It sounds like the makings of a Netflix series--and it should be. But the story of the Glomar Explorer is the stuff of fact, even if it has long been shrouded in secrecy. In his new book, intelligence historian M. Todd Bennett pierces the veil surrounding this most improbable of intelligence operations and surfaces a riveting tale of underwater espionag...
Feb 02, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 68
Yaya Fanusie has explored his analytic side and his creative side throughout his life and multifaceted career. Comic book writer and illustrator in junior high. International economics in graduate school. Author of nonfiction and fiction. Work at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Counterrorism Center fighting corruption and terrorism. Sound designer. Nonprofit expert on financial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. And now producer, writer, and voice talent of the audio spy thrille...
Jan 26, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 67
For almost 25 years, until his death in November 2018, former president George H. W. Bush's chief of staff was Jean Becker. For event after event through both the best of those times and the worst--from dozens of affirming trips overseas to several parachute jumps in his latter years to many funerals--Becker was there to schedule it, plan it, manage it, and often attend it. All of this has given her a uniquely wide and deep understanding of the challenges and rewards of a long post-presidency. F...
Jan 19, 2023•1 hr 40 min•Season 1Ep. 66
In 2001, the FBI arrested a top U.S. intelligence officer who had spied for Cuba for nearly two decades. The story of Ana Montes, whose colleagues called her “The Queen of Cuba,” has all the hallmarks of an espionage thriller. She was among the most damaging spies of her generation, and yet her story remains lesser known than more notorious Cold War-era turncoats. In his new book, journalist Jim Popkin tells the story of Montes’ radicalization, her recruitment by Cuban intelligence, and how she ...
Jan 12, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 65
Abigail Spanberger, who represents Virginia's 7th congressional district in the House of Representatives, is one of the few members of Congress to have served as an operations officer at the Central Intelligence Agency. She also worked in law enforcement as an officer of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Not typical experiences for a thrice-elected politician--but useful for the role she finds herself in now. David Priess chatted with Rep. Spanberger about her recent re-election to the House, ...
Jan 05, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 64
This week, we're taking time off for the holidays - so we reached into the Chatter archives for one of our favorite shows from the last year. In this episode, Shane Harris sits down with veteran journalist Leslie Kean, who has done groundbreaking and widely admired reporting on unidentified flying objects. And, no, that does not mean aliens. Kean's bestselling 2010 book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record , was a sober account of credible, first-hand witnesses to u...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 63
Donald Trump is trying to do something rare--very rare--in American history: lose a presidential election, run again, and get elected to a second term. Only one president, the underappreciated Grover Cleveland, has ever accomplished that feat. Yet his story remains largely unknown. David Priess invited Troy Senik, author of a new biography of Grover Cleveland called A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland , to Chatter to explore how the stories of rejected...
Dec 22, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 62
Ronald Reagan stands among the most consequential national security presidents in United States history, not least of which because his policies helped to end the Cold War without a direct war between the superpowers. Reagan's vision for ending the Cold War evolved during his presidency, but followed clear principles he brought with him to the office. Will Inboden, a historian and former policymaker who leads the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, has wri...
Dec 15, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 61
Longtime Russia watcher Andrew Weiss took an unconventional approach to his new biography, Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin. Teaming up with illustrator Box Brown, Weiss wrote a graphic novel that tells the story of Putin’s rise from an impoverished childhood in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to the undisputed authoritarian ruler of Russia. A big theme of the book is how Putin imagined an idea of himself as a strongman through spy movies and pulp novels that he devoured as a ...
Dec 08, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 60
Plagues periodically exact a heavy toll on human life--and much more. They devastate economies, exacerbate social disorder, shock governance systems, provide fodder for political violence, and interact in surprising ways with terrorism. In this conversation, David Priess and longtime RAND Corporation terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins talk about the long nature of pandemics, the history of public resistance to efforts to protect public health, links between plagues and social unrest, how the...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 59
It's been just longer than one year since Shane Harris and David Priess embarked on a voyage of new adventures aboard the S.S. Chatter , seeking out creative conversations on the distant shores of the national security ocean. And what a journey it's been. To date, they've hosted more than 50 long-form conversations on topics from spy novels to Olympic security, from surveillance-related art to assassins' poisons, from 9/11 memorialization to ethical space exploration. The only thing more intrigu...
Nov 24, 2022•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 58
Satellites have held a special place in military planning and in spy fiction alike for more than half a century. Both domains ended up devoting much attention to satellite-based weapons and anti-satellite weaponry; both have also dealt with the problem of space debris related to the latter. In this chat, David Priess and George Washington University historian Aaron Bateman talk about Bateman's early interest in satellites, early satellite technology and attempts at anti-satellite activity, the O...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 57
Modern presidents both influence and are influenced by books, movies, and television; with no commander in chief is that more clear than with Ronald Reagan. Dr. Benjamin Griffin, chief of the Military History Division at the United States Military Academy, has researched and written the definitive book about the 40th president's interactions with Tom Clancy and other authors, Hollywood films, and other pop culture: Reagan's War Stories: A Cold War Presidency. In this chat, David Priess and Griff...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Although codemaking and codebreaking often receive less attention in the public imagination than swashbuckling HUMINT operations and ingenious spy gadgets, they have changed history. The under-appreciation of cryptography might stem from a combination of the complexity of encryption, the classified nature of much of its technology, and the difficulty of conveying codebreaking effectively in pop culture. David Priess spoke with Vince Houghton about the realities and fictional representations of c...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 55
Andrew Kirsch didn’t grow up watching James Bond movies and dreaming of becoming a spy. Like many Canadians, he was barely aware his country had an intelligence service. But when terrorists attacked not far from his office in London, where he was working in the financial services industry, Kirsch decided to apply for a job with CSIS--not the think tank, but the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Kirsch chronicles his decade as a spy for Canada in his memoir, I Was Never Here: My True Canadi...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 54
Olivia Troye has worked in the Republican National Committee, the Pentagon, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Department of Homeland Security. But it was her role on the small team directly supporting Vice President Mike Pence that brought her the most challenging experiences of her career while making her all too aware of the surprisingly thin staffing for the next in line to the presidency. David Priess spoke to Troye about her path f...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 53
The American Revolution was fought not only over taxation and representation, but also information. Foreign news, received inconsistently and reprinted according to newspaper editors' biases and misperceptions, helped define the boundaries of early American politics and ultimately spurred colonists to rise up against the British authorities. Digging deep into the horribly flawed media environment from the mid 1700s to the birth of the nation, and then through the first post-revolutionary generat...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 52
Darrell Blocker retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2018 after serving as an operations officer and manager in many countries, especially within Africa. His self-described lack of success recruiting assets during early assignments nevertheless taught him important lessons about the intelligence business, about how people work, and about himself; later tours of duty gave him the chance to make up for lost time by excelling at the job while also getting shot at and even gaining minor f...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 51
Every year, the eastern United States faces the prospect--and, too often, the reality--of major hurricanes that cause extensive physical and financial damage. This year is no exception; even as Hurricane Ian approaches the Gulf Coast, more storms are likely in the coming weeks. David Priess chatted with author Eric Jay Dolin about the history of Atlantic hurricanes, with a special focus on such storms' influence on U.S. national security. They spoke about the devastating 2017 hurricane season, h...
Sep 29, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 50
In her day, Josephine Baker was one of the most famous women in the world. Fans recognized the superstar singer, actress, and dancer everywhere she went, particularly on the streets of Paris, where she often walked a pet cheetah on a diamond leash. Why would anyone think such a conspicuous person might make the perfect spy? Author Damien Lewis set out to answer that question in his latest book, “Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy.” It chronicles Baker’s remarkable career ...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 49
