In the summer of 1991, US Army Colonel James Cox arrived in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, to serve as Assistant Army Attaché. Little did he know that Communist hardliners were about to launch a coup. When the coup started, the intelligence agencies in Washington immediately needed up-to-the-minute information on developments, so the attachés went out on the streets to get it. Hear Colonel Cox tell SPY Historian Mark Stout what it was like chasing tanks on the streets of Moscow and wit...
Sep 03, 2013•45 min•Ep. 121
Sun Tzu’s 2500 year old book The Art of War contains a famous chapter on spies. However, Master Sun was not the only Chinese author to address this topic centuries before Westerners did. In fact, many Chinese authors built on his work. SPY Historian Mark Stout met up with Ralph Sawyer, the translator of the definitive edition of The Art of War and the author of The Tao of Spycraft, to discuss the sophisticated theory and remarkable practice of espionage in traditional China. Learn more about you...
Aug 05, 2013•29 min•Ep. 120
“One could not choose a worse place for fighting the Japanese,” said Winston Churchill of northern Burma, but it was there that the fledgling Office of Strategic Services conducted its most successful combat operations of World War II. Troy Sacquety, an Historian for the US Army’s Special Operations Command, ventures into Burma’s steaming jungles in the first book to fully cover the exploits and contributions of the OSS’s Detachment 101 against the Japanese Imperial Army. In this Author Debriefi...
Jul 11, 2013•51 min•Ep. 119
Military deception was an important part of Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 coalition effort to eject the Iraqi Army from Kuwait. The man in charge of that U.S. Marine Corp’s part of that deception was Brigadier General Tom Draude. Despite the fact that he had no previous background in deception, General Draude and his team of clever American planners put together an elegant and effective deception plan. Hear him tell Peter how they exploited the expectations of Iraq's military to put them off ...
Jun 26, 2013•38 min•Ep. 118
Mark Zaid is one of the nation’s top national security lawyers and has defended many alleged whistleblowers and leakers. SPY Historian, Mark Stout, called him in for a consultation on the case of Edward Snowden who has admitted leaking to the press top secret material from the National Security Agency. Hear them discuss Snowden’s present legal position, the options open to a would-be whistleblower, and the actual meanings of treason and asylum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f...
Jun 24, 2013•44 min•Ep. 117
Morten Storm was a Danish convert to Islam who became a close associate of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American imam who was a senior member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen. He even ate in Awlaki’s home and helped find him a wife. When Storm repented of his radical ways, he turned to the Danish intelligence service and offered inside access to AQAP. Hear him tell SPY Historian Mark Stout how MI6 and CIA came into the picture and how he helped tracked down Awlaki, who died in a cont...
May 26, 2013•58 min•Ep. 116
Can you keep a secret? Maybe you can, but the United States government can’t. Since the birth of our country, nations from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen some of our country’s most precious secrets. Michael Sulick, former director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, discusses his book, Spying in America, which presents a history of more than thirty espionage cases inside the United States. This event took place on January 15, 2013. Get the book: http://www.spymuseumsto...
May 03, 2013•56 min•Ep. 114
After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US Navy knew it would need vital information from the Pacific. Captain Milton ‘Mary’ Miles journeyed to China to set up weather stations and monitor the Chinese coastline—and to spy on the Japanese. After a handshake agreement with Chiang Kai-shek's spymaster, General Dai Li, the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) was born. This top-secret network worked hand in hand with the Nationalist Chinese to fight the Japanese i...
May 03, 2013•43 min•Ep. 115
Major General Michael Ennis was one of the rare Marine officers admitted to the Foreign Area Officer program where he became a specialist on the Soviet Union. This led to an assignment as a translator on the Washington-Moscow Hotline at the White House and then got him a license to spy in communist East Germany in the 1980s as part of the US Military Liaison Mission. Hear him tell SPY Historian Mark Stout what it’s like to penetrate a Soviet command bunker at night or be chased by a Soviet tank,...
Apr 19, 2013•40 min•Ep. 113
In the 1970s, historian John Earl Haynes was researching the American labor movement when he discovered interesting connections to the Communist party. Fast forward 20 years to the 1990s, when that ongoing research on the Communist party led him into the murky world of Soviet espionage. SPY Historian Mark Stout sits down with this groundbreaking historian to look back on his career and learn how he became a leading and unlikely expert on Soviet espionage in the America. Follow along on this fasc...
Apr 01, 2013•47 min•Ep. 112
Looking back on her childhood, Sarah Taber remembers that “my identity was problematic because of moving from country to country and the overall atmosphere of growing up in the CIA.” As an adult she wrote about what it was like to be raised in a culture of “secrecy, stoicism and silence” in her book Born Under an Assumed Name: The Memoir of a Cold War Spy’s Daughter. Feel the stresses and learn the secrets of a CIA family in this heart-to-heart talk between Sarah and Peter, himself a CIA father....
Feb 11, 2013•28 min•Ep. 111
The United Nations thinks “intelligence” is a dirty word but it still needs intelligence to conduct peacekeeping operations. The result is a euphemism: “military information.” SPY Historian Mark Stout talks with Tom Quiggin, a former Canadian intelligence officer who worked alongside Americans, Swedes, Jordanians, Russians, and others in the Military Information Office supporting UN peacekeeping operations in Bosnia during the 1990s. Hear what it’s like to pass through a checkpoint manned by dru...
Feb 11, 2013•44 min•Ep. 110
In this Spycast Peter finishes his conversation with Peter Sichel. Listen to this insider talking about CIA operations in Germany after World War II, the futile support for anti-communist guerrillas in Ukraine and China during the 1940s and 1950s, the strains of leading an undercover life and his friendship with legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 22, 2013•28 min•Ep. 109
Canada’s Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) operates on a very different model from the American CIA, being neither strictly a foreign intelligence agency nor a domestic intelligence agency. Today SPY Historian Mark Stout discusses CSIS with Ray Boisvert, who was one of the founding members of the Service in 1984 and rose to become its Assistant Director, Intelligence, a position from which he retired in 2012. Hear them talk about the concept of “security intelligence” in a democratic society ...
Jan 10, 2013•43 min•Ep. 108
In January 1917, British naval intelligence intercepted what became the most important telegram in all of American history. It was a daring proposition from Germany's foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, offering German support to Mexico for regaining Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in exchange for a Mexican attack on America. Five weeks later, America entered World War I. Former SPY Historian Dr. Thomas Boghardt who is now at the US Army’s Center of Military History talks about his new account ...
Dec 31, 2012•41 min•Ep. 107
Today Peter begins a conversation with the remarkable Peter Sichel, OSS veteran, senior CIA official of the 1950s, and onetime head of Blue Nun wines. After fleeing Nazi Germany with his family in the 1930s and eventually finding himself in the United States, Sichel joined the OSS and in 1944 he went back to Europe where he recruited German prisoners of war to spy for the US 7th Army. Hear him talk about his operations in Europe and his friendship with future Director of the CIA, Richard Helms. ...
Dec 21, 2012•24 min•Ep. 106
The modern spy novel was born in early twentieth century Britain with writers such as Erskine Childers and William LeQueux whose one-dimensional heroes were English gentlemen holding back the barbarians. How did we get from there to the gray and morally ambiguous world of John Le Carré? And how does all this relate to James Bond and even George Orwell’s 1984? Listen to SPY Historian Mark Stout discuss the development and importance of spy fiction with intelligence historian Wesley Wark. Learn mo...
Nov 14, 2012•45 min•Ep. 105
The United States and Iran have been at daggers drawn for more than thirty years. While this rivalry has never erupted into open war, it has been an enduring “twilight war” in which spies and terrorists often play the lead role. US Government historian David Crist will discuss his groundbreaking book which pulls back the curtain on many of the deepest secrets of this lethal struggle. Among other fascinating revelations, hear about the massive spy network that the CIA developed in Iran with Germa...
Nov 08, 2012•49 min•Ep. 104
In Castro’s Secrets, Brian Latell, former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America and long-time Cuba analyst, offers a strikingly original image of Fidel Castro as Cuba's supreme spymaster. Latell exposes many long-buried secrets of Castro's lengthy reign, including the extent of Cuba’s double agent operations against the United States. In writing this book, Latell spoke with many high-level defectors from Cuba’s powerful intelligence and security services; some had never told their stor...
Nov 06, 2012•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 103
In the days after 9/11, the CIA directed Henry Crumpton to organize and lead its covert action campaign in Afghanistan. In less than 90 days Al Qaeda and the Taliban were routed. The Art of Intelligence draws from the full arc of Crumpton’s espionage and covert action exploits to explain what America’s spies do and why their service is more valuable than ever. This event took place 12 June 2012. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 25, 2012•59 min•Ep. 102
The surprise of September 11 2001 was, in part, a failure of imagination and CIA Director George Tenet did not want that to happen again. On September 13 he created the Red Cell and staffed it with “people who were willing to take their analysis to a whole new zip code.” CIA analyst Mark Henshaw’s first novel, Red Cell, is about the adventures of two analysts assigned to that team during a military crisis with China. The story is fiction, but it draws on Henshaw’s three years in the Red Cell. Jo...
Aug 23, 2012•37 min•Ep. 101
Juan Pujol was the Walter Mitty of World War II, a nobody who at one doomed venture after another while dreaming of doing something interesting with his life -- saving Western civilization, if possible. Journalist Stephan Talty, whose work has appeared widely, including in the New York Times Magazine and GQ, has told the remarkable story of how against all the odds, Pujol did just that by becoming agent GARBO, the most important double agent of World War II. Hear Talty discuss his new book with ...
Aug 21, 2012•44 min•Ep. 100
Peter concludes his conversation with longtime CIA officer George Cave with a brief discussion of some of the funny and unusual events that took place in the course of his career in the Clandestine Service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 06, 2012•14 min•Ep. 99
The history of Israel’s intelligence community—led by the feared and famous Mossad—includes stunning successes and embarrassing failures with important implications for war and peace today. CBS journalist Dan Raviv co-author with Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, of Spies Against Armageddon, traces this history from the country’s independence in 1948 right up to the crises of today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 26, 2012•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 98
Russia was a chaotic hotspot after the Revolution of 1917 and an extraordinary collection of spies, adventurers, and opportunists poured into the roiling Russian political scene. Outsized characters like Sidney “Ace of Spies” Reilly, communist activist John Reed, and author/spy Somerset Maugham all played their parts…under the watchful eye of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the ruthless Cheka, the first of the Soviet state security organizations. Listen to renown British historian Robert Service...
Jul 13, 2012•58 min•Ep. 97
Peter continues his discussion with career CIA officer George Cave. They cover Cave’s time in Saudi Arabia—from which he was expelled when a candid cable he wrote about Saudi politics leaked to the press—and back in Washington where he became embroiled in the Iran-Contra Affair. Hear his account of a clandestine trip with Robert McFarlane and Oliver North for talks with Ayatollah Khomeini’s government and other inside details of this scandal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...
Jul 09, 2012•31 min•Ep. 96
George Cave is a legend in the CIA’s Clandestine Service. He was recruited into the CIA in 1956 as a fluent Farsi speaker and was pulled out of his entry training and sent to Afghanistan to deal with an urgent operation there. He never looked back. Join Peter and George as they relive the assassination attempts in Iran against the US Ambassador and George himself in the early 1970s and discuss CIA’s operations in the Middle East over three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...
Jun 21, 2012•43 min•Ep. 95
Peter continues his discussion with legendary case officer Dick Holm, the author of The Craft We Chose: My Life in the CIA. Holm discusses several highlights and low points of his career. Learn about his work with Belgian intelligence in thwarting a Belgian Air Force officer who was spying for Russia and his role in the embarrassing “spy flap” when he was the CIA chief in Paris. Get the book: http://www.spymuseumstore.org/craft-we-chose-life-in-cia-book.html#.Vz3rhPkrIdU Learn more about your ad...
Jun 01, 2012•32 min•Ep. 94
In 1948, when Whittaker Chambers accused Ivy League-educated senior diplomat Alger Hiss of spying for the Soviets, few Americans were willing to believe him. In fact, Hiss went to his grave protesting his innocence, but now it seems clear that he was guilty, given the evidence available since the end of the Cold War. Retired counterintelligence officer Christina Shelton has written a new biography of Hiss. She highlights the many missed opportunities and poor judgments in the Hiss case, and disc...
May 25, 2012•58 min•Ep. 93
Josh Meyer, co-author with Terry McDermott of The Hunt for KSM, visits the International Spy Museum to talk about the decade-long FBI and CIA effort to capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Meyer discusses the repeated failed attempts to find the evil genius who had plotted to kill the Pope and President Clinton and explode a dozen planes over the Pacific Ocean, all before masterminding the 9/11 attacks. Finally, hear how the US finally grabbed KSM as a result of the interrogation of another terrorist...
May 18, 2012•28 min•Ep. 92
