SpyCast

Confusion and controversy are growing around the intelligence community’s handling of Havana Syndrome. This is what the government refers to as Anomalous Health Incidents, or AHIs. The mysterious health condition has left a group of American spies, diplomats, and service members with serious brain injuries. Many believe Russia’s hand is at play. But an intelligence community assessment from 2023 s...

He may dress like he’s on a vacation in Hawaii, but Palmer Luckey has been busy designing weapons for the Pentagon. He founded California-based defense technology firm, Anduril, in 2017, named after a sword from the Lord of the Rings and, according to Palmer, is 20% veteran owned. He is promising a marked shift: faster, cheaper, and more agile systems to fight the wars of today and tomorrow. This...

Half-truths. Lies. Distrust. And spying. These were part and parcel of the tenuous relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin - the “Big Three” who were eventually brought together by their opposition to Adolf Hitler during World War II. From London, British historian Tim Bouverie lays out the complicated dynamics of this coalition. His new book, Allies at War...

Jonna Mendez knows how to blend in and when to stand out. Starting out as a secretary at the CIA, she left as its Chief of Disguise. Her career took her into denied areas, where her special abilities assisted in a variety of high stakes operations - collecting on the adversary, recruiting and exfiltrating agents, and staying on the cutting edge of technology. She sits down with Sasha to discuss st...

In the 1960s, the CIA lost a plutonium-fueled generator on top of a mountain in India. The generator was supposed to power an unmanned listening station, intended to pick up signals from China’s missile tests. But when mountaineers ascended the near 26,000-ft Nanda Devi – under the guise of studying the environment – weather got in their way. They left the nuclear device behind and months later, w...

When you’re sitting alone, and you want company or advice, have you ever turned to Artificial Intelligence? Chip Usher, who spent 32 years in the CIA, has been looking at AI companions. The tech companies behind them claim they offer comfort and reliability. Chip says they mostly come from China, and eventually they will be used to collect personal data on users, building a roadmap for recruiting...

Children grew up reading Roald Dahl’s tales of giant peaches and chocolate factories. Adults know about the controversy surrounding the antisemitic statements he made in his later years. But before becoming one of the most successful children’s authors of all time, Dahl worked for MI6, seducing Washington socialites and cozying up to the First Family. He did this to gather intelligence and exert i...

Katrina Leung, code name Parlor Maid, received nearly two million dollars from the FBI for being their top China informant. But little did the Bureau know… she was a double agent, collecting intelligence for China’s Ministry of State Security. Not only that, she was also sleeping with her FBI handler, James J. Smith (J.J.). For nearly two decades, J.J. covered up reports that raised red flags abou...

Before Delta Force captured Nicolás Maduro, Bryan Stern went on a secret mission in Venezuela. The veteran and Purple Heart recipient was there to extract opposition leader María Corina Machado, who had been living in hiding for her own safety. Bryan was trying to get María to Oslo to accept her Nobel Peace Prize. This daring operation – named Operation Golden Dynamite after Alfred Nobel, the inve...

A 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina opened the world’s eyes to Hezbollah’s presence in Latin America. But the Iranian proxy, a US-designated terrorist group, has operated in the region since the 1980s. This started in the Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, earning the nickname "the United Nations of crime." The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has said He...

As an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who later embedded with the CIA, Wes Tabor worked to dismantle criminal networks in Central and South America - think gangs like MS-13, the Sinaloa Cartel, and Tren de Aragua. In 2006, he was stationed in Guatemala, a transit corridor for South American cocaine to enter the US. It was during this time that he created a gang intelligence sy...

This January marks the anniversary of the conclusion of Operation Just Cause, which began days before Christmas, on December 20th, 1989, when about 27,000 US troops deployed to Panama. Their mission was to capture Panama’s notorious dictator, General Manuel Noriega, whom the US had indicted for drug trafficking. Noriega had also been suppressing unarmed demonstrators, gathering intelligence on the...

When The Night Manager aired in 2016, it was an instant success. Based on the 1993 John le Carré novel of the same name, the series centered on former British soldier Jonathan Pine. In the show, Pine is recruited by MI6 to infiltrate the secret network of a notorious arms dealer. Ten years later, the series returns, despite the fact le Carré never wrote a sequel before he died. Georgi Banks-Davies...

For SpyCast’s 20th year, we’re kicking off the season with Brian Carbaugh. After serving in the CIA for over two decades, he retired as Director of the Special Activities Center- the Agency’s arm for covert action, where some of the boldest and most dangerous work happens with authorization from the president. This is a world few know about firsthand, and even fewer can discuss. Brian sits down wi...

John le Carré, born David Cornwell in 1931, was a British novelist renowned for his morally complex spy fiction. Writing under a pen name gave him the freedom to publish while he worked in both MI5 and MI6, but after the breakthrough success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he left the intel community world for good. Le Carré’s work spanned the globe, covering terrorism and drug networks, pri...

From August to December 2016, then Marine Special Operations Officer Ivan Ingraham lived on an assault ship off the coast of Sirte, a city in northern Libya that lies between Tripoli and Benghazi. It was the hometown of Muammar Gaddafi, who invested in Sirte before dying there during Libya’s first civil war. In the midst of a second civil war, ISIS had filled a power vacuum and overrun the city, s...

At the CIA headquarters in Langley, you will find Kryptos, a large curved copper panel that holds the letters to four encrypted messages. The first three messages- K1, K2, and K3- were solved in the nineties, but K4 continued to mystify cryptographers for decades. That is until Jim Sanborn, the artist who created Kryptos, decided to auction off the plain text and the coding charts that can crack t...

Bob Wallace was appointed Deputy Director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service in 1995 and became its director three years later. In other words, he was the CIA’s “Q.” The storied office dealt in microdots and secret writing, creating innovations that spanned concealments, forged documents, surveillance equipment, covert communications, and special weapons. In this interview, Sasha and Bob sit...

The CIA’s book club, known by the codename QRHELPFUL, was a secret 35-year program born of the fear that communism would dominate the globe. About 10 million books were smuggled into the Soviet Union during the Cold War, transported by trucks and yachts, in tins and luggage, and even dropped from balloons. The agency believed that the literature could win hearts and minds, turning citizens of the...

For decades, California-based engineer Chi Mak quietly stole secrets on war-fighting technologies. He and his family members shared the intelligence with spies in China, giving Beijing astounding insights they hadn’t earned. Former FBI Special Agent James Gaylord takes us back to the elaborate investigation in 2004. Evidence gathered by his squad, call sign “SARA-4,” broke a string of FBI failures...

No other American has a family history quite like Christine Kuehn. Through years of doing painstaking interviews, hunting down letters, and pouring through FBI records, Christine learned that her German-born aunt had a fling with Nazi politician Joseph Goebbels. When he found out she was half-Jewish, Goebbels sent the family to Hawaii to spy. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Christine’s grandfat...

In our last episode, author Stuart Reid peeled back the curtain on 'The Lumumba Plot,' the CIA’s plan to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Congo. Station Chief Larry Devlin was central to the CIA’s 1960 assassination plot. He never had to carry it out, but Lumumba was later killed in another plot that Devlin knew about, according to diplomatic cabl...

The Congo was just gaining its independence from Belgium in 1960 when its first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, faced an existential crisis: mutiny in his new army, followed by an unwelcome intervention by Belgian forces. Lumumba had hoped the U.S. would help, but when Washington turned its back, Lumumba turned to Moscow. And so began a CIA operation to assassinate Lumumba to stop...

Russian drones and warplanes have been increasingly breaching the airspace of NATO countries. Admiral Joachim Rühle, (ret.) is the former Chief of Staff of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, the headquarters of Command Operations - including defense, deterrence, and training to Ukrainians - in Belgium. He talked about Moscow’s incursions, its acts of sabotage, and how to manage this co...

Jessica Brandt knows a lot about influence. She was the director of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which served as intermediary between the U.S. intelligence community and the public. It alerted private citizens and the public to disinformation operations orchestrated by adversaries overseas. Jessica explains how the toolkit has gotten larger, more sophisticated, and is being wielded by more...