Secrets and Spies Podcast: Espionage | Global Issues | Current Affairs

Chris and Matt start at RAF Fairford, where the arrest of five men outside the US bomber base, their swift release on bail, and a widening inquiry into possible Iranian involvement were followed by the abrupt return of all twelve American B-1Bs to the United States. They turn to flydubai Flight 1072, where the co-pilot attacked his captain with the cockpit crash axe en route to Tel Aviv, and to th...

Sam Lichtenstein, director of analysis at the global risk intelligence firm RANE, returns to walk Chris through RANE's 2025–2035 decade forecast: a multipolar world in which no great power has the will or the means to set the rules. The big calls include a China turned inward by economic and demographic strain even as its coercion of Taiwan intensifies; a Europe pushed toward integration as the Am...

Every week, the Security Council of the Russian Federation publishes a digest of world events as Moscow sees them. Investigative journalist Dave Troy has been reading them closely, and he argues they matter not because they’re accurate, but because they show the story the Kremlin tell itself and its allies. Dave returns to the show to talk with Chris about his piece "What Russia Believes." His cen...

Beginning in 1949, officially non-aligned Sweden did something it kept secret for half a century: in close cooperation with the CIA and MI6, it built a clandestine civilian resistance network meant to outlast a Soviet occupation and fight on from within. Its members were ordinary people, farmers, salesmen, gamekeepers, organized into cells that never met. In this episode, Matt talks with Johan Wen...

Journalist Gil Durán spent years in political consulting before returning to reporting, and eventually, to the beat that became the subject of his book, The Nerd Reich . He joins Chris to lay out his case that a corner of Silicon Valley has turned against democracy itself — an ideology he traces from the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual , through neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, to Balaji...

Chris and Matt open season eleven, and Secrets & Spies’ tenth anniversary, with three stories from a busy August. First, CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow, a rare visit by an agency chief since Bill Burns went in 2021, reportedly carrying a blunt warning against testing NATO amid U.S. assessments that a cornered Russia might attempt a limited probe of the alliance. Then, a New Yorke...

Before Bletchley Park, there was Reginald "Blinker" Hall, the Admiralty’s mercurial intelligence chief whose codebreakers read Germany’s wireless traffic during World War I, giving Britain a front-row seat to the plot behind the 1916 Easter Rising. His target was Sir Roger Casement: a diplomat knighted for exposing colonial atrocities, turned Irish rebel, caught after a U-boat put him ashore in Ke...

Peter J. Ortiz was the most battle-decorated member of the OSS, America’s wartime forerunner to the CIA, and one of the most decorated Marines of the Second World War. In 1944, the former French Foreign Legionnaire twice parachuted into occupied France to arm the Maquis, sabotage German lines, and feed intelligence to London ahead of D-Day. Chris speaks with former Marine and CIA historian Nichola...

GPS is the rare piece of infrastructure most of us never think about until it fails — and it is failing more often, in more places, by design. In Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World , journalist Katherine Dunn traces the system from its Cold War origins — wartime radio beams, Vietnam's precision-bombing problem, the Soviet shock of Sputnik — to its current role underpinning modern lif...

Samuel M. Katz is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the foremost chroniclers of Middle Eastern conflict, special operations, and intelligence. His latest book, The Architect of Espionage , is the biography of Meir Dagan — the Holocaust survivor turned soldier turned spymaster who reshaped Mossad from a cautious intelligence collector into a direct-action force of global reach. Chris s...

Amanda Mason is a senior curator of contemporary conflict at the Imperial War Museums, where she previously worked on the museum's acclaimed Secret War gallery. Chris speaks with her about Spies, Lies and Deception , the IWM's major exhibition on espionage and military deception now showing at IWM North in Manchester until August 31. Drawing on more than sixty original objects, documents, and arti...

For years, according to a New York Times report, Mossad quietly cultivated former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust denier who once called for Israel's destruction, as the man it hoped to install in Tehran. The plan collapsed on the opening day of the war, when he lost his nerve in a Mossad safe house. Chris and Matt trace how a run of tactical brilliance curdled into strategic...

Every few months, a rumor or prediction suggests Vladimir Putin is finally cornered — a purge, a battlefield setback, a grim Victory Day parade. Former senior CIA officer Sean Wiswesser, author of Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks , says the West keeps mistaking Russia's elite infighting for weakness. Drawing on his recent Foreign Policy and Cipher Brief essays, he joins Matt to map the author...

For most of its history, Germany's foreign intelligence service was built to watch, not to act — a constraint rooted in the country's experience of the Gestapo and the Stasi. A sweeping draft law would change that, letting the BND conduct sabotage, covert interference, and offensive cyber operations for the first time. Chris speaks with German investigative journalist Florian Flade, among the firs...

Britain is changing prime ministers again: Keir Starmer is out after two years, with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham the favourite to replace him — inheriting an underfunded defence plan and the wreckage of Peter Mandelson's Epstein-tainted appointment, all of it driven by the fear of Reform. Chris and Matt then ask what happens when the mole is a machine, using Anthropic's Claude blackmail...

For most of her career, Tulsi Gabbard may have been taking direction from a reclusive Hawaii guru — the allegation at the center of a Washington Post investigation that shadowed her out of office as Director of National Intelligence. Her replacement, federal housing-finance official Bill Pulte, arrived with no national security background and, as The Atlantic 's Shane Harris reports, may be holdin...

Chris and Matt dig into the fine print of the U.S.-Iran memorandum signed this week by President Trump in Versailles, separating what Tehran banks immediately — sanctions relief, frozen funds, an open Strait of Hormuz — from what's still contingent on a future nuclear settlement, and why claiming victory now looks premature. From there, a Foreign Affairs piece reframes the war's aftermath: rather...

Ahana Datta Fasel began as an ethical hacker for the British government before becoming cyber chief at the Financial Times, where nation-state actors targeting journalists became a daily reality. Her PhD on the political economy of digital espionage produced Full Stack Spies: Cyber Espionage in the Age of US-China Competition , which argues that cyber operations function as a mirror of the states...

Ahmed Aboudouh — associate fellow at Chatham House's Middle East and North Africa Programme and head of the China Studies Unit at the Emirates Policy Center — joins Chris to assess the shifting architecture of power in the Middle East. He argues that China has no coherent regional strategy and that Washington's expectation of Chinese pressure on Tehran reflects a fundamental misreading of Beijing'...

Julian Fisher spent his career as a British intelligence operative before distilling what he learned into the Think Like a Spy: Strategic Relations Workshop —and his central argument is counterintuitive: the most transferable lessons from intelligence work aren't classified techniques, they're interpersonal skills. In conversation with Chris, Fisher argues that human intelligence, at its core, is...

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, CIA and MI6 launched an audacious series of clandestine operations to infiltrate and destabilize Communist Albania — and lost nearly every agent they sent in. Historian Stephen Long, Assistant Professor in International Relations at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and author of A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit , reconstructs how the Albanian Sigurimi, one of Ea...

Chris and Matt break down a packed few weeks in intelligence and geopolitics, opening with the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence — a departure framed officially around her husband's illness but widely read as an exit under pressure. Drawing on a Bulwark piece by former CIA officer John Sipher, they examine whether the ODNI was ever structurally sound enough to survi...

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Congress hasn't formally done so since 1942. Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and current senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, joins Matt to make sense of how that happened — and what it means now that the United States is at war with Iran. Brian has spent years arguing, across administrations of both parti...

Charles Beaumont spent years as an MI6 officer running human sources before turning to fiction—and his second novel, A Spy at War , carries the authority of someone who has actually done the work. Set against the early days of the Ukraine War in 2022, the book maps the architecture of Russian disinformation: corruption narratives seeded into sympathetic media, useful idiots at senior policy levels...

There will be no show on Saturday 9th May as we are on a production break. We will return on Saturday 16th May Chris has some recommendations from our back catalogue. Chris's Episode recommendations From CIA to CEO with Rupal Patel Audio: https://pod.fo/e/371b55 YouTube: https://youtu.be/94-vBjgdNzA Former CIA analyst Rupal Patel joins Chris to explore reinvention, resilience and life after intell...