I Spy

Foreign Policy’s hit show returns Tuesday, April 28 with the first of eight new episodes. From a former CIA officer’s retelling of how he survived a plane crash in the Congo to the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq – tune in to hear more spies tell the stories of clandestine operations in their own words. And this season, there’s more I Spy with I Spy Plus. Get ad-free I Spy episodes and weekl...

A man jumps from a burning plane, exposing a covert U.S. operation and nearly bringing down the president. This week on I Spy, Eugene Hasenfus tells his story. Check out I Spy's merch by going to https://store.dftba.com/collections/i-spy Save 15% on FP subscriptions. Visit https://foreignpolicy.com/subscribe/ and enter code ISPY at checkout to claim this offer. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

Amaryllis Fox worked for a decade as an undercover agent at the CIA, cultivating arms merchants and preventing them from selling fissile material to terrorist groups. On this episode, she describes courting one particular dealer whose ties to terrorist groups in Indonesia and elsewhere raised alarm bells at Langley. Fox has changed some of the details of her story to avoid exposing the agency's as...

The CIA thought it had thoroughly penetrated Cuban intelligence, with scores of agents and informants in Havana, until one day a Cuban officer walked into the U.S. Embassy in Vienna and broke the news—the agents were actually double agents. James Olson was the CIA station chief in Vienna at the time. He would go on to serve as the agency’s head of counterintelligence.   Check out I Spy's merch by...

On this episode, the Israeli Mossad operative Mishka Ben-David is sent to the Jordanian capital of Amman to help assassinate Khaled Mashal, the political leader of the Palestinian Islamic group Hamas. But the mission doesn’t go quite as planned. Check out I Spy's merch by going to https://store.dftba.com/collections/i-spy Save 15% on FP subscriptions. Visit https://foreignpolicy.com/subscribe/ and...

On this first episode of I Spy, CIA agent Jonna Mendez is sent to a capital city in Asia to help steal a top-secret encryption machine from a Soviet Embassy. Mendez’s job in the operation is to fashion disguises for the team. She would go on to become the chief of disguise at the CIA’s Office of Technical Service. Check out I Spy's merch by going to https://store.dftba.com/collections/i-spy Save 1...

On this episode, we talk to Albrecht Dittrich—aka Jack Barsky—who was born in East Germany, recruited by the KGB, and sent to the United States to influence U.S. policymaking. Barsky began his mission in 1978. He was one of hundreds of sleeper agents the Soviets planted in the United States over the years. Check out I Spy's merch by going to https://store.dftba.com/collections/i-spy Save 15% on FP...

Spies don’t talk—it’s the cardinal rule of the business. But on Foreign Policy’s podcast I Spy, we get them to open up. We hear from the operations people: the spies who steal secrets, kill adversaries, and turn agents into double agents. Each episode features one spy’s most thrilling story. Coming November 13. Check out I Spy's merch by going to https://store.dftba.com/collections/i-spy Save 15%...