The DSR Network

Chinese espionage poses a mortal threat to the US, former counterintelligence boss Bill Evanina tells Jeanne Meserve. And author Kai Bird talks with Jeff Stein about a clandestine plot with Iran by Reagan campaign manager and future CIA Director Bill Casey to deny Jimmy Carter re-election.  Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/deepstateradio. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out i...

Pultizer Prize-winner Daniel Yergin is widely regarded as the world's foremost analyst and commentator on energy issues. His books have chronicled every aspect of how modern energy markets have evolved and their impact on geopolitics and daily life. His latest book, "The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations," describes how emerging energy technologies and climate related issues are im...

Joe Biden is off to Europe. He will meet with Allies and with Vladimir Putin. Under Trump, that was a formula for headlines and disaster. Under all presidents such trips produce fraught analyses seeking to identify presidential doctrines and historic deliverables. But most of diplomacy is blocking and tackling. And much of it best done out of sight of the public. We discuss the upcoming trip with...

On this special edition of SpyTalk, co-host Jeanne Meserve speaks with William Evanina, former Director of the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center about the recent spate of ransomware attacks. Evanina says President Biden should threaten to pull out of the upcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that the US should demonstrate it is willing and able to...

The Democrats keep bending over backwards to "do what's right" or "preserve bipartisanship." Republicans meanwhile have made it clear they have no interest in doing what's right or bipartisanship. Is the Democratic strategy a way to get to enough votes to reform the filibuster and thereby thwart GOP efforts to gut democracy? Or is it the old story of Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football. The weeks...

Former top FBI domestic extremist specialist Tom O’Connor tells co-host Jeanne Meserve in a startling interview that he’s worried about another Timothy McVeigh plotting something big. And Jeff Stein talks with veteran intelligence reporter Bill Arkin about a vast Pentagon secret army combatting our enemies that no one’s heard about. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/deepstateradio. See...

Many are rightly focused on the importance of 2024's presidential elections and the midterms in 2022. But if we do not stop GOP efforts at voter suppression this year...which means ending the filibuster this year...and we don't create accountability for Trump Administration abuses, we will set in motion inevitable defeats not just for Democrats but for American democracy in the years ahead. We dis...

Jean Meserve talks with former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Juliette Kayyem about the mess in DHS’ intelligence shop, and Jeff Stein interviews Barry Meier about his new book, “Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies.” Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/deepstateradio. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your...

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is one of the world's leading thinkers on international affairs. His most recent book, "The World: A Brief Introduction" is a one volume crash course into how we got to where we are and where we go from here. It is now out in paperback and to mark that event, we sat down with Richad to discuss the book, America's changing role in the wo...

We've come to the end of another violent cycle between Israelis and Palestinians. Generally, the Biden Administration has gotten good grades for a policy that balanced active, behind the scenes efforts to bring the violence to a quick close with a desire not to get side-tracked from their main agenda items here at home. Where do we go from here? What did the crisis tell us is now different between...

This week, the vast majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill sought to block a bipartisan commission that would investigate the attack that took place on January 6th and the factors leading up to it. Some even portrayed the attackers as the victims or as just a bunch of tourists visiting a national monument. It would have been shocking if it were not so commonplace. So the question becomes, do enou...

The past two weeks have revealed that the Israel-Palestine conflict remains far from a solution. Indeed, of the two most likely solutions discussed--a two-state "solution" or a one-state "solution"--both seem impossible. But the problem is a real one with profound human consequences in Israel and Palestine and great resonance in the US (often for the wrong reasons). We discuss the situation and ou...

Former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was praised in a multitude of articles and broadcasts marking the 10th anniversary of the elimination of Osama Bin Laden earlier this month. But in an hour long interview with Jeff Stein, he described a major failing of US intelligence during his watch. Listen to it here.  Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/deepstateradio. See aca...

CIA clandestine services veteran and longtime Middle East hand Marc Polymeropoulos tells Jeff Stein that the CIA no longer prizes regional expertise, instead opting for spy corps “generalists” who can be shifted from region to region. In this Special Edition of the SpyTalk podcast, Polymeropoulos laments the passing of Charlie Seidel, who he calls the CIA’s “last great Arabist.” Support this show...

The Biden Administration is working hard to maintain a fairly traditional front for US-Israel relations during the current crisis. Which is to say they are essentially following the playbook the Obama Administration would have followed (Trump's bromance with Bibi was an outlier). But times are changing, the views of Democrats are changing, the generational outlook is changing, and don't forget Bib...

It was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who popularized the phrase "states are laboratories of democracy." That has never been clearer than at this moment when some of the most important innovation in governing is coming from states...and some folks, notably on the right, are working on experiments that may end up crippling democracy or even killing it. To get a sense of what is going on at th...

In the fourth edition of the SpyTalk podcast, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen talks with co-host Jeanne Meserve about combatting “psychological warfare” disinformation attacks from Russia, China, Iran and even Venezuela, and former top CIA analyst Mathew Burrows tells her that US intelligence is so busy coping with immediate threats they “can’t see the forest for the trees.” Le...

On this special episode of Deep State Radio, we discuss the Covid-19 crisis in India with Washington Post Global Opinion Columnist, Rana Ayyub, who is covering the crisis from the front lines from her home in Mumbai and describes unimaginable suffering, both personally and across her country. Rana is joined by Edward Luce of the Financial Times and practicing physician and former Obama health advi...

The US could be back in the Iran nuclear accord by the end of the month. There are plenty of hurdles to that, of course, but it is not impossible. And if not by then, then perhaps it will happen by Fall. We discuss why that is likely to be a good thing with the Quincy Institute's Joe Cirincione, the American Enterprise Institute's Kori Schake, and Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University Law School. W...

Ronald Reagan would not have been president nor would he have enjoyed the successes he had as a politician without the active role played by his wife, Nancy. Often underestimated, sometimes the subject of gossipy slights, this woman was really one of the principle architects of a watershed presidency, among the very top advisors in an era in which some of the others including Washington titans lik...

In an important ruling this week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote a scathing assessment of the Barr Department of Justice's efforts to rationalize their handling of the serial obstruction of justice within the Trump Administration. This may have been another significant step toward getting some accountability for the last administration's serial abuses. The decision came in a case brought by Citize...

Jeanne Meserve looks into the mysterious directed-energy attacks on officials in Washington with Mark Zaid, lawyer for CIA and State Department victims. Then Ronen Bergman, author of a groundbreaking book on Israeli assassination operations, talks with Jeff Stein about the effect of Mossad’s hits on Iran’s nuclear scientists and uranium facilities. Last but hardly least, Jeanne talks at length wit...

Joe Biden is doing a remarkable job. Public support for Biden's bold economic initiatives is exceptionally high. But there are warning signs about what may be around the next bend in American politics. The GOP is punishing those in its ranks who dared to speak the truth. The most extreme actors on the right seem to have the best prospects. Republicans are posed to do well in the 2022 mid-terms. An...

We are in the middle of an economic sea-change in the United States. The prevailing views of the past 40 years--call them Reaganomics or neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus--are being pushed aside. The inequality they left in their wake are being addressed by new policies that focus on investing in the middle class and the most vulnerable. The leader of this revolution is not some young fir...

Joe Biden spoke to a joint session of Congress and outlined an economic plan that exceeds in scope anything we have seen nearly a century. It was specific, doable, and would be paid for simply by restoring taxes to levels they were at past periods of American prosperity and growth. He framed it as not just urgent from a domestic perspective but critical to "winning the 21st Century", to our compet...