The Live Drop

Toby Harnden is an awarded journalist, foreign correspondent and former bureau chief of the Sunday Times.  His most recent book is  First Casualty: The untold story of he CIA mission to avenge 911 .   After numerous interviews with key players and having visited Afganistan several times over the last decades, Toby documents the unconventional success story of CIA’s Team Alpha from their insertion...

The Live Drop's 50th Episode - John Sipher - CIA & Spycraft Entertainment from Spycraftentertainment.com John retired in 2014 after a 28-year career in the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Clandestine Service. At the time of his retirement, he was a member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, the leadership team that guides CIA activities globally. John served multiple overseas tour...

Live Drop guest Kao Kalia Yang is a celebrated Hmong-American writer. She holds degrees from Carleton College and Columbia University. Yang is the author of The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir   winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction/Memoir and Readers’ Choice, a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Asian Literary Award in Nonfiction. Her sec...

Jonathan Dyer spent three years during the Cold War living and working in Berlin as a Russian Linguist for the Army's Intelligence and Security Command at Field Station Berlin. From 1983 through 1986, Dyer worked at the NSA’s intercept site on Teufelsberg in what was at the time West Berlin. He was a SIGINT intercept operator and transcriber - his job was to keep tabs on the USSR’s military a...

Mike Croll has been around a crisis or two - some violent and some peaceful - starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall. He's worked for the Halo Trust in Cambodia, and with the British Foreign Office, European Union, United Nations and more recently, Facebook. He's an old friend of your host Mark Valley and they share a few laughs as Mike offers some thoughts about Security from ancient time...

American photographer Dan Kane has a vivid memory. He got to Berlin in 1983 and experienced some of the major events like the Nicholson shooting of 1985, the LaBelle bombing in 1986, the Wall coming down in 1989 - and he has some stories to share. Dan was a civilian, fluent in German, and an ex-pat with a variety of jobs in the American sector. He taught English, narrated ads for AFN Berlin (...

Author Trevor Barnes talks about his new book Dead Doubles – about the Portland spy Ring – their Portland, not our Portland.  In the late 50s Soviet illegal Gordon Lonsdale (Konan Molody) ran a group of spies who managed to penetrate a British research facility at the Portland Naval Base, and communicate effectively to Moscow. The compromised intelligence ranged from sonar to biological technologi...

In this episode we gather some expert intelligence about global health supply chains, and how they are adapting to the demands and limitations of the Covid-19 pandemic. My guest Maeve Magner is an industry renowned global health supply chain advisor who’s clients include: Foundation for New Diagnostics, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Fund, and the GAVI Vaccine Alliance.   Maeve info...

"Fake news" is a term you’ve probably heard a lot in the last few years, but it’s not a new phenomenon. From the ancient Egyptians to the French Revolution to Jack the Ripper and the founding fathers, fake news has been around as long as human civilization. But that doesn’t mean that we should just give up on the idea of finding the truth. In True or False, former CIA analyst Cindy Otis...

Lovers Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen formed an unconventional and enigmatic network of artists and intellectuals to resist the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s Berlin.  As an officer of the Luftwaffe and Nazi film worker Harro and Libertas sought to operate in plain site, and combine friendship with opportunities for espionage. This gripping spy tale asks the question of how much we are willing to r...

Emily Whalen is a historian of U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. She is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Texas - Austin, and an Earnest May pre-doctoral fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Soon to be Dr. Whalen essentially offers a thorough country profile starting literally with ancient history to the present...

The Secret War in Laos was sponsored by Americans, fought by Laotians, Thais, Vietnamese, American advisors and pilots while almost entirely eclipsed by the war in Vietnam.  Jessica Pearce Rotondi’s book What We Inherit – is a poignant memoir of a family’s loss and search for answers over generations to find Jack Pearce whose AC130 gunship was shot down over Laos in 1972. Decades later Jack's...

Latvian Aviator Hubert Cukurs was a popular figure before WWII, but the Charles Lindbergh of Latvia would soon become the Butcher of Latvia responsible for the murder of some 30,000 Latvian Jews. Somehow, he dodged the Nuremberg trials, and fleed to South America after war’s end.  In 1965, with the improbable German war crimes statute of limitations about to expire, the Mossad mobilized their own...

This episode isn’t so much about espionage or intelligence collection as it is an example of how understanding how what you don’t know can help shape your reality. How do you take precautions against an unseen and undefined threat - in this episode - to public health.  After getting his Phd in Chemistry, Sergei was called to duty by his reserve military unit for the clean-up at the Chernobyl nucle...

Focusing on the motivations, The Anatomy of a Spy   by Michael Smith tells the story of why spies spy, presenting a wealth of spy stories—some previously unknown and some famous—from the very human angle of the agents themselves. He breaks them into categories that go beyond the widely shared MICE - Money, Ideology, Compromise/Coercion, Ego. We discuss some classic examples from his book: Operatio...

Author James Stejskal talks about his secret Berlin unit during the Cold War.  Their mission, should hostilities have commenced, was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each man was allocated a specifi...

Fred Burton, one of the world's foremost authorities on security and terrorism, tells the harrowing story of the hunt for William Buckley - CIA station chief abducted by Hezbollah in Beirut on March 16th, 1984.  Mr. Burton was deputy chief of counterterrorism at the Diplomatic Security Service, where he was in charge of preventing and investigating attacks against diplomatic personnel and fac...

Special Agents of the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) have been on the front lines of securing diplomacy for over a century. From the Fall of Saigon to the U.S. embassy bombings in east Africa, and the Iranian Hostage Crisis to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, special agents of the DSS have relentlessly put their lives on the line to protect their fellow diplomats around the globe....

Ilya is an asset protection practitioner and sought after security specialist.  After immigrating to the US from Moscow, he graduated and later taught at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.  He spent his formative professional years at Prudential Financial HQ in Newark, NJ, under the tutelage of Paul DeMatteis.  He then went on to Kroll Security for eleven years - starting in New...

My guest Neil Graham Hansen began his aviation career as a pilot for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. He then spent more than a decade in Southeast Asia as a captain for Air America - the CIA's airline that operated during the Vietnam era and the 'Secret War' in Laos. Upon returning to the States, unable to let go of the thrills of high stakes flying, his career trajectory veered off cour...

Tracy Walder ,  ex-USC sorority girl joined the CIA at age 22, hunted down the most dangerous terrorists, then joined the FBI to uproot domestic spies and wrote a fantastic book about it - The Unexpected Spy .  “I’d show up in countries where armies of terrorists wanted to kill Westerners. I’d wear red lipstick, curl my hair and stand firmly on the rock of my convictions.”   Tracy talks about her...

Author and journalist Stephen Vogel’s written a definitive and engaging book about the Cold War’s most audacious espionage operation – Betrayal in Berlin - about a clandestine tunnel as long as the Empire State Building into the Soviet sector of Berlin in the mid 50s.  The operation collected years of telephone and wire communications from the Soviet forces long after it was revealed to have been...

Joyce Wayne has written a historical novel called The Last Night of the World   about a Soviet female operative, a key player in the Gouzenko Affair.  When Igor Gouzenko defected from the GRU to the RCMP in September of 1945 the west would see for the first time the extent of Soviet espionage activity in North America.   His 200 pages of documents would reveal a covert ring of dozens of operatives...

TRANSMISSION 028 Witold’s experience as a daring underground operator working within and around the Polish borders offers a view into the relationships, ratlines, allies, enemies, and tradecraft necessary to fund and supply the Solidarity insurgency movement from the late 70s until the Communists were peacefully voted out of power in 1989.  He speaks to me from an apartment in Warsaw near the form...

Live Drop episode 027, I meet up with an old friend of mine who among other things plays high stakes poker. I wanted to talk to him about that world, and perhaps see how it could inform the role of intelligence with the brinksmanship, nerve, bluff and distraction that are tools to a card player, and protection or transfer of clandestine information ie. when to show your cards. Joe doesn’t disappoi...