SpyCast
SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum, is a journey into the shadows of international espionage. Each week, host Sasha Ingber brings you the latest insights and intriguing tales from spies, secret agents, and covert communicators, with a focus on how this secret world reaches us all in our everyday lives. Tune in to discover the critical role intelligence has played throughout history and today. Brought to you from Airwave, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum.
The Spy Museum does not endorse, approve, or support the opinions stated by guest speakers. Statements made by speakers do not represent the position or opinion of the International Spy Museum.
601
The Secret Rescue: An Untold Story of America...
When 26 Army nurses and medics boarded a transport plane in November, 1943, they never anticipated the crash landing in Nazi-occupied Albania that would lead to their months-long struggle for survival. The group dodged bullets and battled blinding win...
36 min
602
The Life of a Military Attaché: Moscow, Almaty...
In this continuation of the discussion with US Army Colonel James Cox, we hear about the day-to-day work of US military attachés: being military diplomats for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Colonel Cox tells SPY Historian Mark Stout what it was like...
16 min
603
The CIA Analyst and the Polish Colonel
During the 1970s, Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski was a rising star in the Polish General Staff during the Cold War. He was also a spy for the CIA. Colonel Aris Pappas was a rising star in the CIA’s analytic ranks whose specialty was Poland. Pappas sat do...
50 min
604
The Life of a Military Attaché: Moscow During ...
In the summer of 1991, US Army Colonel James Cox arrived in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, to serve as Assistant Army Attaché. Little did he know that Communist hardliners were about to launch a coup. When the coup started, the intelligence...
43 min
605
Espionage in Traditional China
Sun Tzu’s 2500 year old book The Art of War contains a famous chapter on spies. However, Master Sun was not the only Chinese author to address this topic centuries before Westerners did. In fact, many Chinese authors built on his work. SPY Historian...
27 min
606
The OSS in Burma: Jungle War Against the Japanese
“One could not choose a worse place for fighting the Japanese,” said Winston Churchill of northern Burma, but it was there that the fledgling Office of Strategic Services conducted its most successful combat operations of World War II. Troy Sacquety, ...
49 min
607
Deceiving the Iraqis in Operation Desert Storm
Military deception was an important part of Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 coalition effort to eject the Iraqi Army from Kuwait. The man in charge of that U.S. Marine Corp’s part of that deception was Brigadier General Tom Draude. Despite the fact ...
36 min
608
A Legal Perspective on the Snowden Case
Mark Zaid is one of the nation’s top national security lawyers and has defended many alleged whistleblowers and leakers. SPY Historian, Mark Stout, called him in for a consultation on the case of Edward Snowden who has admitted leaking to the press to...
42 min
609
A Western Spy among Terrorists in Yemen
Morten Storm was a Danish convert to Islam who became a close associate of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American imam who was a senior member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen. He even ate in Awlaki’s home and helped find him a wife. When ...
56 min
610
The Rice Paddy Navy: U.S. Sailors Undercover in...
After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US Navy knew it would need vital information from the Pacific. Captain Milton ‘Mary’ Miles journeyed to China to set up weather stations and monitor the Chinese coastline—and to spy on ...
41 min
611
Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutio...
Can you keep a secret? Maybe you can, but the United States government can’t. Since the birth of our country, nations from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen some of our country’s most precious secrets. Michael Sulick, former director ...
54 min
612
The United States Military Liaison Mission in E...
Major General Michael Ennis was one of the rare Marine officers admitted to the Foreign Area Officer program where he became a specialist on the Soviet Union. This led to an assignment as a translator on the Washington-Moscow Hotline at the White House...
38 min
613
American Communism and Soviet Espionage: A Look...
In the 1970s, historian John Earl Haynes was researching the American labor movement when he discovered interesting connections to the Communist party. Fast forward 20 years to the 1990s, when that ongoing research on the Communist party led him into t...
45 min
614
Born Under an Assumed Name
Looking back on her childhood, Sarah Taber remembers that “my identity was problematic because of moving from country to country and the overall atmosphere of growing up in the CIA.” As an adult she wrote about what it was like to be raised in a cultu...
26 min
615
Intelligence in Support of UN Peacekeeping in B...
The United Nations thinks “intelligence” is a dirty word but it still needs intelligence to conduct peacekeeping operations. The result is a euphemism: “military information.” SPY Historian Mark Stout talks with Tom Quiggin, a former Canadian intellige...
42 min
616
From Nazi Germany to the OSS to the CIA (Part 2)
In this Spycast Peter finishes his conversation with Peter Sichel. Listen to this insider talking about CIA operations in Germany after World War II, the futile support for anti-communist guerrillas in Ukraine and China during the 1940s and 1950s, the ...
26 min
617
Canada’s Security Intelligence Service in the P...
Canada’s Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) operates on a very different model from the American CIA, being neither strictly a foreign intelligence agency nor a domestic intelligence agency. Today SPY Historian Mark Stout discusses CSIS with Ray Boi...
41 min
618
The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomac...
In January 1917, British naval intelligence intercepted what became the most important telegram in all of American history. It was a daring proposition from Germany's foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, offering German support to Mexico for regaining...
39 min
619
From Nazi Germany to the OSS to the CIA (Part 1)
Today Peter begins a conversation with the remarkable Peter Sichel, OSS veteran, senior CIA official of the 1950s, and onetime head of Blue Nun wines. After fleeing Nazi Germany with his family in the 1930s and eventually finding himself in the United...
22 min
620
The Evolution of Spy Fiction: Bond and His Bret...
The modern spy novel was born in early twentieth century Britain with writers such as Erskine Childers and William LeQueux whose one-dimensional heroes were English gentlemen holding back the barbarians. How did we get from there to the gray and morall...
43 min
621
Author Debriefing: The Twilight War: The Secret...
The United States and Iran have been at daggers drawn for more than thirty years. While this rivalry has never erupted into open war, it has been an enduring “twilight war” in which spies and terrorists often play the lead role. US Government historian...
47 min
622
Author Debrief: Castro's Secrets: The CIA and C...
In Castro’s Secrets, Brian Latell, former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America and long-time Cuba analyst, offers a strikingly original image of Fidel Castro as Cuba's supreme spymaster. Latell exposes many long-buried secrets of Castro's le...
60 min
623
Author Debriefing: The Art of Intelligence: Les...
In the days after 9/11, the CIA directed Henry Crumpton to organize and lead its covert action campaign in Afghanistan. In less than 90 days Al Qaeda and the Taliban were routed. The Art of Intelligence draws from the full arc of Crumpton’s espionage a...
57 min
624
The Red Cell: Fact and Fiction
The surprise of September 11 2001 was, in part, a failure of imagination and CIA Director George Tenet did not want that to happen again. On September 13 he created the Red Cell and staffed it with “people who were willing to take their analysis to a w...
35 min
625
Agent Garbo: How a Brilliant & Eccentric Doubl...
Juan Pujol was the Walter Mitty of World War II, a nobody who at one doomed venture after another while dreaming of doing something interesting with his life -- saving Western civilization, if possible. Journalist Stephan Talty, whose work has appeare...
42 min