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

Keir Giles has spent his career explaining why Russia does what it does, as an adviser to governments and a senior fellow in Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme. He returns to talk with Chris about his new book, American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame in Its Long War with Washington, which reads Trump’s second term through the lens of Kremlinology. Giles argues that the administration’s choices track closely with goals Russian strategists set out decades ago. He points to concentrating power in the presidency, dismantling the offices that guarded against foreign interference, pressing Ukraine toward a ceasefire and draining US munitions in Iran. He is equally careful about what the evidence cannot yet show: the mechanism connecting Moscow’s aims to Washington’s decisions. The conversation closes on 2028, and whether Trump follows Putin’s playbook on term limits.

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Order American Overthrow: https://hurstpublishers.com/book/american-overthrow/

More about Keir Giles: https://www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/our-people/keir-giles

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Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

#Spies #GeoPolitics #TrumpRussia

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Chris and Matt open with two reports, from the Washington Post and Politico, that point to a more aggressive Pentagon intelligence posture: a planned deep-cover program with officers posing as businesspeople as part of economic warfare against China, and a quietly created Technology Support Office built to sabotage rivals’ military technology. The Pentagon calls the reporting “simply not true.” They weigh which model of non-official cover the Pentagon might borrow, JSOC’s or the CIA’s, and what oversight should look like. From there: MI5 Director General Ken McCallum’s annual threat update and social media’s role in radicalization; Israel’s inconclusive election, which left neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Gadi Eisenkot within reach of a majority; Austria’s expulsion of four Russian diplomats from Vienna, long a hub for Russian intelligence in Europe; and a Defense Intelligence Agency report with the clearest image yet of China’s secretive spaceplane.

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Andrew R Bird Album "Automatopia" https://music.imusician.pro/a/xfpkGB99

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Articles discussed in today’s episode

"Pentagon looks to build a deep-cover spy program to confront China" by Zach Dorfman & Warren P. Strobel | The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/10/21/pentagon-looks-build-deep-cover-spy-program-confront-china/

"The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency" by John Sakellariadis, Jack Detsch & Paul McLeary | Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/22/technology-support-office-dod-tech-spyware-sabotage-01100327

“Unpacking MI5’s Warning on a ‘New Era’ of Security Threats” by Farah Pandith | Council on Foreign Relations: https://www.cfr.org/articles/unpacking-mi5s-warning-on-a-new-era-of-security-threats

“Israel’s Election: When Will We Know Who Will Be Prime Minister?” by Ephrat Livni | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/world/middleeast/israel-election-guide-netanyahu-eisenkot.html

“Spies Suspected at Russian Embassy and OSCE Mission in Vienna. Austria Orders Four Diplomats to Leave” by Katherina Poplinichenko | United24 Media: https://united24media.com/world/spies-suspected-at-russian-embassy-and-osce-mission-in-vienna-austria-orders-four-diplomats-to-leave-23759

"U.S. Intel Confirms This Is China’s Secret Spaceplane" by Joseph Trevithick | The War Zone: https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-intel-confirms-this-is-chinas-secret-spaceplane

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by Eric Lee/NYT, Canva, Aaron Favila/Reuters

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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Former U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent Pete Turner joins Chris for a conversation about what human intelligence actually looks like on the ground. Turner’s career ran from post–Cold War Germany and Bosnia through Egypt in the weeks after 9/11 to Iraq and Afghanistan, and he explains why the work turned less on stealing secrets than on access: winning over wary commanders, building rapport with sheikhs and district governors, and treating interpreters as partners rather than mouthpieces. Along the way he recounts a meeting he later learned the Taliban had called to look him over, and a colleague’s hunt for a district’s shadow governor that ended at the governor’s own door. Turner, host of the Break It Down Show, closes on what the job taught him about human nature.

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Find Pete on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PeteATurner/streams

Listen to Pete’s podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/break-it-down-show/id941689175

https://open.spotify.com/show/1FcUXypxYsB2heFD3Q4gcm

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Cody Quinn

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Joby Warrick covered national security for the Washington Post for nearly three decades. In his new book, The Jackal, he turns to Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—Carlos the Jackal—the Venezuelan who in the 1970s and '80s was the most famous terrorist in the world. Matt talks with Warrick about Carlos’s rise, from the audacious 1975 OPEC siege in Vienna to his years as a gun for hire in the Soviet bloc, and about the book’s sharpest argument: that Carlos was less a true believer than a narcissist in love with his own legend. They close on why his story matters now as the deniable, mercenary terror Carlos pioneered is back, in the contract attacks Russia and Iran are running across the West. Only this time, the hired hands have no wish to be famous.

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by Jack Guez/AFP, AFP/Getty, Marvin Joseph/WaPo

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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A quick programming note: this weekend’s episode will be out on Sunday, October 18, rather than our usual Saturday release. We’re taking an extra day in the edit on Matt’s conversation with national security reporter Joby Warrick about Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born militant who became one of the Cold War’s most wanted men. Thanks for your patience, and we’ll see you Sunday.

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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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 the reported red flags that didn’t follow him from one airline to the next. In Germany, former BND president August Hanning has been arrested on suspicion of espionage and treason, allegedly fed classified files by a serving insider. And ShinyHunters’ breach of the FBI’s jobs portal may have exposed the home addresses and assignments of Bureau personnel. They close with what the summer’s listener survey told them.

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Articles discussed in today’s episode

"Amateurism and organisation’: Iran’s potential role in RAF Fairford incident" by Charles Clover | Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/7a91fa6b-e908-4a28-b04f-02d5a10a6bb1

"No 10 insists RAF Fairford is safe after US withdraws its bombers from base" by Dan Sabbagh & Aletha Adu | The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/05/no-10-says-raf-fairford-safe-us-withdraws-bombers-from-base

"B-1B Bombers Make Hasty Departure From England" by Howard Altman | The War Zone: https://www.twz.com/air/b-1b-bombers-make-hasty-departure-from-england

"RAF Fairford suspects were ‘just thieves syphoning fuel’, sources" by Daniel Jae Webb | Wiltshire999s: https://www.wiltshire999s.co.uk/raf-fairford-thieves-syphoning-fuel/

"UK-Iranian dual national arrested over RAF Fairford released on bail" by Olivia Ireland | BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6d095ygggv1o

"What happened inside the Flydubai flight to Israel?" by Mitchell McCluskey & Tal Shalev | CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/30/middleeast/flydubai-israel-plane-pilot-hijacking-incident-latam-hnk-intl

"Flydubai co-pilot originally planned attack for July, investigators believe" by Jason Burke & Stephanie Kirchgaessner | The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/05/flydubai-co-pilot-originally-planned-attack-for-july-investigators-believe

"German court orders detention of former intelligence chief after spying arrest" by Kate Connolly | The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/07/germany-court-august-hanning-spying-arrest-detention-bnd

"What to Know About the Hacking Group ShinyHunters and Its F.B.I. Breach" by Chris Cameron | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/shinyhunters-fbi-hacking-cybercriminal-group.html

"Embarrassing Breach at F.B.I. Fuels Fears of Harm to Its Employees" by Dustin Volz, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage & Adam Goldman | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/us/politics/fbi-shinyhunters-damage.html

"What Should the U.S. Government Do in Response to the FBI Hack?" by Nikita Shah | CSIS: https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-should-us-government-do-response-fbi-hack

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by USAF/Senior Airman Colin Hollowell

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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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 American security anchor weakens; a Russia that won't remain a pariah forever; intra-Sunni rivalry reshaping the Middle East; and global jihad's center of gravity settling in the Sahel. They also cover AI's disruption of white-collar work, climate change as a threat multiplier, and a splintering internet. Throughout, Sam is candid about the limits of the exercise, including why the Iran war, which dominates the present, may not define the decade.

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Read RANE’s 2025-2035 decade forecast here: https://go.ranenetwork.com/decade-forecast-overview-lp

More about RANE: https://www.ranenetwork.com/

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Saul Loeb/Getty

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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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 central claim is that the Kremlin sees the war in Ukraine less as a fight over territory than as a contest over the shape of the world order itself — and its real campaign is the slow export of that worldview into the West through proxies and information warfare, a war the West has been slow to recognize as one. They also get into why Washington keeps misreading Moscow, the spiritual and conspiratorial currents Putin curates rather than invents, and how "sovereignty," disinformation, and even UFO culture serve the same end.

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Read Dave’s article, "What Russia Believes: Weekly Reports Reveal the Kremlin's Distorted Worldview": https://america2.news/what-russia-believes-weekly-reports-reveal-the-kremlins-distorted-worldview/

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Sergei Bobylev / TASS

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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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 Wennström of the Swedish Defence University, whose book The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians is the first in-depth English account of the network — the tradecraft, the human cost, and why it suddenly speaks to a Europe at war and a Sweden newly inside NATO during the alliance’s most uncertain moment in a generation.

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP, Johan Wennström

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Srinivasan’s "network state" — with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Vice President J.D. Vance at its center. His argument, Durán insists, rests on what these men have said on the record: that democracy is obsolete, that a "cognitive elite" should rule, that crypto and AI will dissolve the nation-state. He contends the movement is losing the public even as it gains power, and that the 2026 midterms will test whether that still counts.

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Jessica Christian/Getty, Gil Durán

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Yorker investigation into how Iran now reaches its critics abroad by renting the local underworld — Romanian petty criminals, teenagers recruited over Snapchat — a "cutout of a cutout" model built to defeat the way security services watch known threats. Finally, they discuss a new Foreign Affairs piece that pushes back against transatlantic-alliance fatalism.

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Articles discussed in today’s episode

"Claims Swirl Around CIA Director’s Reason For Secret Moscow Visit, Nearly All Of Them Are Terrifying" by Howard Altman & Tyler Rogoway | The War Zone: https://www.twz.com/news-features/claims-swirl-around-cia-directors-reason-for-secret-moscow-visit-nearly-all-of-them-are-terrifying

"CIA Director Ratcliffe Lands in Moscow Aboard C-17 With New Mobile SCIF" by Scott McCain | Tech Times: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/325483/20260825/cia-director-ratcliffe-lands-moscow-aboard-c-17-new-mobile-scif.htm

"Iran Is Using Foreign Criminals to Attack Its Critics Overseas" by Cora Engelbrecht | The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/iran-is-using-foreign-criminals-to-attack-its-critics-overseas

"How Alliances Survive: The Case Against Pessimism and the Path to a New Allied Order" by Kurt M. Campbell & Rush Doshi | Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-alliances-survive-campbell-doshi

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by AP/John McDonnell & Tom Brenner

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Kerry. Rory Carroll, The Guardian’s Ireland correspondent and acclaimed author of Killing Thatcher, joins Chris to trace the manhunt — and Casement’s "Black Diaries," the still-contested record of his private life that Hall leaked to break a clemency campaign in an early act of information warfare. A century on, Casement’s bones and his reputation remain unfinished business between Britain and Ireland.

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Order Rory’s book, A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FS44H5RZ

Find more about Rory on his website: https://www.rorycarroll.co.uk/

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by Hulton Archive, Bettmann

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 Nicholas Reynolds and journalist Katie S. Sanders—whose grandfather, a downed airman, was among those Ortiz rescued—about their book Ortiz’s War, and the moment when Ortiz surrendered to a hundred Germans to spare a village.

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Order Ortiz’s War: https://www.harpercollinsfocus.com/harper-horizon/ortizs-war/

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https://www.nicholasreynoldsauthor.com/

https://www.katiessanders.com/

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by Marine Corps History Division, Imperial War Museums

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 life, governing not just where we are but the precise time that keeps power grids, markets, and supply chains in sync. Chris talks with Dunn about how a taxpayer-funded military tool became invisible civilian scaffolding, and how it turned into a battlefield: Russian jamming and spoofing from the Black Sea to the Baltics, ships that appear at airports, a drone war fought over the electromagnetic spectrum, and what it means when certainty itself becomes a target.

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Order Little Blue Dot: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/little-blue-dot-how-the-global-positioning-system-shaped-the-modern-world-katherine-dunn/c5ae27c07c3864a5

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1639734317

Learn more about Katherine on her website: https://katherinedunn.me/

Connect with Katherine on LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/katherine-dunn-journalist/

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Katherine Dunn, Canva

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 speaks with Katz about the experiences that forged Dagan: rejection from Israel's elite commando ranks, the undercover war he built in Gaza under Ariel Sharon, and the Lebanon fighting that made him a man of war who hated war. The conversation traces his eight-year tenure as Mossad director — the covert campaign against Iran, the intelligence diplomacy that helped lay the groundwork for the Abraham Accords — and what October 7th revealed about the limits of the very apparatus he built.

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Order The Architect of Espionage: The Man Who Built Israel's Mossad into the World's Boldest Intelligence Force: https://www.amazon.com/Architect-Espionage-Israels-Boldest-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B0DV6T6XDM/

More about Samuel on his website: https://samuelkatzonline.com/

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Rex Features, Samuel M. Katz, Canva

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 artifacts — from Operation Mincemeat's pocket litter and Noor Inayat Khan's letters from occupied France to the Portland Spy Ring's suburban cover and the Trent Park eavesdropping operation — the exhibition traces deception from the trenches of the First World War through Cold War suburbia to Bellingcat's open-source unmasking of the Salisbury poisoners and today's deepfake threats, asking not just how deception works but what it costs the people who practice it.

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Explore the IWM’s Spies, Lies and Deception exhibition: https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/spies-lies-and-deception-iwm-north

Watch this episode on YouTube to see exclusive footage from the Exhibition: https://youtu.be/WTLxI5s4qgA

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Illustration by Katherine Tromans

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 fantasy, then turn to Pickaxe Mountain — the buried nuclear site Trump keeps threatening to strike, but that even America's largest bunker-buster may not reach — and ask whether hitting it ends anything. They also examine how Japan has become a haven for Russian procurement networks supporting its war machine in Ukraine, and the forces driving political violence across the West after the killing of Ann Widdecombe, before closing on the life of the late James Woolsey, Bill Clinton's first CIA director.

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Articles discussed in today’s episode

"‘It becomes inevitable’: the toxic mix fuelling deadly political violence around world" by John Henley | The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/18/inevitable-toxic-mix-fuelling-deadly-political-violence-world

"Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad" by Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi & Ronen Bergman | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/us/politics/israel-mahmoud-ahmadinejad-iran.html

"Israel Thought It Could Spur Rebellion Inside Iran. That Hasn’t Happened." by Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Edward Wong & Ronen Bergman | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/us/politics/iran-israel-trump-netanyahu-mossad.html

"Trump’s Threat To Strike Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain Bunker’s 'Front Door' Underscores Targeting Challenges" by Joseph Trevithick | The War Zone: https://www.twz.com/news-features/trumps-threat-to-strike-irans-pickaxe-mountain-bunkers-front-door-underscores-targeting-challenges

"How Putin Turned Japan Into a Den of Spies" by Jane Bradley, Michael Schwirtz & Adam Goldman | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/world/asia/russia-spies-japan-war-drones-electronics.html

"A Russian Spy, Suddenly Cast Into the Spotlight, Flees Japan" by Michael Schwirtz, Adam Goldman & Jane Bradley | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/world/asia/russian-spy-flees-japan.html (published after recording)

"James Woolsey, CIA director under Bill Clinton, dies at 84" by Bob Drogin | The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2026/07/21/james-woolsey-cia-director-under-bill-clinton-dies-84/

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/
Music by Andrew R. Bird
Photos by Fatemah Bahrami/Anadolu, Ebrahim Noroozi/AP

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 authoritarian machine Putin built to survive exactly these moments — the layered security state, the loyalty he fosters rather than assumes, and why the 2023 Wagner mutiny revealed his regime's strength rather than its cracks. Then the question the survival playbook never answers: what happens the morning Putin is gone, and why the West is watching the wrong people.

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Order Sean’s book, Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War: https://www.amazon.com/Tradecraft-Tactics-Dirty-Tricks Intelligence/dp/1682476014/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

Follow Sean on X/Twitter: https://x.com/Wiswesser

Connect with Sean on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-wiswesser

Read Sean’s writing on Putin’s regime

"Don’t Fall for Rumors of Putin’s Weakness" in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/12/russia-putin-opposition-war-ukraine-fsb-security-services-dissidents-dissent-dictator-authoritarianism/

"After the War and After Putin: Three Potential Succession Scenarios for Russia’s Modern Tsar" in The Cipher Brief: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/after-the-war-after-putin

"Confronting Putin's continual escalation — between deterrence now or greater conflict later" in Tomorrow's Affairs: https://tomorrowsaffairs.com/confronting-putins-continual-escalation-between-deterrence-now-or-greater-conflict-later

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Gavriil Grigorov/Sputnik/Reuters, Alexander Nemenov/AFP, Sean Wiswesser

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 first to report on the draft, about what's driving the overhaul — Russia's war and hybrid campaign, and eroding trust in Washington under Trump — and the unease that lingers around empowering services that once served dictatorships.

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Articles by Florian

https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/ndr-wdr/bnd-gesetz-befugnisse-100.html

https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/ndr-wdr/bnd-gesetz-befugnisse-102.html

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Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton

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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 experiment and Melissa Graves's Lawfare essay to reframe AI in intelligence work as a counterintelligence problem. Finally, Ken Harbaugh's Atlantic report on Ukraine's "warrior-witches" — women running honeypots and directing drone strikes from occupied ground, where the oldest tradecraft still wins.

Trigger Warning: In the last story after the second AD Break there is mention of violence against women in the Russian War on Ukraine

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Articles discussed in today’s episode

"Keir Starmer to step down as prime minister two years after historic election victory" by Pippa Crerar | The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/22/keir-starmer-resigns-as-prime-minister

"How UK's Keir Starmer went from election landslide to downfall" by Jill Lawless & Pan Pylas | Associated Press: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-uks-keir-starmer-went-from-election-landslide-to-downfall

"Andy Burnham soft-launches his premiership" by Dan Bloom | Politico Europe: https://www.politico.eu/article/andy-burnham-uk-soft-launches-his-premiership/

"Starmer backs 5 billion drone overhaul for UK forces in DIP" by George Allison | UK Defence Journal: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/starmer-backs-5-billion-drone-overhaul-for-uk-forces-in-dip/

"The Next Counterintelligence Problem Is Artificial" by Melissa Graves | Lawfare: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-next-counterintelligence-problem-is-artificial

"The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance" by Ken Harbaugh | The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/06/underground-intelligence-network-russia-ukraine/687578/

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

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Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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