SpyCast

Before he became one of the world's most notorious terrorists in the 1970s and '80s, inspiring movies, books, and future terrorists, Carlos the Jackal was born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez to a privileged family in Venezuela...

It's a dark moment in American history that leads to a lot of what-ifs. By the spring of 1963, eight years into the Vietnam War, two opposing factions across the CIA and the State Department had President John F...

Retired Colonel Justin Sapp was a Green Beret detailed to the CIA after the September 11th terrorist attacks. He was part of Team Alpha, the first eight Americans to drop behind enemy lines into the mountains of...

Content warning: some of this episode focuses on sexual enslavement and medical experimentation. The Asia-Pacific theater saw its own scenes of brutality during World War II. But many of us don't know about them. Jenny...

In 2017, journalist Katie Sanders discovered an episode of a radio program called This Is Your Life. It was a scratchy recording from 1949, and she heard the voice of 2nd Lt. Murray Simon, her grandfather, for the first...

You might find Meredith Cavan playing music in an Irish pub. But long before her first album dropped, she clocked more than 20 years at the CIA. One of her jobs there was Southeast Asia Department chief, where she...

For decades, Cuban intelligence has been seen as a force that punches above its weight. Shaped during the Cold War through cooperation with the Soviet Union, its intelligence officers received extensive training by the...

In Cold War Britain, a secret propaganda department saw its list of targets and tactics widen. Personnel inside the Information Research Department went beyond forgeries, fakes, and plants, conducting bold...

For those of you who have visited the International Spy Museum, you may be familiar with one of our most prized artifacts, the ice ax used to assassinate Leon Trotsky in 1940. Trotsky was the operational mastermind of...

The DGSE, or Directorate General for External Security, is France's foreign intelligence service. It's found inside the Ministry of Defense but reports to the president. It was established under that name in 1982...

Ahana Datta Fasel became the British government’s first ethical hacker in 2014, testing vulnerabilities in computer systems and networks that hackers could potentially exploit. She was only 23, but that gave her an...

You may have heard of the long-running TV show NCIS, based on the real work of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. But you may never have heard of a unit inside it, called the Office of Special Projects, where...

It's November of 1983, the closest the world came to nuclear war, some may argue even closer than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Yet the Able Archer 1983 exercise incident is relatively unknown by comparison. A...

Since its emergence in 2014, the Wagner Group operated as the Kremlin's shadow army, deploying mercenaries across Africa and the Middle East. It gave Vladimir Putin plausible deniability, expanding Moscow's geopolitical...

The FBI won’t discuss exactly how Chinese spy Xu Yanjun came to the attention of special agents. Xu was handling a GE Aviation engineer in Ohio who specialized in composite fan-blade technology. That engineer, David...