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

Secrets & Spies

300 episodes

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 unpacks global events through the lens of intelligence and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and analysts. Tune in for balanced, critical perspectives that will expand your understanding of our uncertain world, deciphering the most enigmatic professions, ideologies, and organizations that shape the global landscape.

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Our Hosts Host Chris Carr, driven by a teenage encounter with former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, brings a unique authenticity to the podcast. His deep-seated fascination with espionage is evident in his highly acclaimed short spy film The Dry Cleaner, available on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. Currently developing feature film and television scripts inspired by the podcast's themes, Chris aims to create realistic and compelling spy dramas.

Joining him is Matt Fulton, a novelist and screenwriter who draws inspiration from masters of the spy genre like John Le Carré, Tom Clancy, and Graham Greene. Author of the Active Measures series of globe-trotting geopolitical thrillers, Matt brings his decades of extensive research and narrative prowess to the podcast, offering listeners a front-row seat to the thrilling world of covert operations.

Episodes page 1 of 6

  1. The Human Side of Counterintelligence | Pete A. Turner former US Army Intelligence

    · 1 h 25 min · S11 E8

    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…

  2. Carlos the Jackal and the Return of Terror for Hire | Joby Warrick

    · 56 min · S11 E7

    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…

  3. Podcast Update | This Weekend's Episode Coming Sunday

    · 0:23 · Trailer

    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…

  4. RAF Fairford, Flydubai, and the FBI | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 03 min · S11 E6

    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…

  5. What the Next 10 Years Look Like: China, Russia, Europe and AI | Sam Lichtenstein RANE

    · 59 min · S11 E5

    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…

  6. Russia’s worldview, disinformation, and the politics of influence | Dave Troy

    · 1 h 08 min · S11 E4

    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…

  7. The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians | Johan Wennström

    · 1 h 10 min · S11 E3

    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…

  8. The Nerd Reich | Gil Durán

    · 1 h 00 min · S11 E2

    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…

  9. Ratcliffe’s Moscow Warning, Iran’s Long Reach, and an Alliance on Edge | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 16 min · S11 E1 · Explicit

    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…

  10. A Rebel, a Traitor, and the Birth of the IRA | Rory Carroll

    · 42 min · S10 E61

    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…

  11. Ortiz’s War: The Most Decorated Marine in the OSS | Nicholas Reynolds & Katie S. Sanders

    · 49 min · S10 E60

    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…

  12. How GPS Became a Weapon | Katherine Dunn

    · 1 h 05 min · S10 E59

    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…

  13. Meir Dagan, Mossad, and the Art of Intelligence | Samuel M. Katz

    · 1 h 03 min · S10 E58 · Explicit

    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…

  14. Inside the Imperial War Museums’ Spies, Lies and Deception Exhibition | Amanda Mason

    · 29 min · S10 E57

    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,…

  15. Political Violence on the Rise and Israel's Plot to Install Ahmadinejad | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 17 min · S10 E56

    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…

  16. Putin’s Survival Machine | Sean Wiswesser

    · 52 min · S1 E55

    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,…

  17. Germany Rewrites the Rules for its Spies | Florian Flade

    · 57 min · S1 E54

    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,…

  18. Britain's Next PM, AI's Counterintelligence Problem, and Ukraine's Warrior-Witches | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 07 min · S10 E53 · Explicit

    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…

  19. The Guru, the Loyalist, and the DNI After Gabbard | Shane Harris

    · 52 min · S10 E52

    For most of her career, Tulsi Gabbard may have been taking direction from a reclusive Hawaii guru — the allegation at the center of a Washington Post investigation that shadowed her out of office as Director of…

  20. Iran Survived. Now What? | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 07 min · S10 E51 · Explicit

    Chris and Matt dig into the fine print of the U.S.-Iran memorandum signed this week by President Trump in Versailles, separating what Tehran banks immediately — sanctions relief, frozen funds, an open Strait of Hormuz…

  21. Full Stack Spies: Cyber Espionage in the Age of US China Competition | Ahana Datta Fasel

    · 1 h 01 min · S10 E50

    Ahana Datta Fasel began as an ethical hacker for the British government before becoming cyber chief at the Financial Times, where nation-state actors targeting journalists became a daily reality. Her PhD on the…

  22. Iran, China, and the New Middle East | Ahmed Aboudouh from Chatham House

    · 49 min · S10 E49

    Ahmed Aboudouh — associate fellow at Chatham House's Middle East and North Africa Programme and head of the China Studies Unit at the Emirates Policy Center — joins Chris to assess the shifting architecture of power in…

  23. Think Like a Spy: What Intelligence Work Really Teaches About People | Julian Fisher

    · 1 h 09 min · S10 E48

    Julian Fisher spent his career as a British intelligence operative before distilling what he learned into the Think Like a Spy: Strategic Relations Workshop—and his central argument is counterintuitive: the most…

  24. A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit: CIA, MI6, and Covert Action in Cold War Albania | Stephen Long

    · 54 min · S10 E47

    In the late 1940s and early 1950s, CIA and MI6 launched an audacious series of clandestine operations to infiltrate and destabilize Communist Albania — and lost nearly every agent they sent in. Historian Stephen Long,…

  25. Gabbard Resigns, Trump Meets Xi, and China's Capitol Hill Spy Pitch | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 17 min · S10 E46

    Chris and Matt break down a packed few weeks in intelligence and geopolitics, opening with the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence — a departure framed officially around her husband's…

  26. America’s War Powers Crisis | Brian Finucane

    · 59 min · S10 E45

    The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Congress hasn't formally done so since 1942. Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and current senior adviser at the International Crisis Group,…

  27. A Spy at War | Charles Beaumont

    · 1 h 12 min · S10 E44

    Charles Beaumont spent years as an MI6 officer running human sources before turning to fiction—and his second novel, A Spy at War, carries the authority of someone who has actually done the work. Set against the early…

  28. No show on Saturday 9th May. We will return on 16th May. Chris has some episode recommendations from our back catalogue

    · 1:21 · S1 E326

    There will be no show on Saturday 9th May as we are on a production break. We will return on Saturday 16th May Chris has some recommendations from our back catalogue. Chris's Episode recommendations From CIA to CEO…

  29. Iran Stalemate, the End of Orbán, and the CIA in Mexico | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 17 min · S10 E43

    Two months into Operation Epic Fury, the US and Iran remain locked in an uncomfortable limbo: a ceasefire is technically holding, the Strait of Hormuz is still contested, and diplomacy has collapsed over the question…

  30. A Spy’s Guide to Cold War Berlin | James Stejskal

    · 1 h 05 min · S10 E42

    In today’s episode, former Special Forces Detachment A operator James Stejskal shares his extraordinary insights into Berlin's role as the epicenter of Cold War espionage. From his personal experiences in the city to…

  31. Able Archer: The Nuclear War Game That Almost Ended the World | Brian J. Morra

    · 1 h 01 min · S10 E41

    In the fall of 1983, NATO's annual nuclear war exercise, Able Archer 83, brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to catastrophe than almost anyone in Washington understood at the time. Brian J.…

  32. What Hollywood Gets Wrong About the CIA | John Sipher & Jerry O’Shea

    · 1 h 19 min · S10 E40

    John Sipher and Jerry O'Shea, former senior CIA officers and co-founders of Spycraft Entertainment, return to the show for a conversation with Matt and Chris about what Hollywood gets wrong about espionage—and what…

  33. Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks | Sean Wiswesser

    · 1 h 02 min · S10 E39

    Sean Wiswesser spent three decades in the U.S. intelligence community, much of it running operations against Russia for the CIA. His new book, Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks, dissects of how the FSB, SVR, and…

  34. Inside the New Apostolic Reformation: Faith, Power, and American Politics | Pastor Louis Florio

    · 1 h 40 min · S10 E38

    Pastor Louis Florio—Lutheran pastor, former military intelligence officer, and police chaplain in Virginia—joins Chris to explain the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR): what it actually is, where it came from, and why it…

  35. Boots in Iran, Putin's War Plans, and China in Orbit | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 06 min · S10 E37

    Chris and Matt are back for Espresso Martini. Nearly a month into Operation Epic Fury, Washington appears to be laying the groundwork for potential ground operations inside Iran—but the two options on the table,…

  36. Inside the Bulgarian Spy Ring Trial | Trevor Barnes

    · 1 h 25 min · S10 E36

    Chris speaks with intelligence historian and journalist Trevor Barnes about the Bulgarian spy ring trial at the Old Bailey, one of the most significant espionage cases in the UK since the Cold War. Barnes attended the…

  37. How China Steals America’s Secrets | David Shedd & Andrew Badger

    · 1 h 01 min · S10 E35

    David Shedd served as acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; Andrew Badger is a former DIA case officer now teaching state-sponsored espionage at Oxford. Together they've written The Great Heist: China's…

  38. Iran After Khamenei | Phillip Smyth

    · 1 h 25 min · S10 E34

    Israel has killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The IRGC's senior leadership is decimated. The CIA is reportedly arming Kurdish opposition forces along the Iran-Iraq border. Phillip Smyth — one of the foremost experts on…

  39. Plotters: The UK Terrorists Who Failed | Lizzie Dearden

    · 58 min · S10 E33

    In this conversation, Lizzie Dearden, a journalist specializing in terrorism reporting, shares her journey into the field, the writing of her book Plotters, and insights into the evolving landscape of terrorism in the…

  40. Ukraine’s Struggle, Four Years On | Ben Wittes

    · 1 h 16 min · S10 E32

    Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare, joins Matt and Chris after spending two weeks traveling across Ukraine—from Kyiv to Kharkiv and Odesa—as the war enters its fourth year. What he describes is sobering.…

  41. Jan Marsalek’s Spy Ring and a Telegram Trail to Moscow | Manuel Bewarder

    · 1 h 07 min · S10 E31

    In this episode, Chris speaks with German investigative journalist Manuel Bewarder about the Jan Marsalek spy network and the landmark UK trial that exposed it. They unpack how the former Wirecard executive allegedly…

  42. Epstein’s Russian Espionage Ties and a World Out of Bounds | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 26 min · S10 E30

    This week on Espresso Martini, Chris and Matt examine a set of stories pointing to a more volatile intelligence and political landscape. They unpack Poland’s investigation into whether Jeffrey Epstein functioned as a…

  43. How Russia Protects its Nuclear Submarines | Florian Flade

    · 1 h 01 min · S10 E29

    Investigative journalist Florian Flade returns to discuss Russia's Harmony Undersea Surveillance System, a project aimed at protecting its nuclear submarine fleet. Florian and Chris cover the international…

  44. Global Security in 2026: Conflict, Cyber, and the End of Unipolarity | Sam Lichtenstein

    · 1 h 13 min · S10 E28

    In this comprehensive discussion, Sam Lichtenstein from RANE (Risk Assistance Network & Exchange) joins Chris to dissect their annual geopolitical and security forecast. Sam provides insights into the geopolitical…

  45. Trump, Greenland, and an Alliance in Crisis | Shane Harris

    · 1 h 00 min · S10 E27

    Shane Harris joins Matt to discuss his latest reporting for The Atlantic on one of the most destabilizing ideas circulating inside the Trump administration: the U.S. acquisition of Greenland. Shane explains how an idea…

  46. Inside Operation Absolute Resolve | Jack Murphy

    · 54 min · S10 E26

    In this conversation, Jack Murphy discusses his military background and transition into journalism, focusing on his reporting of Operation Absolute Resolve. He shares insights into the planning and execution of the…

  47. Maduro’s Capture, America’s Role Abroad, and Aldrich Ames’ Infamy | Espresso Martini

    · 1 h 17 min · S10 E25

    The U.S. capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro marks one of the most consequential unilateral actions Washington has taken in the Western Hemisphere in decades. Chris and Matt unpack what actually happened,…

  48. From CIA to CEO | Rupal Patel

    · 1 h 00 min · S10 E24

    Former CIA analyst-turned-entrepreneur Rupal Patel joins Chris for a candid conversation about reinvention, resilience, and what it takes to build a life that actually fits. Rupal talks about identity shifts after…

  49. Watching Putin's Shadow Fleet | Remy Osman

    · 58 min · S10 E23

    Remy Osman joins Chris to unpack the strange, high-stakes world of Putin’s “shadow fleet”—the tankers and ghost ships helping Russia move oil and dodge sanctions. Remy traces how he got into ship-spotting during…

  50. John le Carré and the Russian Mafia | Federico Varese

    · 1 h 09 min · S10 E22

    Criminologist Federico Varese joins Chris to talk John le Carré—David Cornwell—and what his fiction got right about power, corruption, and the criminal underside of the modern Russian state. Varese, a co-curator of…

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