In the 1950s, Lyman Kirkpatrick had just been promoted to Chief of Operations in the CIA’s clandestine service. He was 36, with a bright future ahead. Then what he thought was a cold turned out to be polio. Suddenly, he saw his career trajectory derailed, not because of health issues but because of restrictions the agency was imposing on him for being in a wheelchair. He was determined to prove them wrong. Earning the nickname “Hell on Wheels,” Lyman ended up landing top jobs, becoming No.3 at the agency, and receiving prestigious awards for his service. To mark National Disability Employment Awareness Month in October, author David Taylor joined SpyCast host Sasha Ingber to talk about Lyman’s work and life.
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is engaged in far-reaching spying against left-wing activists that rivals the FBI and CIA crackdowns on the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.
Winter is coming, and that means Ukraine has to gear up for another brutal season of strikes on its energy infrastructure - Russia’s bid to cut off power and heat, making life harder for all Ukrainians. Earlier this year, Ukrainian forces reversed the enemy’s territorial gains, and now Vladimir Putin appears to be stepping up long-range strikes targeting not just Ukraine’s energy system but also its water, railways, and bridges. The Ukrainians have responded with their own long-range attacks on Russian energy sites. Since the full-scale invasion began, former CIA director and retired four-star general David Petraeus has made numerous trips to Ukraine. He sits down with SpyCast host Sasha Ingber to discuss not just major developments on the battlefield but also the quieter side of the war: the covert maneuvering behind closed doors and the threats of sabotage troubling the European continent.
The Kremlin is not a fan of Alex Goldfarb. He left the Soviet Union as a scientist, becoming a prominent author and human rights activist. In 2006, he was in the room with ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, reading his dying words, which accused Vladimir Putin of assassination by radioactive polonium. Today, Alex's memoir, Refusenik's Son, traces a complicated family history made clear only decades later. His father, David, was a Jewish scientist denied permission to leave the Soviet Union - one of the so-called "refuseniks." David had been a prominent microbiologist in the 1970s and '80s, when Moscow's secret bioweapons program was under development. But only after an exiled KGB officer contacted Alex in 2010 did the full reason for his father's confinement become clear. It's a winding story involving an anthrax accident and a media leak, a Soviet scientist and a U.S. journalist trying to help him. Two men pulled unknowingly into a tide of suspicion.
The trial of a former Ukrainian special forces officer, identified as Serhii K., is set to begin October 14th in Hamburg. German investigators have been unrelenting in their pursuit of justice since the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, which carried Russian gas to Germany. It was about seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Scandinavian seismologists detected what appeared to be an undersea earthquake near a Danish island, on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Denmark, Germany, and Sweden opened investigations, but only Germany pushed forward. Since then, The Wall Street Journal’s chief European political correspondent, Bojan Pancevski, has uncovered what happened in his book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy. We sat down with him to talk about the operation and the fallout, part of which is set to unfold in a German courtroom.
In the spring of 1944, three elite commandos parachuted into Hungary. The country was aligned with Nazi Germany, and these men intended to be captured in what was meant to look like a failed operation. Their real mission was to help Hungary switch to the Allied side. But three days later, Germany launched a preemptive invasion. The men were captured by the Nazis, imprisoned, and interrogated. They used their interrogation as a chance to fool Adolf Hitler into thinking an Allied invasion would come from southeastern Europe, drawing German troops away from Normandy ahead of D-Day. Author Jason Bell unravels this daring and untold story in his new book, Operation Sparrow.
It was preparation for an invasion that might never come, and never did. Across Cold War Europe, stay-behind networks were established on the premise that Soviet forces might successfully invade and occupy sovereign territory. These clandestine organizations consisted of carefully vetted soldiers, intelligence officers, and everyday citizens tasked with remaining behind enemy lines to gather intelligence, conduct sabotage, and support resistance movements if their country were overrun. In neutral Sweden, the prime minister secretly authorized one such covert network in 1949 to mount guerrilla warfare against a potential Red Army occupation. Guest host Dr. Mark Jacobson speaks with Johan Wennström, author of The Stay Behinds: Sweden's Cold War Guardians, about this long-classified operation.
Discover how the recent September update caused a critical Windows File History bug. Learn about backup failures and how to protect your essential data now.
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. Over time, his crimes grew bolder, from an attempted assassination to abductions, murder, hijackings, and bombings. Some state leaders tolerated him out of fear he would target their countries, yet his alliances with militants and dictators soured as the years passed. In his new book, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super Terrorist, journalist Joby Warrick profiles the mercenary terrorist and details how American and French intelligence took him down.
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. Kennedy's ear. One side wanted to keep South Vietnam's first president, Ngô Đình Diệm, in power. The other wanted to see him removed. Then, unrest in Saigon caught the CIA by surprise, and the rift in Washington grew deeper. Author Jack Cheevers spent a decade piecing together and writing Kennedy's Coup, which lays out the grave decision to oust Diem, a move that led to his death and, arguably, escalated the war. The first U.S. combat troops deployed two years later.
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 Afghanistan. At 29, Justin was its youngest member. There was no time to onboard him, and he was told he was leaving the next day, departing from the DC area to a base in Uzbekistan, then touching down in northern Afghanistan on a Black Hawk helicopter. Justin would go on to clear the way for follow-on forces to land, secure alliances with warlords to oust the Taliban, interrogate enemy fighters who had been captured. He would also tragically lose his colleague, Johnny “Mike” Spann. Justin takes us back into that historic mission 25 years later.
The Asia-Pacific theater saw its own scenes of brutality during World War II. But many of us don't know about them. Jenny Chan co-founded Pacific Atrocities Education to raise awareness of these lesser-known horrors. This conversation focuses on the Imperial Japanese Army, which occupied parts of China between 1937 and 1945 as part of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Jenny uncovered new details that showed how intelligence-gathering and covert research enabled war crimes.
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