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.

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 time. In the episode, Murray was reunited with a man named Peter Ortiz, who had rescued him after his plane crashed over Nazi-occupied France in 1944. Ortiz became one of the most decorated Marine officers of World War II, undertaking missions now handled by units like the Navy SEALs and Green Berets. Katie and Nicholas Reynolds, a former CIA historian, went on to write Ortiz's War.

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 oversaw covert action, intelligence operations, and analysis across 30 countries. We're talking about the years 2021 to 2023, when terrorism was taking a back seat to strategic competition, and her priority was trying to thwart China's influence and infrastructure in its most consequential playground.

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 KGB. But where does Cuba’s spy service stand today, especially as it faces pressure from Washington? Retired FBI special agent Peter J. Lapp, who wrote Queen of Cuba, came in to discuss Havana’s capabilities, the Americans who spied for Cuba, and the Cubans who spied for us.