The Peter Earnest “Exit Interview”

The United States and Iran have been at daggers drawn for more than thirty years. While this rivalry has never erupted into open war, it has been an enduring “twilight war” in which spies and terroris...

8 Nov 201248min

In Castro’s Secrets, Brian Latell, former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America and long-time Cuba analyst, offers a strikingly original image of Fidel Castro as Cuba's supreme spymaster. La...

6 Nov 20121h 1min

In the days after 9/11, the CIA directed Henry Crumpton to organize and lead its covert action campaign in Afghanistan. In less than 90 days Al Qaeda and the Taliban were routed. The Art of Intelligen...

25 Sep 201259min

The surprise of September 11 2001 was, in part, a failure of imagination and CIA Director George Tenet did not want that to happen again. On September 13 he created the Red Cell and staffed it with “p...

23 Aug 201236min

Juan Pujol was the Walter Mitty of World War II, a nobody who at one doomed venture after another while dreaming of doing something interesting with his life -- saving Western civilization, if possibl...

21 Aug 201244min

Peter concludes his conversation with longtime CIA officer George Cave with a brief discussion of some of the funny and unusual events that took place in the course of his career in the Clandestine Se...

6 Aug 201213min

The history of Israel’s intelligence community—led by the feared and famous Mossad—includes stunning successes and embarrassing failures with important implications for war and peace today. CBS journa...

26 Jul 20121h 2min

Russia was a chaotic hotspot after the Revolution of 1917 and an extraordinary collection of spies, adventurers, and opportunists poured into the roiling Russian political scene. Outsized characters l...

13 Jul 201257min