Murder in Mexico City: The Assassination of Leon Trotsky
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 operatio...
28 Jul 42min
The Triumphs and Failures of France's Foreign Intel Service
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 ...
21 Jul 38min
Inside China's Cyber Espionage Business
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 th...
14 Jul 39min
The Navy Spy who Sold Secrets for $377 a Year
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 ...
7 Jul 35min
Closer than Cuba: the Able Archer Nuclear Crisis of 1983
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 ...
30 Jun 39min
Putin’s Paramilitary 2.0
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 Mo...
23 Jun 40min
Tricked and Extradited: Inside the First FBI Operation to Lure a Chinese Spy to the US
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 ...
16 Jun 37min
The Flip That Broke the Cali Cartel
Now that drug cartels can be labeled foreign terrorist organizations, how do you dismantle one? As part of his 26 years at the Drug Enforcement Administration, retired Special Agent Chris Feistl was o...
9 Jun 41min
