SpyCast

During the Vietnam War, perhaps the US Army’s most secretive unit was the Studies and Observations Group (SOG). This unit conducted reconnaissance missions, captured enemy prisoners for interrogation and rescued American POWs. It also ran teams of clandestine agents, and conducted psychological operations. The leader of this group in the mid-1960s was a legendary Army officer, Donald Blackburn. Listen to author Mike Guardia describe Blackburn’s colorful life in this event which took place on 16 February 2012.

SPY Historian Mark Stout explores the importance of signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the Vietnam War with retired National Security Agency cryptanalyst Tom Glenn. Glenn served more time in country than any other civilian of the NSA. Hear about the sixth sense that good SIGINTers need to have, the difficulties of working in foreign languages, and how Glenn and his colleagues were able to predict every major Communist offensive. Learn also why American commanders did not always believe them. Finally, hear the wrenching story of Glenn’s last days in Saigon in 1975 as the city was falling to the North Vietnamese Army.

With the ever increasing global connectivity, more and more information is available merely for the asking. This has led to a flourishing of the discipline of open source intelligence collection. SPY Historian Mark Stout has a probing discussion with one of the world’s leading practitioners of this art: Arno Reuser of the Dutch military intelligence service. With the growth of open source, can we stop stealing secrets?

In the early James Bond novels, the hero battled the villainous forces of Smersh, a shadowy Soviet intelligence organization. Bond was fictional, but Smersh really existed. Drawing its name from smert shpionam Russian for “death to spies,” it was Stalin’s wartime terror apparatus and it cut a bloody swath of death across Eastern Europe. Its job was to “filter” the Red Army for spies and it was responsible for the arrest, torture, and execution of many thousands of innocent people. Listen to historian Vadim J. Birstein as he discusses this bloodthirsty organization and discusses the evidence suggesting that Raoul Wallenberg was one of its victims. This event took place on 12 January 2012.

Researching spy history is a difficult business. Spies carefully cover their tracks and intelligence agencies classify everything and release their records only after many years, if at all. Given these difficulties how do historians reconstruct espionage history? SPY Historian Mark Stout explores this issue with Dr. R. Bruce Craig, the author of Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case. Hear Craig describe how a receipt for $1.25 allowed him to discover the real identity of the mysterious “Agent Zero” who spied for the Soviets before World War II. Also listen as Craig tells of his forthcoming book about Alger Hiss and how he has brought lawsuits that forced the government to open up sealed grand jury records for Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Since 9/11, the United States Intelligence Community has expanded into an $80 billion behemoth and taken on many new tasks, for instance spying on terrorists in cyberspace and even becoming a combat organization in its own right. Are we getting value for our money? To what extent did the invasion of Iraq divert important intelligence resources from Afghanistan? And why is the FBI flying reconnaissance flights over northwest D.C.? Intelligence historian, Matthew Aid, the author of the new book Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror, grapples with these and other questions in a discussion with SPY Historian Mark Stout.

Spies, cavalry, and telescopes were the traditional intelligence tools available during the Civil War, but there was also cutting edge high tech: the telegraph and the observation balloon. How did Civil War generals combine these to help make strategic decisions? As we observe the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, SPY Historian Mark Stout discusses this question with Professor William Feis of Buena Vista University, the author of Grant’s Secret Service: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox.

Operation MHCHAOS was the code name for a secret domestic spying program conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1960s and early 1970s charged with unmasking any foreign influences on left wing protestors. CIA counterintelligence officer Frank Rafalko was a part of that operation. When The New York Times revealed MHCHAOS in 1974 and Congress investigated, MHCHAOS took its place in the pantheon of intelligence abuses. However, in his new book Rafalko says that the operation was justified and that the CIA was the logical agency to conduct it. Listen as he defends his perspective with dramatic intelligence collected on the New Left and black radicals. This event took place on 26 October 2011.

D. J. Thorp, a signals intelligence officer in the British Army, spent many years eavesdropping on the hot spots of the Cold War in Europe and the Middle East. In 1982 he found himself on board a Royal Navy ship intercepting signals from the Argentinean military as it fought the British in the Falklands War. Listen in as Major Thorp describes to SPY Historian Mark Stout how signals intelligence influenced the course of that war, how his team uncovered an Argentinean plan for a counterattack that could have turned the tide of the war, and even how a signals intercept led British naval personnel to shave off their beards!

Clint Eastwood’s movie, J. Edgar, gives a Hollywood take on the controversial Director of the FBI. However, many people have criticized the movie for whitewashing Hoover’s abuses while others have criticized it for its implication that Hoover may have been gay. Peter addresses these issues in discussion with Ray Batvinis, a former FBI special agent, a former Executive Director of the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, and the author of the book, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence.

After a childhood in war-torn Lebanon with an abusive father, Nada Prouty jumped at the chance to forge her own path in America, a path that led to undercover work in the FBI, then the CIA. Her work earned her great respect from her colleagues but her promising career came to an end when federal investigators charged Prouty with passing intelligence to Hezbollah. Lacking sufficient evidence to make their case in court, prosecutors went to the media, suggesting that she had committed treason. Though the CIA and a federal judge eventually exonerated Prouty, she was dismissed from the Agency and stripped of her citizenship. In Uncompromised, Prouty tells her story in a bid to restore her name and reputation. This event took place on 15 November 2011.

Who are your friends on Facebook? Are you sure? Thomas Ryan, co-founder of Provide Security, knows that you can’t always be certain. Why? Because he created the fictional Robin Sage, a cyber femme fatale, who quickly wormed her way into the confidence of national security professionals who should have known better. He conceived the experiment to expose weaknesses in the nation's defense and intelligence communities, but even he was surprised by its success. Robin Sage is just one of the fascinating and disturbing tricks of the online espionage trade that Ryan shared with SPY Historian Mark Stout. You may never friend anyone again…

What would you do if you were told to do whatever was necessary to get a prisoner to talk? This is the situation that career CIA officer Glenn Carle found himself in when he was made the lead interrogator for a detainee who was said to be a member of Al Qaeda’s top echelon. Carle, the author of the recently published book, The Interrogator: An Education, tells Peter what it was like to be in this position. And, he describes how he got on the wrong side of CIA Headquarters (HQ) when he objected to the treatment of the detainee, who he came to believe was not who CIA HQ said he was. Listen in on a discussion that raises profound questions about American values and the struggle against terrorism.

The war with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did not begin on September 11th. CIA analyst Cindy Storer was there from the beginning in the early 1990s, a member of a small band of mostly female analysts who worked on Al Qaeda long before September 11. They faced a frustrating uphill battle convincing others about this new threat and were subjected to ridicule for their supposedly excessive passion right up until September 11th. Hear Cindy discuss with SPY Historian Mark Stout what it was like to be in the building on that day and the amazing combination of emotion, professionalism, and commitment that characterized the following days.

In 2009, the CIA’s partners in the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate had a source named Humam Khalil al-Balawi working inside Al Qaeda and he knew where Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man in al Qaeda was…or so they thought. In fact, Al Qaeda was running a deception. In December 2009 al-Balawi came to a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan and detonated bomb strapped to his chest, killing seven CIA officers and one Jordanian intelligence officer. It was the CIA’s greatest loss of life in decades. Join Pulitzer Prize winning author Joby Warrick for this gripping true story of miscalculation, deception, and revenge, and learn how Al Qaeda fooled the world’s greatest intelligence service. This event took place on 20 July 2011.