Podcast Episodes

From the SpyCast Vault: : Escaping Tehran with The CIA Pt. 2

We return to November, 1979 when radical Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage. 

Mark and Cora Lijek were two American officials stuck in Tehran, and i…

Published on 5 hours ago

From the SpyCast Vault: Escaping Tehran with The CIA

We'll go back in time to November, 1979 when radical Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage. Six US officials managed to find refuge with Canadian embas…

Published on 1 week ago

Catching an Iranian-American Missile Broker

Reza Olangian, a dual US-Iranian citizen, left behind his life in Silicon Valley to spy for Iran in the capital. And by the time DEA special agent Jeffrey James Higgins found out about him in 2011, O…

Published on 2 weeks ago

Lethal Dissent: Iran’s Spy Games in Turkey

Washington and Tehran have a long and complicated history, with tensions that rise, fall and then rise again. Just this summer, we watched the U.S. and Israel strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. T…

Published on 3 weeks ago

Agent 202: New Secrets Emerge on an American Who Spied for Cuba

Codenamed "Agent 202," Kendall Myers went undetected as a spy for Cuba for nearly 30 years. He worked at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, secretly spying for Cuba out of an earnest l…

Published on 4 weeks ago

Agent of Chaos: The Austrian Fugitive Running Russia’s Global Spy Networks

Today he’s one of the most wanted men in the world, but before Jan Marsalek fled to Russia, he was the COO of payment-processing firm Wirecard. 

Officials and investigators say Marsalek used the comp…

Published on 1 month ago

From Intel Officer to White House Adviser: A Chat with The Museum’s Executive Director

This week we spoke with the International Spy Museum's Executive Director, Colonel Chris Costa. His decades-long career in the intelligence community spanned multiple continents, running sensitive op…

Published on 1 month, 1 week ago

“America’s Gatekeeper”: A Conversation with DCSA’s Director David Cattler

Born out of a major Chinese cyberattack that stole personal information from millions of federal government employees, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency calls itself ‘America’s Gate…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

Russia's Fake Identity Assembly Line in Brazil

When a Russian spy was arrested in Brazil in 2022, authorities were shocked to discover that he seemed to have a real birth certificate and authentic citizenship documents. The incident sparked a mul…

Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago

Breaking the Silence: Coming Out in the CIA

Emerging alongside Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare in the 1950s was the Lavender Scare: Widespread panic and paranoia over the inclusion of gay personnel in the federal government. Their perceived danger…

Published on 2 months ago