SPYCRAFT 101

177. Traitor or CIA Double Agent? The Richard Craig Smith Story


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In this solo episode, Justin share some of his own research. Today he discusses the very unusual case of Richard Craig Smith. Craig was a former army counterintelligence agent who was arrested in April, 1984 for passing classified information to a KGB officer in Japan on several occasions. There are two very different versions of Craig's story. He did meet with a Soviet intelligence agent. He did give him information on American double agents and he was paid for this information. Craig did not dispute this during the trial, but his defense was that he'd done it at the behest of case officers from the CIA who had approached him and recruited him as a double agent against the KGB. If that was so, why was he ever brought to trial in the first place? Because the CIA did not claim him as one of their recruited agents. So, either he was a spy and a traitor... or he was a double agent left out in the cold by his own country.

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Find Justin's first book, Spyshots: Volume One, here.
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SPYCRAFT 101By Justin Black

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