Who is spying on us and why is the US government letting them? These are the questions that today’s guest asks in his most recent book Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence. James Bamford is one of the country’s leading writers on intelligence, especially the National Security Agency. He joins host Esty Dinur to talk about Spyfall and threat of espionage conducted by  foreign countries within the US.

James Bamford is a bestselling author, journalist and documentary filmmaker. His writing has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications.  In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his writing on the war in Iraq published in Rolling Stone. He currently writes for The Nation magazine.

He is also an Emmy nominated documentary filmmaker for PBS and spent a decade as the Washington investigative producer for ABC’s World News Tonight.  He is the author of a trilogy of New York Times bestselling books, The Puzzle Palace (1982) and Body of Secrets (2001), and The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

James joined the show back on May 15th, 2002 to talk about Body of Secrets. As a special treat, we offer you the freshly digitized recording of that show:

Special thank you to Douglas Ranney and WORT’s Archiving Project.

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