Secrets and Spies Podcast: Espionage | Global Issues | Current Affairs

Sam Lichtenstein, director of analysis at the global risk intelligence firm RANE, returns to walk Chris through RANE's 2025–2035 decade forecast: a multipolar world in which no great power has the will or the means to set the rules. The big calls include a China turned inward by economic and demographic strain even as its coercion of Taiwan intensifies; a Europe pushed toward integration as the American security anchor weakens; a Russia that won't remain a pariah forever; intra-Sunni rivalry reshaping the Middle East; and global jihad's center of gravity settling in the Sahel. They also cover AI's disruption of white-collar work, climate change as a threat multiplier, and a splintering internet. Throughout, Sam is candid about the limits of the exercise, including why the Iran war, which dominates the present, may not define the decade.

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Read RANE’s 2025-2035 decade forecast here: https://go.ranenetwork.com/decade-forecast-overview-lp

More about RANE: https://www.ranenetwork.com/

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Saul Loeb/Getty

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every week, the Security Council of the Russian Federation publishes a digest of world events as Moscow sees them. Investigative journalist Dave Troy has been reading them closely, and he argues they matter not because they’re accurate, but because they show the story the Kremlin tell itself and its allies. Dave returns to the show to talk with Chris about his piece "What Russia Believes." His central claim is that the Kremlin sees the war in Ukraine less as a fight over territory than as a contest over the shape of the world order itself — and its real campaign is the slow export of that worldview into the West through proxies and information warfare, a war the West has been slow to recognize as one. They also get into why Washington keeps misreading Moscow, the spiritual and conspiratorial currents Putin curates rather than invents, and how "sovereignty," disinformation, and even UFO culture serve the same end.

Read Dave’s article, "What Russia Believes: Weekly Reports Reveal the Kremlin's Distorted Worldview": https://america2.news/what-russia-believes-weekly-reports-reveal-the-kremlins-distorted-worldview/

More about Dave on his website: https://about.davetroy.com/

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Sergei Bobylev / TASS

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Beginning in 1949, officially non-aligned Sweden did something it kept secret for half a century: in close cooperation with the CIA and MI6, it built a clandestine civilian resistance network meant to outlast a Soviet occupation and fight on from within. Its members were ordinary people, farmers, salesmen, gamekeepers, organized into cells that never met. In this episode, Matt talks with Johan Wennström of the Swedish Defence University, whose book The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians is the first in-depth English account of the network — the tradecraft, the human cost, and why it suddenly speaks to a Europe at war and a Sweden newly inside NATO during the alliance’s most uncertain moment in a generation.

Order The Stay Behinds: https://www.ospreypublishing.com/us/stay-behinds-9781472877567/

Read Johan’s Substack, "Our Man in Stockholm": https://johanwennstrom.substack.com/

Follow Johan on X: https://x.com/johanwennstrom

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP, Johan Wennström

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Journalist Gil Durán spent years in political consulting before returning to reporting, and eventually, to the beat that became the subject of his book, The Nerd Reich. He joins Chris to lay out his case that a corner of Silicon Valley has turned against democracy itself — an ideology he traces from the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, through neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, to Balaji Srinivasan’s "network state" — with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Vice President J.D. Vance at its center. His argument, Durán insists, rests on what these men have said on the record: that democracy is obsolete, that a "cognitive elite" should rule, that crypto and AI will dissolve the nation-state. He contends the movement is losing the public even as it gains power, and that the 2026 midterms will test whether that still counts.

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Order The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Gil-Duran/243113363

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-nerd-reich-silicon-valley-fascism-and-the-war-on-democracy-gil-dur-n/a6f6f0dce1150339

Follow Gil’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheNerdReichNews

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Jessica Christian/Getty, Gil Durán

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chris and Matt open season eleven, and Secrets & Spies’ tenth anniversary, with three stories from a busy August. First, CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow, a rare visit by an agency chief since Bill Burns went in 2021, reportedly carrying a blunt warning against testing NATO amid U.S. assessments that a cornered Russia might attempt a limited probe of the alliance. Then, a New Yorker investigation into how Iran now reaches its critics abroad by renting the local underworld — Romanian petty criminals, teenagers recruited over Snapchat — a "cutout of a cutout" model built to defeat the way security services watch known threats. Finally, they discuss a new Foreign Affairs piece that pushes back against transatlantic-alliance fatalism.

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Articles discussed in today’s episode

"Claims Swirl Around CIA Director’s Reason For Secret Moscow Visit, Nearly All Of Them Are Terrifying" by Howard Altman & Tyler Rogoway | The War Zone: https://www.twz.com/news-features/claims-swirl-around-cia-directors-reason-for-secret-moscow-visit-nearly-all-of-them-are-terrifying

"CIA Director Ratcliffe Lands in Moscow Aboard C-17 With New Mobile SCIF" by Scott McCain | Tech Times: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/325483/20260825/cia-director-ratcliffe-lands-moscow-aboard-c-17-new-mobile-scif.htm

"Iran Is Using Foreign Criminals to Attack Its Critics Overseas" by Cora Engelbrecht | The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/iran-is-using-foreign-criminals-to-attack-its-critics-overseas

"How Alliances Survive: The Case Against Pessimism and the Path to a New Allied Order" by Kurt M. Campbell & Rush Doshi | Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-alliances-survive-campbell-doshi

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by AP/John McDonnell & Tom Brenner

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Before Bletchley Park, there was Reginald "Blinker" Hall, the Admiralty’s mercurial intelligence chief whose codebreakers read Germany’s wireless traffic during World War I, giving Britain a front-row seat to the plot behind the 1916 Easter Rising. His target was Sir Roger Casement: a diplomat knighted for exposing colonial atrocities, turned Irish rebel, caught after a U-boat put him ashore in Kerry. Rory Carroll, The Guardian’s Ireland correspondent and acclaimed author of Killing Thatcher, joins Chris to trace the manhunt — and Casement’s "Black Diaries," the still-contested record of his private life that Hall leaked to break a clemency campaign in an early act of information warfare. A century on, Casement’s bones and his reputation remain unfinished business between Britain and Ireland.

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Order Rory’s book, A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FS44H5RZ

Find more about Rory on his website: https://www.rorycarroll.co.uk/

Take our audience survey: https://forms.gle/eFx59XntNtiKzNQa8

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by Hulton Archive, Bettmann

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter J. Ortiz was the most battle-decorated member of the OSS, America’s wartime forerunner to the CIA, and one of the most decorated Marines of the Second World War. In 1944, the former French Foreign Legionnaire twice parachuted into occupied France to arm the Maquis, sabotage German lines, and feed intelligence to London ahead of D-Day. Chris speaks with former Marine and CIA historian Nicholas Reynolds and journalist Katie S. Sanders—whose grandfather, a downed airman, was among those Ortiz rescued—about their book Ortiz’s War, and the moment when Ortiz surrendered to a hundred Germans to spare a village.

Order Ortiz’s War: https://www.harpercollinsfocus.com/harper-horizon/ortizs-war/

More about Nicholas and Katie on their websites:

https://www.nicholasreynoldsauthor.com/

https://www.katiessanders.com/

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by Marine Corps History Division, Imperial War Museums

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

GPS is the rare piece of infrastructure most of us never think about until it fails — and it is failing more often, in more places, by design. In Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World, journalist Katherine Dunn traces the system from its Cold War origins — wartime radio beams, Vietnam's precision-bombing problem, the Soviet shock of Sputnik — to its current role underpinning modern life, governing not just where we are but the precise time that keeps power grids, markets, and supply chains in sync. Chris talks with Dunn about how a taxpayer-funded military tool became invisible civilian scaffolding, and how it turned into a battlefield: Russian jamming and spoofing from the Black Sea to the Baltics, ships that appear at airports, a drone war fought over the electromagnetic spectrum, and what it means when certainty itself becomes a target.

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Order Little Blue Dot: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/little-blue-dot-how-the-global-positioning-system-shaped-the-modern-world-katherine-dunn/c5ae27c07c3864a5

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1639734317

Learn more about Katherine on her website: katherinedunn.me/

Connect with Katherine on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/katherine-dunn-journalist/

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Katherine Dunn, Canva

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Samuel M. Katz is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the foremost chroniclers of Middle Eastern conflict, special operations, and intelligence. His latest book, The Architect of Espionage, is the biography of Meir Dagan — the Holocaust survivor turned soldier turned spymaster who reshaped Mossad from a cautious intelligence collector into a direct-action force of global reach. Chris speaks with Katz about the experiences that forged Dagan: rejection from Israel's elite commando ranks, the undercover war he built in Gaza under Ariel Sharon, and the Lebanon fighting that made him a man of war who hated war. The conversation traces his eight-year tenure as Mossad director — the covert campaign against Iran, the intelligence diplomacy that helped lay the groundwork for the Abraham Accords — and what October 7th revealed about the limits of the very apparatus he built.

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Order The Architect of Espionage: The Man Who Built Israel's Mossad into the World's Boldest Intelligence Force: https://www.amazon.com/Architect-Espionage-Israels-Boldest-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B0DV6T6XDM/

More about Samuel on his website: https://samuelkatzonline.com/

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Rex Features, Samuel M. Katz, Canva

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Amanda Mason is a senior curator of contemporary conflict at the Imperial War Museums, where she previously worked on the museum's acclaimed Secret War gallery. Chris speaks with her about Spies, Lies and Deception, the IWM's major exhibition on espionage and military deception now showing at IWM North in Manchester until August 31. Drawing on more than sixty original objects, documents, and artifacts — from Operation Mincemeat's pocket litter and Noor Inayat Khan's letters from occupied France to the Portland Spy Ring's suburban cover and the Trent Park eavesdropping operation — the exhibition traces deception from the trenches of the First World War through Cold War suburbia to Bellingcat's open-source unmasking of the Salisbury poisoners and today's deepfake threats, asking not just how deception works but what it costs the people who practice it.

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Explore the IWM’s Spies, Lies and Deception exhibition: https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/spies-lies-and-deception-iwm-north

Watch this episode on YouTube to see exclusive footage from the Exhibition: https://youtu.be/WTLxI5s4qgA

Take our audience survey: https://forms.gle/eFx59XntNtiKzNQa8

Support Secrets and Spies

Become a “Friend of the Podcast” on Patreon for £3/$4: https://www.patreon.com/SecretsAndSpies

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Illustration by Katherine Tromans

Secrets and Spies sits at the intersection of intelligence, covert action, real-world espionage, and broader geopolitics in a way that is digestible but serious. Hosted by filmmaker Chris Carr and writer Matt Fulton, each episode examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.

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