Spy Historian

Can you keep a secret? Maybe you can, but the United States government can’t. Since the birth of our country, nations from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen some of our country’s most precious secrets.

After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US Navy knew it would need vital information from the Pacific.

Morten Storm was a Danish convert to Islam who became a close associate of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American imam who was a senior member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen.

Mark Zaid is one of the nation’s top national security lawyers and has defended many alleged whistleblowers and leakers. SPY Historian, Mark Stout, called him in for a consultation on the case of Edward Snowden who has admitted leaking to the press top secret material from the National Security Agency.

The United States and Iran have been at daggers drawn for more than thirty years. While this rivalry has never erupted into open war, it has been an enduring “twilight war” in which spies and terrorists often play the lead role.

The modern spy novel was born in early twentieth century Britain with writers such as Erskine Childers and William LeQueux whose one-dimensional heroes were English gentlemen holding back the barbarians.

The modern spy novel was born in early twentieth century Britain with writers such as Erskine Childers and William LeQueux whose one-dimensional heroes were English gentlemen holding back the barbarians.

Today Peter begins a conversation with the remarkable Peter Sichel, OSS veteran, senior CIA official of the 1950s, and onetime head of Blue Nun wines. After fleeing Nazi Germany with his family in the 1930s and eventually finding himself in the United States, Sichel joined the OSS and in 1944 he went back to Europe where he recruited German prisoners of war to spy for the US 7th Army.

George Cave is a legend in the CIA’s Clandestine Service. He was recruited into the CIA in 1956 as a fluent Farsi speaker and was pulled out of his entry training and sent to Afghanistan to deal with an urgent operation there.

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.