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On 6 September 1976, Soviet Air Force Lieutenant Viktor Belenko defected to the West in a MiG-25 interceptor, landing at a civilian airport in Japan and handing American intelligence the most secret aircraft in the Soviet arsenal.

The MiG-25 was studied for 67 days before being returned to the Soviet Union in pieces. What the West found overturned a decade of assumptions about Soviet air power.

This is the story of how Belenko did it, what the analysis revealed, and what became of the man who pulled it off.

📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):

📕 MiG Pilot by John Barron

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In 1982, an American signals intelligence sergeant walked past the Soviet consulate in West Berlin and dropped a letter through its mail slot, offering his services to the KGB. Within weeks he had opened a second channel to the East German Stasi, selling the same secrets to both.

For six years, James W. Hall III operated out of Field Station Berlin — one of the most sensitive NSA listening posts in Cold War Europe — passing material an NSA official later estimated cost three billion dollars in damage. He was paid roughly three hundred thousand dollars for it.

This episode tells the story of how he did it, what he sold, and how an unrelated shoplifting arrest in West Berlin set the chain of events in motion that would end his career in a motel room outside Savannah, Georgia.

📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):

📕 Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catchers World by Stuart A. Herrington - https://amzn.to/4uVZXac

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Welcome to Dead Drop.

In this week's dossier:

1. FSB operative Zarubina jailed 14 months in New York;
2. the Pentagon raises Israel's espionage threat rating to critical;
3. Tulsi Gabbard resigns as US Director of National Intelligence; and 
4. China arrests US Myanmar scholar on suspicion of espionage.

Ways to support the podcast:

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John Anthony Walker Jnr. ran the largest and most damaging espionage ring in Cold War history. For nearly 18 years he and his co-conspirators sold US Navy secrets to the Soviets.

Yet things inevitably got too big and too messy. John Walker’s contempt for his wife and those around him meant that it was only a matter of time before his house of cards went tumbling down.

In the year of the spy, John Anthony Walker Jnr. was the spy of the decade.

#philipthompson #truelifespystories #johnwalker

Primary sources and further reading (afiiliate links):

📕 Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring, Pete Earley - Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring - https://amzn.to/4v0Sgjw

📘 Spy Hunter: Inside the FBI Investigation of the Walker Espionage Case, Robert W. Hunter - https://amzn.to/4ekCCYq

📕 Breaking the Ring, John Baron - https://amzn.to/3VgiKgo

Media shown in this video (affiliate links):

🎞️ On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) - https://amzn.to/4b4L9vQ

🎞️ The Vietnam War (2017) - https://amzn.to/3VqClux

Ways to support the podcast:

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Welcome to Dead Drop.

In this week's dossier:

1. A former CIA officer steals gold bars worth more than 40 million dollars; 
2. Former MI6 chief, Sir Alex Younger, dies at the age of 62; 
3. IRA spy asks a judge if she can take off her ankle tag to go wedding dress shopping; and 
4. Former MI6 chief reveals how his cover was blown by a Christmas card.

Ways to support the podcast:

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On 28 August 2013, a woman named Monica Witt sent an email from Dubai. She was about to board a flight to Tehran. The message went to a contact in Iran who had been managing her movement for months. "I'm signing off and heading out!" she wrote. "Coming home." She included a smiley-face emoji.

Witt was a former U.S. Air Force cryptologic language analyst who had held a Top Secret clearance and access to some of America’s most sensitive counterintelligence programmes.

In February 2019, a federal grand jury indicted Monica Witt on charges of conspiracy to deliver national defence information to a foreign government and two substantive counts of delivering that information. Each count carries a potential life sentence. An arrest warrant was issued, but only on 14 May 2026 was a $200,000 bounty placed on her head.

But who is she, and why does the FBI now, 13 years later, want her back so badly?

Ways to support the podcast:

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Welcome to Dead Drop.

In this week's dossier:

1. CIA conducts covert operations Mexican cartel;

2. Russia hijacks 18,000 home routers across 120 countries to silently steal credentials;

3. Austria hands down a unanimous guilty verdict in its spy trial of the century; and

4. the FBI posts a 200,000-dollar bounty for a defector to Iran.

Ways to support the podcast:

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In 1990, a German court made a finding that sent shockwaves through the Western intelligence community. If the Cold War had turned hot, NATO would have been forced to choose between capitulation and launching nuclear weapons on German soil. The man responsible was not a senior official, a diplomat, or a career intelligence officer. He was a U.S. Army sergeant from Ohio named Clyde Conrad.

For thirteen years, Conrad walked into one of the most sensitive offices in NATO's European command and sold its most secret war plans to the other side. By the time investigators found him, the damage was done. A German judge would describe him as standing at the top of the worldwide list of all known spies.

This is the full story of Clyde Conrad — his recruitment by a Hungarian-American mole inside his own unit, the thirteen-year operation that followed, the decade-long hunt to find him, and the undercover sting that finally brought him down.

📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):

📕 Damian and Mongoose: How a U.S. Army Counterespionage Agent Infiltrated an International Spy Ring by Danny L Williams - Danny L Williams

📕 Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catchers World by Stuart A. Herrington - https://amzn.to/4uVZXac

Ways to support the podcast:

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Welcome to Dead Drop.

In this week's dossier:

1. Iran hangs three men for alleged Mossad and CIA espionage as the post-war ceasefire teeters on the edge;

2. Britain records its first-ever convictions for Chinese espionage;

3. Norway seizes a 22-ton satellite receiver in a suspected Chinese plot to intercept NATO intelligence from the Arctic;

4. a leaked investigation exposes the GRU's secret hacker school embedded inside Russia's most prestigious university; and

5. two Americans are sentenced for running North Korean IT workers inside US companies.

Ways to support the podcast:

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In 1968 a Soviet nuclear submarine sank in the North Pacific with 98 men aboard. The Soviets never found it. The Americans did — and they spent six years and half a billion dollars trying to secretly raise it from three miles down. This is the story of Project Azorian: the CIA's deep-sea submarine heist.

📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate links):

📕 Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129 by Norman C. Polmar - https://amzn.to/4u7ovxg

📕 Project Azorian: The History of the CIA Operation to Recover a Sunken Soviet Submarine by Charles River Editors, KC Wayman - https://amzn.to/3ORHbSj