True Life Spy Stories

By Philip ThompsonHistory

True Life Spy Stories episodes

November 04 Binance Theft | The Hackers Propping Up Kim's Failed State
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On the evening of 29 October 2026, around $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency was drained from Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange. Most of it went in about twenty minutes. It’s the largest theft of cryptocurrency on record, and the FBI has blamed a North Korean hacking unit it calls TraderTraitor. Pyongyang calls the accusation a political provocation.
This is the story of the Lazarus Group, the government hackers who have become one of the main things keeping Kim Jong Un’s regime afloat. Phil Thompson follows the trail from a single compromised laptop to the record-breaking heists at ByBit, Drift and Bitget. He looks at how stolen crypto is turned into real money through the “Chinese Laundromat”, and at the other ways North Korea earns cash: fake IT workers hired by Western companies, wig factories, and soldiers sent to fight for Russia in exchange for oil.
He also looks at where the money ends up, in a country whose legitimate exports barely reach $470 million a year but which is building hypersonic missiles and a nuclear-powered submarine.
15 min
October 29 RAF Fairford | What We Know Of The Major Incident Declared In The UK
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A farmer, three vans, a quantity of petrol, and a handler known only as “Ali”. In September, masked men were arrested a couple of miles from RAF Fairford, the Cotswolds base used by US bombers to strike Iran. The UK government says Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was almost certainly behind it, and two men have now been charged under the National Security Act.
In this episode, I look at what happened that night, what prosecutors have alleged in court, how Iran recruits local criminals in the UK, and why the American bombers have since gone home.
11 min
October 24 Wandering Soul | The U.S. Army's Spookiest PsyOp
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In February 1970, funeral gongs, weeping women, and the voices of dead soldiers echoed through the jungles of Vietnam. They weren't ghosts. They were a US Army psychological operation built on one fear: dying unburied, far from home.
Operation Wandering Soul used recordings, loudspeakers, and leaflets to turn Vietnamese beliefs about restless spirits into a weapon. This video covers how the tapes were made, how they were deployed from helicopters, boats, and the ground, what the Viet Cong did in response, and whether any of it actually worked. It also looks at the earlier playbook of Edward Lansdale and his vampire ruse in the Philippines, the North Vietnamese broadcaster known as Hanoi Hannah, the Mind War paper of 1980, and how Ukraine's "I Want to Live" project echoes these tactics today.
#Vietnam #PSYOP #Espionage #History #WanderingSoul
21 min
October 16 Operation Grim Beeper | How Mossad Turned Hezbollah's Pagers Into Bombs
Originally aired on 2/16/26, now expanded with new details on the story and republished in full video!
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In September 2024, thousands of pagers exploded across Lebanon in a single afternoon. The devices had been built by Israeli intelligence, packed with explosives, and sold to Hezbollah through a network of fake companies stretching from Budapest to Sofia. The operation had been ten years in the making. This is the story of Operation Grim Beeper.
23 min
October 10 August Hanning | The Spy Scandal of the Century is Happening Right Now
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On 6 October 2026, German police arrested August Hanning, the former head of the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence service. It's the equivalent of a former director of the CIA or chief of MI6 being arrested on suspicion of treason.
Prosecutors allege that for 12 years his former chief of staff, Manfred Dankesreiter, supplied him with around 2,000 secret BND documents in return for payment. Hanning allegedly used them in his private security consultancy, and some of the material may have reached foreign intelligence services. Both men deny the core allegations, and neither has been indicted.
The case only came to light by accident, through a police investigation into the kidnapping of two children from Denmark by a German steakhouse heiress.
This is what we know so far.
20 min
September 29 The Sparrows | Author Jason Bell Tells The Incredible True Story of The Spies That Tricked Hitler and Won the War
Pick up your copy of Operation Sparrow at ⁠https://link.amazon/B02NMVdls⁠ (affiliate link)
Learn more: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/operation-sparrow-jason-bell?variant=45398167388194
Author's website:Jason's website: https://jasonbell.org/
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In this episode I sit down with author and professor Jason Bell to discuss the incredible story of the Sparrows, a World War 2 spy story that has been hidden from history, until now. Jason's new book Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War, is out now!
1 hr 9 min
September 24 Viktor Belenko | The Soviet Pilot Who Stole A MiG-25
Originally aired 1 July 2026 as an audio-only episode. Now fully edited as a video documentary.
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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
28 min
September 14Intel Dossier | Russian Sub Plots To Cut Western Internet
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Welcome to this week's Intel Dossier:
A Swindon man is denied bail over an alleged plot to sabotage UK drone factories for Russia;
Two more Britons are arrested on suspicion of spying for Iran;
Russian submarine crews rehearse cutting NATO's Arctic internet cables; and
A Sydney consultant is jailed for feeding gossip to Chinese intelligence.
11 min
September 11 Agent Krasnov | Is the US President a Russian Agent?
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A single Facebook post from an exiled ex-Soviet intelligence chief claimed Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 under the codename "Krasnov." This episode traces the claim from its source through the fact-checks, the older "cultivated asset" theory from Craig Unger's American Kompromat, and the documented record of Trump's 1987 Moscow trip, weighing what's evidence and what's speculation.
📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate links):
📕 American Kompromat: how the KGB cultivated Donald Trump and related tales of sex, greed, power, and treachery by Craig Unger
Full source list for every claim in this episode: https://pastebin.com/1FMkhBrG
14 min
September 04 Bridge of Spies | The Dramatic Spy Swap That Defined The Cold War
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On 10 February 1962, two men stood on opposite ends of a bridge in Potsdam and waited for a signal. One was a Soviet illegal who'd spent nine years posing as a Brooklyn artist. The other was the American U-2 pilot shot down over Sverdlovsk two years earlier. This is the story of Rudolf Abel and Francis Gary Powers, the men who negotiated their exchange, and the third prisoner almost nobody remembers.
📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate links):
📕 Bridge of Spies by Giles Whittell - https://amzn.to/46BVhfB
📘 KGB Man: The Cold War's Most Notorious Soviet Agent and the First to be Exchanged at the Bridge of Spies by Cecil Kuhne - https://amzn.to/4ymmkrl
📕 Spy Pilot: Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 Incident, and a Controversial Cold War Legacy by Francis Gary Powers Jr. - https://amzn.to/3UxopSI
📘 Abel: The True Story of the Spy They Traded for Gary Powers by Vin Arthey - https://amzn.to/4cpMb98
27 min

About True Life Spy Stories

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Step into the shadow realm of spies, secrets, and subterfuge with the True Life Spy Stories Podcast. Join Philip Thompson as he meticulously deconstructs real-life espionage stories bringing history's…