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 unpacks global events through the lens of intelligence and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and analysts. Tune in for balanced, critical perspectives that will expand your understanding of our uncertain world, deciphering the most…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
For years, according to a New York Times report, Mossad quietly cultivated former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust denier who once called for Israel's destruction, as the man it hoped to install in Tehran. The plan collapsed on the opening day of the war, when he lost his nerve in a Mossad safe house. Chris and Matt trace how a run of tactical brilliance curdled into strategic…
Every few months, a rumor or prediction suggests Vladimir Putin is finally cornered — a purge, a battlefield setback, a grim Victory Day parade. Former senior CIA officer Sean Wiswesser, author of Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks , says the West keeps mistaking Russia's elite infighting for weakness. Drawing on his recent Foreign Policy and Cipher Brief essays, he joins Matt to map the…
For most of its history, Germany's foreign intelligence service was built to watch, not to act — a constraint rooted in the country's experience of the Gestapo and the Stasi. A sweeping draft law would change that, letting the BND conduct sabotage, covert interference, and offensive cyber operations for the first time. Chris speaks with German investigative journalist Florian Flade, among the…
Britain is changing prime ministers again: Keir Starmer is out after two years, with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham the favourite to replace him — inheriting an underfunded defence plan and the wreckage of Peter Mandelson's Epstein-tainted appointment, all of it driven by the fear of Reform. Chris and Matt then ask what happens when the mole is a machine, using Anthropic's Claude blackmail…
For most of her career, Tulsi Gabbard may have been taking direction from a reclusive Hawaii guru — the allegation at the center of a Washington Post investigation that shadowed her out of office as Director of National Intelligence. Her replacement, federal housing-finance official Bill Pulte, arrived with no national security background and, as The Atlantic 's Shane Harris reports, may be…
Chris and Matt dig into the fine print of the U.S.-Iran memorandum signed this week by President Trump in Versailles, separating what Tehran banks immediately — sanctions relief, frozen funds, an open Strait of Hormuz — from what's still contingent on a future nuclear settlement, and why claiming victory now looks premature. From there, a Foreign Affairs piece reframes the war's aftermath: rather…
Ahana Datta Fasel began as an ethical hacker for the British government before becoming cyber chief at the Financial Times, where nation-state actors targeting journalists became a daily reality. Her PhD on the political economy of digital espionage produced Full Stack Spies: Cyber Espionage in the Age of US-China Competition , which argues that cyber operations function as a mirror of the states…
