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

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

Iran, China, and the New Middle East with Ahmed Aboudouh from Chatham House

Iran, China, and the New Middle East with Ahmed Aboudouh from Chatham House

Ahmed Aboudouh from Chatham House joins Chris to assess the shifting power dynamics of the Middle East, arguing that China has no coherent regional strategy and that Arab states want a normalised Iran rather than a weakened one. With the Abraham Accords effectively dead, he warns that the US faces a...

S10 Ep48: Think Like a Spy: What Intelligence Work Really Teaches About People | Julian Fisher

S10 Ep48: Think Like a Spy: What Intelligence Work Really Teaches About People | Julian Fisher

Julian Fisher spent his career as a British intelligence operative before distilling what he learned into the Think Like a Spy: Strategic Relations Workshop—and his central argument is counterintuitive: the most transferable lessons from intelligence work aren't classified techniques, they're interp...

S10 Ep47: A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit : CIA, MI6, and Covert Action in Cold War Albania with Stephen Long

S10 Ep47: A Rich Harvest of Bitter Fruit : CIA, MI6, and Covert Action in Cold War Albania with Stephen Long

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, CIA and MI6 launched an audacious series of clandestine operations to infiltrate and destabilize Communist Albania — and lost nearly every agent they sent in. Historian Stephen Long, Assistant Professor in International Relations at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool Univers...

S10 Ep46: Espresso Martini | Gabbard Resigns, Trump Meets Xi, and China's Capitol Hill Spy Pitch

S10 Ep46: Espresso Martini | Gabbard Resigns, Trump Meets Xi, and China's Capitol Hill Spy Pitch

Chris and Matt break down a packed few weeks in intelligence and geopolitics, opening with the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence — a departure framed officially around her husband's illness but widely read as an exit under pressure. Drawing on a Bulwark piece by forme...

S10 Ep45: America’s War Powers Crisis with Brian Finucane

S10 Ep45: America’s War Powers Crisis with Brian Finucane

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Congress hasn't formally done so since 1942. Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and current senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, joins Matt to make sense of how that happened — and what it means now that the Un...