Charles Beaumont spent years as an MI6 officer running human sources before turning to fiction—and his second novel, A Spy at War, carries the authority of someone who has actually done the work. Set against the early days of the Ukraine War in 2022, the book maps the architecture of Russian disinformation: corruption narratives seeded into sympathetic media, useful idiots at senior policy levels, and the Chechen enforcers whose own histories implicate Moscow in the violence that built Putin's state. His conversation with Matt covers the CIA-SIS pre-invasion intelligence coup, the fracturing transatlantic alliance, and the Global South's soft-power vacuum—arriving at a conclusion that is harder to dismiss with every passing month: that this war won't be decided in the Donbas, but in the battle for Western public opinion, a battle the West is still not sure it's fighting.
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Music by Andrew R. Bird
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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 examines the very topics that real intelligence officers and analysts consider on a daily basis through the lens of global events and geopolitics, featuring expert insights from former spies, authors, and journalists.