Season 11

Keir Giles has spent his career explaining why Russia does what it does, as an adviser to governments and a senior fellow in Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme. He returns to talk with Chris about his new book, American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame in Its Long War with Washington, which rea...

Chris and Matt open with two reports, from the Washington Post and Politico, that point to a more aggressive Pentagon intelligence posture: a planned deep-cover program with officers posing as businesspeople as part of economic warfare against China, and a quietly created Technology Support Office b...

Former U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent Pete Turner joins Chris for a conversation about what human intelligence actually looks like on the ground. Turner’s career ran from post–Cold War Germany and Bosnia through Egypt in the weeks after 9/11 to Iraq and Afghanistan, and he explains why ...

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Joby Warrick covered national security for the Washington Post for nearly three decades. In his new book, The Jackal, he turns to Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—Carlos the Jackal—the Venezuelan who in the 1970s and '80s was the most famous terrorist in the world.

Chris and Matt break down the week's biggest intelligence and geopolitical stories: what really happened at RAF Fairford, the intelligence failure behind the FlyDubai hijacking, allegations of treason against a former BND chief, and a major data leak at the FBI.