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 enigmatic professions, ideologies, and organizations that shape the global landscape.
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Our Hosts
Host Chris Carr, driven by a teenage encounter with former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, brings a unique authenticity to the podcast. His deep-seated fascination with espionage is evident in his highly acclaimed short spy film The Dry Cleaner, available on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. Currently developing feature film and television scripts inspired by the podcast's themes, Chris aims to create realistic and compelling spy dramas.
Joining him is Matt Fulton, a novelist and screenwriter who draws inspiration from masters of the spy genre like John Le Carré, Tom Clancy, and Graham Greene. Author of the Active Measures series of globe-trotting geopolitical thrillers, Matt brings his decades of extensive research and narrative prowess to the podcast, offering listeners a front-row seat to the thrilling world of covert operations.
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A Democratic Congress, a Lame-Duck President | Espresso Martini
Season 11 · Episode 11
Saturday, November 7, 2026 • Duration 01:23:05
After a midterm wave handed Democrats both houses of Congress, Chris and Matt, espresso martinis in hand, ask what the result changes for American national security. Matt lays out what the new majorities gain in January, from subpoenas to the defense budget to confirmations, and what they don’t, as the Pentagon braces for a fight over who answers for the Iran war and Pete Hegseth’s future comes into question. Chris brings the view from Europe, where relief is tempered by doubt over whether voters rejected Trumpism or just gas prices, and where capitals are weighing how to work with Congress, manage the White House and plan for what comes after. Along the way: Elon Musk, Starlink and the limits of private power over public defense, and what the transatlantic relationship can realistically become.
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Photos by US Congress, Anadolu/Getty, Andrew Harnik/Getty
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Moscow’s Endgame in Its Long War with Washington, American Overthrow | Keir Giles
Season 11 · Episode 10
Tuesday, November 3, 2026 • Duration 48:23
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 reads Trump’s second term through the lens of Kremlinology. Giles argues that the administration’s choices track closely with goals Russian strategists set out decades ago. He points to concentrating power in the presidency, dismantling the offices that guarded against foreign interference, pressing Ukraine toward a ceasefire and draining US munitions in Iran. He is equally careful about what the evidence cannot yet show: the mechanism connecting Moscow’s aims to Washington’s decisions. The conversation closes on 2028, and whether Trump follows Putin’s playbook on term limits.
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The Pentagon's Deep-Cover Plans, Israel's Deadlock, and China's Spaceplane | Espresso Martini
Season 11 · Episode 9
Saturday, October 31, 2026 • Duration 01:16:48
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 built to sabotage rivals’ military technology. The Pentagon calls the reporting “simply not true.” They weigh which model of non-official cover the Pentagon might borrow, JSOC’s or the CIA’s, and what oversight should look like. From there: MI5 Director General Ken McCallum’s annual threat update and social media’s role in radicalization; Israel’s inconclusive election, which left neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Gadi Eisenkot within reach of a majority; Austria’s expulsion of four Russian diplomats from Vienna, long a hub for Russian intelligence in Europe; and a Defense Intelligence Agency report with the clearest image yet of China’s secretive spaceplane.
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Andrew R Bird Album "Automatopia" https://music.imusician.pro/a/xfpkGB99
The Human Side of Counterintelligence | Pete A. Turner former US Army Intelligence
Season 11 · Episode 8
Saturday, October 24, 2026 • Duration 01:24:53
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 the work turned less on stealing secrets than on access: winning over wary commanders, building rapport with sheikhs and district governors, and treating interpreters as partners rather than mouthpieces. Along the way he recounts a meeting he later learned the Taliban had called to look him over, and a colleague’s hunt for a district’s shadow governor that ended at the governor’s own door. Turner, host of the Break It Down Show, closes on what the job taught him about human nature.
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Carlos the Jackal and the Return of Terror for Hire | Joby Warrick
Season 11 · Episode 7
Sunday, October 18, 2026 • Duration 56:21
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. Matt talks with Warrick about Carlos’s rise, from the audacious 1975 OPEC siege in Vienna to his years as a gun for hire in the Soviet bloc, and about the book’s sharpest argument: that Carlos was less a true believer than a narcissist in love with his own legend. They close on why his story matters now as the deniable, mercenary terror Carlos pioneered is back, in the contract attacks Russia and Iran are running across the West. Only this time, the hired hands have no wish to be famous.
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Podcast Update | This Weekend's Episode Coming Sunday
Season 1
Friday, October 16, 2026 • Duration 00:23
A quick programming note: this weekend’s episode will be out on Sunday, October 18, rather than our usual Saturday release. We’re taking an extra day in the edit on Matt’s conversation with national security reporter Joby Warrick about Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born militant who became one of the Cold War’s most wanted men. Thanks for your patience, and we’ll see you Sunday.
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RAF Fairford, Flydubai, and the FBI | Espresso Martini
Season 11 · Episode 6
Saturday, October 10, 2026 • Duration 01:03:11
Chris and Matt start at RAF Fairford, where the arrest of five men outside the US bomber base, their swift release on bail, and a widening inquiry into possible Iranian involvement were followed by the abrupt return of all twelve American B-1Bs to the United States. They turn to flydubai Flight 1072, where the co-pilot attacked his captain with the cockpit crash axe en route to Tel Aviv, and to the reported red flags that didn’t follow him from one airline to the next. In Germany, former BND president August Hanning has been arrested on suspicion of espionage and treason, allegedly fed classified files by a serving insider. And ShinyHunters’ breach of the FBI’s jobs portal may have exposed the home addresses and assignments of Bureau personnel. They close with what the summer’s listener survey told them.
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What the Next 10 Years Look Like: China, Russia, Europe and AI | Sam Lichtenstein RANE
Season 11 · Episode 5
Saturday, October 3, 2026 • Duration 59:04
Sam Lichtenstein, director of analysis at the global risk intelligence firm RANE, returns to walk Chris through RANE's 2025–2035 decade forecast: a multipolar world in which no great power has the will or the means to set the rules. The big calls include a China turned inward by economic and demographic strain even as its coercion of Taiwan intensifies; a Europe pushed toward integration as the American security anchor weakens; a Russia that won't remain a pariah forever; intra-Sunni rivalry reshaping the Middle East; and global jihad's center of gravity settling in the Sahel. They also cover AI's disruption of white-collar work, climate change as a threat multiplier, and a splintering internet. Throughout, Sam is candid about the limits of the exercise, including why the Iran war, which dominates the present, may not define the decade.
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Russia’s worldview, disinformation, and the politics of influence | Dave Troy
Season 11 · Episode 4
Saturday, September 26, 2026 • Duration 01:07:34
Every week, the Security Council of the Russian Federation publishes a digest of world events as Moscow sees them. Investigative journalist Dave Troy has been reading them closely, and he argues they matter not because they’re accurate, but because they show the story the Kremlin tell itself and its allies. Dave returns to the show to talk with Chris about his piece "What Russia Believes." His central claim is that the Kremlin sees the war in Ukraine less as a fight over territory than as a contest over the shape of the world order itself — and its real campaign is the slow export of that worldview into the West through proxies and information warfare, a war the West has been slow to recognize as one. They also get into why Washington keeps misreading Moscow, the spiritual and conspiratorial currents Putin curates rather than invents, and how "sovereignty," disinformation, and even UFO culture serve the same end.
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The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians | Johan Wennström
Season 11 · Episode 3
Saturday, September 19, 2026 • Duration 01:09:32
Beginning in 1949, officially non-aligned Sweden did something it kept secret for half a century: in close cooperation with the CIA and MI6, it built a clandestine civilian resistance network meant to outlast a Soviet occupation and fight on from within. Its members were ordinary people, farmers, salesmen, gamekeepers, organized into cells that never met. In this episode, Matt talks with Johan Wennström of the Swedish Defence University, whose book The Stay Behinds: Sweden’s Cold War Guardians is the first in-depth English account of the network — the tradecraft, the human cost, and why it suddenly speaks to a Europe at war and a Sweden newly inside NATO during the alliance’s most uncertain moment in a generation.
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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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Photos by Eric Lee/NYT, Canva, Aaron Favila/Reuters
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Photos by Jack Guez/AFP, AFP/Getty, Marvin Joseph/WaPo
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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