SpyCast

John le Carré, born David Cornwell in 1931, was a British novelist renowned for his morally complex spy fiction. Writing under a pen name gave him the freedom to publish while he worked in both MI5 and MI6, but after the breakthrough success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he left the intel community world for go

From August to December 2016, then Marine Special Operations Officer Ivan Ingraham lived on an assault ship off the coast of Sirte, a city in northern Libya that lies between Tripoli and Benghazi. It was the hometown of Muammar Gaddafi, who invested in Sirte before dying there during Libya’s first civil war. In the mid

At the CIA headquarters in Langley, you will find Kryptos, a large curved copper panel that holds the letters to four encrypted messages. The first three messages- K1, K2, and K3- were solved in the nineties, but K4 continued to mystify cryptographers for decades. That is until Jim Sanborn, the artist who created Krypt

Bob Wallace was appointed Deputy Director of the CIA’s Office of Technical Service in 1995 and became its director three years later. In other words, he was the CIA’s “Q.” The storied office dealt in microdots and secret writing, creating innovations that spanned concealments, forged documents, surveillance equipment,

The CIA’s book club, known by the codename QRHELPFUL, was a secret 35-year program born of the fear that communism would dominate the globe. About 10 million books were smuggled into the Soviet Union during the Cold War, transported by trucks and yachts, in tins and luggage, and even dropped from balloons. The agency b

For decades, California-based engineer Chi Mak quietly stole secrets on war-fighting technologies. He and his family members shared the intelligence with spies in China, giving Beijing astounding insights they hadn’t earned. Former FBI Special Agent James Gaylord takes us back to the elaborate investigation in 2004. Ev