True Life Spy Stories

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In 1990, a German court made a finding that sent shockwaves through the Western intelligence community. If the Cold War had turned hot, NATO would have been forced to choose between capitulation and launching nuclear weapons on German soil. The man responsible was not a senior official, a diplomat, or a career intelligence officer. He was a U.S. Army sergeant from Ohio named Clyde Conrad.
For thirteen years, Conrad walked into one of the most sensitive offices in NATO's European command and sold its most secret war plans to the other side. By the time investigators found him, the damage was done. A German judge would describe him as standing at the top of the worldwide list of all known spies.
This is the full story of Clyde Conrad — his recruitment by a Hungarian-American mole inside his own unit, the thirteen-year operation that followed, the decade-long hunt to find him, and the undercover sting that finally brought him down.
📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):
📕 Damian and Mongoose: How a U.S. Army Counterespionage Agent Infiltrated an International Spy Ring by Danny L Williams - Danny L Williams
📕 Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catchers World by Stuart A. Herrington - https://amzn.to/4uVZXac

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Welcome to Dead Drop.
In this week's dossier:
1. Iran hangs three men for alleged Mossad and CIA espionage as the post-war ceasefire teeters on the edge;
2. Britain records its first-ever convictions for Chinese espionage;
3. Norway seizes a 22-ton satellite receiver in a suspected Chinese plot to intercept NATO intelligence from the Arctic;
4. a leaked investigation exposes the GRU's secret hacker school embedded inside Russia's most prestigious university; and
5. two Americans are sentenced for running North Korean IT workers inside US companies.

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In 1968 a Soviet nuclear submarine sank in the North Pacific with 98 men aboard. The Soviets never found it. The Americans did — and they spent six years and half a billion dollars trying to secretly raise it from three miles down. This is the story of Project Azorian: the CIA's deep-sea submarine heist.
📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate links):
📕 Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129 by Norman C. Polmar - https://amzn.to/4u7ovxg
📕 Project Azorian: The History of the CIA Operation to Recover a Sunken Soviet Submarine by Charles River Editors, KC Wayman - https://amzn.to/3ORHbSj

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Welcome to Dead Drop. In this week's dossier:
Russia's secret unit for assassinations and sabotage finally unmasked — after one of its operatives used Google Translate to arrange a murder and was arrested in Colombia;

A former Google engineer becomes the first person convicted in the US on AI-related economic espionage charges, after stealing thousands of pages of proprietary AI technology for China; and

A FOIA lawsuit extracts internal emails revealing how America's top intelligence office quietly wiped hundreds of its own public records from the internet.

Ways to support the podcast:
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In October 1957, a young Ukrainian man walked into a Munich office building, passed a stranger on a stairwell, and killed him with a weapon that left no trace. Two years later, he did it again. Both deaths were recorded as heart attacks.On 13 August 1961, as the Berlin Wall was being erected, Bogdan Stashinsky walked into a West Berlin police station and confessed to both murders.This is the story of a KGB assassin recruited and trained to kill with a Soviet poison gun concealed in a rolled newspaper, and ultimately broken by the weight of what he had done. It is also the story of the two men he killed, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera, leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in exile, hunted by Moscow across Western Europe throughout the 1950s.Stashinsky's trial in Karlsruhe in 1962 exposed the Soviet Union's use of state-sponsored assassination to the world. His memoirs, written before the trial and lost in an archive for sixty years, were published in 2024.His whereabouts today, should he still be alive, are unknown.
📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link):
📕 The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story by Serhii Plokhy - https://amzn.to/4cHLecS
📕 Erinnerungen eines KGB-Agenten: Kontexte des Mordes an Stepan Bandera und Lew Rebet by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe