John Kiriakou's Dead Drop

IN THIS EPISODE As the hot war - WW2 - ended, a "cooler" but equally fervent Cold War replaced it. The stay-behind networks described in episode one quickly became a whole subset of cold warriors. How the Cold War happened - and why - and how that set the stage for the life and death struggle that would pit old allies against each other. Walking onto that stage as Sweden's Prime Minister, Olof Palme (judging by his social class) should have been a safe bet. He was anything but. A committed socialist, Palme drove Sweden to the left - making it both prosperous and happpy. But he also wanted to negotiate with the Soviets and halt all nuclear proliferation. That made some Western leaders nervous. It made others angry enough to do something about it. Like set an assassination plot in motion.

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IN THIS EPISODE One of the most remarkable stories that no one knows - which is remarkable in itself - is the assassinatioin of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on a Stockholm street on February 28, 1986. Palme's murder is to Sweden what JFK's is to America: a demarcation point between a sense of goodness and integrity, and corruption. As of now, the crime still remains unsolved - though much work has gone into trying to figure out who did this terrible thing and why. Though we may think the Cold War is a museum piece, we still live in the darkest part of its shadow. The assassination of Olof Palme wasn't just a dark day in Sweden's history. It was a dark day in lots of other places, too - including the United States - because the US may have been guilty of helping that assassination happen. In episode 1 of this 7 part series, we'll introduce you to the "Stay-Behinds", a secret, anti-fascist army made for World War Two but repurposed - and rebranded as anti-Communist - for the Cold War, with branches and combatants all over Western Europe.

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IN THIS EPISODE In the previous two Spy Academy episodes, we talked about liars and how to spot them. Now it's time to put all that knowledge to good use as we deep dive into interrogating a true psychopath, the former leader of Iraq Saddam Hussein. While it would be easy to see Saddam as an unsophisticated bumpkin, it also would be a profound mistake. Saddam may have struggled to understand American motives and actions in the lead up to the American invasion of Iraq, but he understood his corner of the world as well as if not better than anyone. As he stared across the table at his interrogator, Saddam believed he was the host and that the Americans were his guests. In fact, Saddam was so cagey that he managed to interrogate his interrogators even as they were interrogating him. This episode's guest, former intelligence officer John Nixon, had studied Saddam, for years; getting the chance to interrogate the man himself, truly a monster metaphorically speaking, was not just a career-defining moment, it was a personal triumph.

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IN THIS EPISODE

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If you're enjoying Dead Drop, podcast, please check out the rest of Costard & Touchstone's family of podcasts. They cover everything from journalism to Chinese medicine to culture to self help. Your next great podcast obsession is just a click away!
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IN THIS EPISODE Welcome to John Kiriakou's Spy Academy! Whether chatting with someone informally or conducting a full-on interrogation, every spy needs to know whether or not the person they're talking to is being truthful with them. To get to the bottom of that, we'll start with defining our terms: what do we even mean by "lies" and "liars"? Whether we call them white lies, fibs, fabrications or whoppers, lies cover a lot of psychological territory. Before we can interrogate our liar, we need to understand just how many kinds of liars - and lies - we could encounter.

SHOW NOTES
If you're enjoying Dead Drop, podcast, please check out the rest of Costard & Touchstone's family of podcasts. They cover everything from journalism to Chinese medicine to culture to self help. Your next great podcast obsession is just a click away!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.