Secrets and Spies Podcast: Espionage | Global Issues | Current Affairs

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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Articles discussed in today’s episode

"Amateurism and organisation’: Iran’s potential role in RAF Fairford incident" by Charles Clover | Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/7a91fa6b-e908-4a28-b04f-02d5a10a6bb1

"No 10 insists RAF Fairford is safe after US withdraws its bombers from base" by Dan Sabbagh & Aletha Adu | The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/05/no-10-says-raf-fairford-safe-us-withdraws-bombers-from-base

"B-1B Bombers Make Hasty Departure From England" by Howard Altman | The War Zone: https://www.twz.com/air/b-1b-bombers-make-hasty-departure-from-england

"RAF Fairford suspects were ‘just thieves syphoning fuel’, sources" by Daniel Jae Webb | Wiltshire999s: https://www.wiltshire999s.co.uk/raf-fairford-thieves-syphoning-fuel/

"UK-Iranian dual national arrested over RAF Fairford released on bail" by Olivia Ireland | BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6d095ygggv1o

"What happened inside the Flydubai flight to Israel?" by Mitchell McCluskey & Tal Shalev | CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/30/middleeast/flydubai-israel-plane-pilot-hijacking-incident-latam-hnk-intl

"Flydubai co-pilot originally planned attack for July, investigators believe" by Jason Burke & Stephanie Kirchgaessner | The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/05/flydubai-co-pilot-originally-planned-attack-for-july-investigators-believe

"German court orders detention of former intelligence chief after spying arrest" by Kate Connolly | The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/07/germany-court-august-hanning-spying-arrest-detention-bnd

"What to Know About the Hacking Group ShinyHunters and Its F.B.I. Breach" by Chris Cameron | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/politics/shinyhunters-fbi-hacking-cybercriminal-group.html

"Embarrassing Breach at F.B.I. Fuels Fears of Harm to Its Employees" by Dustin Volz, Alan Feuer, Charlie Savage & Adam Goldman | The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/us/politics/fbi-shinyhunters-damage.html

"What Should the U.S. Government Do in Response to the FBI Hack?" by Nikita Shah | CSIS: https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-should-us-government-do-response-fbi-hack

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by USAF/Senior Airman Colin Hollowell

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.

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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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Read RANE’s 2025-2035 decade forecast here: https://go.ranenetwork.com/decade-forecast-overview-lp

More about RANE: https://www.ranenetwork.com/

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Saul Loeb/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.

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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Read Dave’s article, "What Russia Believes: Weekly Reports Reveal the Kremlin's Distorted Worldview": https://america2.news/what-russia-believes-weekly-reports-reveal-the-kremlins-distorted-worldview/

More about Dave on his website: https://about.davetroy.com/

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Sergei Bobylev / TASS

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.

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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Order The Stay Behinds: https://www.ospreypublishing.com/us/stay-behinds-9781472877567/

Read Johan’s Substack, "Our Man in Stockholm": https://johanwennstrom.substack.com/

Follow Johan on X: https://x.com/johanwennstrom

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP, Johan Wennström

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.

Journalist Gil Durán spent years in political consulting before returning to reporting, and eventually, to the beat that became the subject of his book, The Nerd Reich. He joins Chris to lay out his case that a corner of Silicon Valley has turned against democracy itself — an ideology he traces from the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, through neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, to Balaji Srinivasan’s "network state" — with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Vice President J.D. Vance at its center. His argument, Durán insists, rests on what these men have said on the record: that democracy is obsolete, that a "cognitive elite" should rule, that crypto and AI will dissolve the nation-state. He contends the movement is losing the public even as it gains power, and that the 2026 midterms will test whether that still counts.

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Order The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy:

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Secrets and Spies is produced by Films & Podcasts LTD: https://filmsandpodcasts.co.uk/

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Jessica Christian/Getty, Gil Durán

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.