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

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 His argument, Durán insists, rests on what these men have said on the record: that democracy is obsolete, that a "cognitive elite" should rule, that crypto and AI will dissolve the nation-state.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:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Gil-Duran/243113363

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-nerd-reich-silicon-valley-fascism-and-the-war-on-democracy-gil-dur-n/a6f6f0dce1150339

Follow Gil’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheNerdReichNews

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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.

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Chris and Matt open season eleven, and Secrets & Spies’ tenth anniversary, with three stories from a busy August. First, CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow, a rare visit by an agency chief since Bill Burns went in 2021, reportedly carrying a blunt warning against testing NATO amid U.S. assessments that a cornered Russia might attempt a limited probe of the alliance. Then, a New Yorker investigation into how Iran now reaches its critics abroad by renting the local underworld — Romanian petty criminals, teenagers recruited over Snapchat — a "cutout of a cutout" model built to defeat the way security services watch known threats. Finally, they discuss a new Foreign Affairs piece that pushes back against transatlantic-alliance fatalism.

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Articles discussed in today’s episode

"Claims Swirl Around CIA Director’s Reason For Secret Moscow Visit, Nearly All Of Them Are Terrifying" by Howard Altman & Tyler Rogoway | The War Zone: https://www.twz.com/news-features/claims-swirl-around-cia-directors-reason-for-secret-moscow-visit-nearly-all-of-them-are-terrifying

"CIA Director Ratcliffe Lands in Moscow Aboard C-17 With New Mobile SCIF" by Scott McCain | Tech Times: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/325483/20260825/cia-director-ratcliffe-lands-moscow-aboard-c-17-new-mobile-scif.htm

"Iran Is Using Foreign Criminals to Attack Its Critics Overseas" by Cora Engelbrecht | The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/iran-is-using-foreign-criminals-to-attack-its-critics-overseas

"How Alliances Survive: The Case Against Pessimism and the Path to a New Allied Order" by Kurt M. Campbell & Rush Doshi | Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-alliances-survive-campbell-doshi

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Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by AP/John McDonnell & Tom Brenner

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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Before Bletchley Park, there was Reginald "Blinker" Hall, the Admiralty’s mercurial intelligence chief whose codebreakers read Germany’s wireless traffic during World War I, giving Britain a front-row seat to the plot behind the 1916 Easter Rising. His target was Sir Roger Casement: a diplomat knighted for exposing colonial atrocities, turned Irish rebel, caught after a U-boat put him ashore in Kerry. Rory Carroll, The Guardian’s Ireland correspondent and acclaimed author of Killing Thatcher, joins Chris to trace the manhunt — and Casement’s "Black Diaries," the still-contested record of his private life that Hall leaked to break a clemency campaign in an early act of information warfare. A century on, Casement’s bones and his reputation remain unfinished business between Britain and Ireland.

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Order Rory’s book, A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FS44H5RZ

Find more about Rory on his website: https://www.rorycarroll.co.uk/

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

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by Hulton Archive, Bettmann

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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Peter J. Ortiz was the most battle-decorated member of the OSS, America’s wartime forerunner to the CIA, and one of the most decorated Marines of the Second World War. In 1944, the former French Foreign Legionnaire twice parachuted into occupied France to arm the Maquis, sabotage German lines, and feed intelligence to London ahead of D-Day. Chris speaks with former Marine and CIA historian Nicholas Reynolds and journalist Katie S. Sanders—whose grandfather, a downed airman, was among those Ortiz rescued—about their book Ortiz’s War, and the moment when Ortiz surrendered to a hundred Germans to spare a village.

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Order Ortiz’s War: https://www.harpercollinsfocus.com/harper-horizon/ortizs-war/

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https://www.nicholasreynoldsauthor.com/

https://www.katiessanders.com/

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

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photos by Marine Corps History Division, Imperial War Museums

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.

GPS is the rare piece of infrastructure most of us never think about until it fails — and it is failing more often, in more places, by design. In Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World, journalist Katherine Dunn traces the system from its Cold War origins — wartime radio beams, Vietnam's precision-bombing problem, the Soviet shock of Sputnik — to its current role underpinning modern life, governing not just where we are but the precise time that keeps power grids, markets, and supply chains in sync. Chris talks with Dunn about how a taxpayer-funded military tool became invisible civilian scaffolding, and how it turned into a battlefield: Russian jamming and spoofing from the Black Sea to the Baltics, ships that appear at airports, a drone war fought over the electromagnetic spectrum, and what it means when certainty itself becomes a target.

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Order Little Blue Dot: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/little-blue-dot-how-the-global-positioning-system-shaped-the-modern-world-katherine-dunn/c5ae27c07c3864a5

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1639734317

Learn more about Katherine on her website: katherinedunn.me/

Connect with Katherine on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/katherine-dunn-journalist/

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

Music by Andrew R. Bird

Photo by Katherine Dunn, Canva

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.