Spy Craft

Some spies steal secrets from embassies or recruit sources inside governments, but the most patient intelligence operations begin with something more ambitious: creating an entirely new human being. During the Cold War and beyond, Soviet and Russian...

What happens when the person recruiting you into espionage isn’t a mysterious intelligence officer, but your own father? John Walker built one of the most damaging Soviet spy networks in American history—and eventually brought his own son into the...

In 1981, a KGB officer secretly handed French intelligence thousands of documents exposing one of the Soviet Union’s most important technology-theft programs. Instead of simply shutting the operation down, American intelligence reportedly developed a...

In this episode, we separate the gripping fiction of The Americans from the gritty operational realities of the Cold War. While television depicts undercover Soviet operatives as lethal martial artists outsmarting federal agents at every turn, real...

When former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko fell mysteriously ill in London, doctors couldn't explain what was happening to him — until forensic testing revealed polonium-210, an almost unheard-of poison, inside his body. This episode...