Tradecraft, Part 9
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The new Showtime original series, The Agency, is now streaming on Paramount+. The all-new political thriller follows Marcin, played by Michael Fassbender, a covert CIA agent ordered to abandon his undercover life and return to London Station.

When the love he left behind reappears, romance reignites. His career, his real identity and his mission are pitted against his heart, hurling them both into a deadly game of international intrigue and espionage. The 10-episode spy thriller features a stellar cast, including Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith and Richard Gere.

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What do they know?

What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Tradecraft says you should in no way draw attention to yourself. You should do absolutely everything to make yourself seem as ordinary as possible. Welcome to True Spies, Tradecraft.

You lived on edge all the time. You never had a day off. It was 24-7 of always being on because you never knew when the phone was going to ring. Do you feel safe? Will they come after you? In this episode of True Spies, we're scouring the archive to bring you the best examples of tradecraft used by our guests in the operations we've spoken to them about in 2024.

As regular listeners will know, spies use tradecraft skills in every aspect of their work to stay grey, surveil a target undetected or, as in our first example, to change the course of human history. The process of codebreaking is really about seeing patterns and repetitions and it involves feats of almost unimaginable mental gymnastics that most people would just not be able to do in a million years.

This is Jackie Ikuna, lecturer in history at the University of Galway. In the True Spies episode, Cribs, Codes and Cairo, Jackie shone a light on the well-respected classical musicologist, Emily Anderson. Alongside Emily's academic work, she held down a day job as a civil servant in the British Foreign Office.

That was the story, anyway. It's acknowledged at the highest levels of British intelligence, even today, that she was by far and away the best ever of the female codebreakers. It was during an interview for the BBC in 1961 about a book she'd just published, a translation of the complete letters of Beethoven, that she hinted at what she really did for the Foreign Office during World War II.

She talks about figuring out the handwriting of Beethoven, how she looked at him and she studied it again and again and again and you wonder what that letter is and then you think, ah, it could be this. And then you use that letter as a crib. Regular True Spies listeners might know that a crib is a code-breaking technique.

Emily picked up that know-how during her first posting at MI1B, the Army's London-based cryptanalysis unit during World War II. So not strictly the Foreign Office, but close enough. Working in shifts around the clock, Emily and her colleagues attacked the enemy's diplomatic messages.

In other words, she was listening in to the embassies and the ambassadors and the politicians talking to each other about strategies and intentions and ambitions. But it wasn't quite as simple as that. While you could hear these messages over the wireless, they were heavily encoded. To the point, in fact, where it often wasn't even clear which language they were originally in.

But if you are skilled in looking at patterns and repetitions, it's much easier to recognize, firstly, what language you're decoding. Because if you get a message, it comes in blocks of five numbers and letters. And a skilled cryptographer would look at that page and say, OK, that's looking like it's a verb. It's a German verb. Most German verbs end in an "-en".

If I'm seeing on the page where a verb is likely to be and it looks like it's en but in the form of qr, then that's very likely to be a German code. These patterns give you your crib, a key into the code's broader structure. But finding a way into the code was only the start for A Mind Like Emily's. The next phase involved a process called book building.

And book builders are not just those who were given a page of Morse code and are asked to break it and make sense of it. She started looking at patterns of building blocks for the codes in whatever language it was. She's going back to how the original cryptanalysts would have created that code by breaking it down and reverse engineering it in one way. A book builder like Emily would compile all these cribs, systemizing all these keys into a template.

a template that could then be applied to each language of code. And that's what book building was about. It was about finding the keys, the ways to get into those codes. By the end of World War II, Emily Anderson had perfected code-breaking in a fifth language. Not bad for a civil servant. We go from code-breaking in the 20th century to its equivalent in the 21st.

Well, code-breaking of sorts. His password ended up being Chewy12345. Chewy was the name of the cat. This is FBI cybersecurity agent Chris Tarbell. In the True Spies episode, The Silk Road Bust, Chris told the story of the most notorious online black market in internet history and how the FBI brought it down. In the process, it ruined the man who ran Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht.

known online as DPR. DPR is Dread Pirate Roberts. He's the system admin or the guy running the show, or as his words put it on the site, the captain of the ship. And if you didn't like the rules, you could get off his ship. Those were his quotes. For the purposes of this episode, we're focusing on the climactic arrest of DPR. The FBI has to catch him in the act, meaning they have to catch him sitting at his laptop.

The laptop must be opened and logged in. Only then can they access his online kingdom. The proof that he is indeed the man behind Silk Road. After some digging around online, Chris's team tracks Ross down. He lives in San Francisco. It's 2013. Chris and his New York team are in San Francisco, making early preparations for the plan to arrest.

Chris knows that the local branch of the FBI has jurisdiction here, and they have to play by their rules. But in the back of his mind, he really wants his team to be the one to make the arrest. He'd worked too hard on it to give that pleasure over to the Californians, so he gathers his crew for a private debrief.

We're out in San Francisco. We meet up for dinner. I talk about the plan and explain to him that we need to make this arrest so this laptop stays alive. This is our big plan. There had been some talkings that Ross had a degausser or a device that you hit a button and it blows away the whole hard drive. So all about keep the laptop alive. They even go to a local electronics store to buy, as he describes it, every adapter that was available to make sure Ross's laptop stays switched on.

The New York crew have their plan, but they are still at the mercy of the San Francisco office. The local FBI supervisor has made it clear that they are planning to catch Ross their way with a SWAT team. But in the case of cybercrime, nuance makes for a better bust than gun-toting Hollywood swagger. So the boss thinks about it another way. He goes, OK, we'll send in three SWAT teams.

He was going to have a SWAT team rappel down from a helicopter, one come up through the basement and one break through his window. And I said, you can't do that. It's not going to work. He'll close it. The local boss reluctantly gives Chris another day. He's tracking Ross's movements in order to catch him in the act. But Ross is a no-show. The following afternoon, the local FBI calls a briefing down in San Jose to plan the SWAT team's maneuvers. The operation is to take place the next morning.

Time is running out for Chris to catch him the way he wants to.

Just when I'm about to leave, we got a call from the surveillance team that Ross just walked out of his house and he's got a laptop bag over his shoulder. So we scatter. We go and run. I come out of the cafe and take a left and I go into the crosswalk and there's Ross right in the middle of the crosswalk. It's just me and him going head on. I have an arrest warrant in my pocket. I got my gun. I got my cuffs. I'm ready to throw him on the ground. Good to go. Case over. But I remembered that we got to get the laptop. So I just walked past him.

An average 29-year-old white American male, mild-mannered, slender, almost forgettable-looking, walks into a library. It sounds like the start of a joke, but this is Ross Ulbricht, one of the most notorious drug barons of the 21st century. He logs on. Chris gives the signal for the plainclothes agents to move in.

He reminds them, if Ross runs, let him go. The important thing is to get the laptop. A female agent who, you know, she'll tell you she's five feet tall. I don't think she's five feet tall. She sat at the same table reading a magazine. He's a drug czar in a billion dollar empire sitting across from an FBI agent at a library table. An older male agent and female agent walk behind Ross and the female agent cocks her hand back and punches the male agent right in the jaw and says, fuck you.

Ross thought that was pretty exciting, so he turned around to take a look at them. And the five foot tall, she's five feet tall, little agent sitting across from her just simply pulled the laptop across to her and kept it open and alive and unlocked. Handed it off to Tom Kiernan, who then plugged it in and kept it alive. Those power adapters were money well spent. While Tom makes sure to keep the precious laptop alive, another agent explains to Ross that he is under arrest.

I handcuffed him and brought him downstairs, read him his rights, and then showed him his arrest warrant that said Ross Ulbrich, a.k.a. DPR, a.k.a. Dred Bryant Roberts. And it sort of kind of washed over his face after that. While we may never know the true scale of Silk Road, we do know that the FBI seized at least 144,000 bitcoins. In 2013, they would have been worth around $28 million.

And that's only what they were able to recover. Not bad for an otherwise unremarkable 29-year-old. The new Showtime original series, The Agency, is now streaming on Paramount+. The all-new political thriller follows Marcin, played by Michael Fassbender, a covert CIA agent ordered to abandon his undercover life and return to London Station.

When the love he left behind reappears, romance reignites. His career, his real identity, and his mission are pitted against his heart, hurling them both into a deadly game of international intrigue and espionage. The 10-episode spy thriller features a stellar cast, including Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Richard Gere. ♪

New episodes of The Agency are now streaming on the Paramount Plus with Showtime plan. Visit ParamountPlus.com to get started. Time to move? Skip the hassles of selling during the holiday season and sell your home directly to Opendoor. Request an all-cash offer in minutes, close, and get paid in days. You can even pick your close date so you can move after New Year's. Start your move at Opendoor.com or download the Opendoor app.

Opendoor is represented by Opendoor Brokerage Inc., licensed 02061130 in California, and Opendoor Brokerage LLC in its other markets. Terms and conditions apply. We aren't saying every normal-looking person is up to something nefarious, but it gives you a head start if you want to commit espionage. Our next vignette is all about the value of hiding in plain sight.

If you are like Sonia, Tradecraft says you should in no way draw attention to yourself. You should do absolutely everything to make yourself seem as ordinary as possible. Meet Professor Anthony Glees, a lifetime professor at the University of Buckingham and former director of two centres for the study of security and intelligence policy. In the two-part True Spy story, Sonia's Red Heart,

We learned about one of the most notorious spies of the 20th century, German communist Ursula Kaczynski, codename Sonia. Anthony also happens to live in rural Oxfordshire in the UK, not far from the very spot where the winds of fate deposited our next true spy during the Second World War. Sonia had lived an amazing 20th century life, highly dangerous,

Very courageous. And it was in the leafy villages of Woodstock, Kidlington, Glimpton and Great Rollwright, between 1941 and 1950, that Agent Sonia carried out her boldest acts of espionage. For nine years, she slipped through the net of the British intelligence services, posing as a scone-baking mother and homemaker, a pillar of her local community.

But crucial to her cover was... She let everybody know that she was a wireless operator. And how did she let everybody know she was a wireless operator? Well, by erecting wireless aerials everywhere she appeared to be living. Which is how she delivered the closest guarded secrets of the Anglo-American Atomic Project...

directly to the Soviet Union. This rather small, sprightly woman with sparkling bright eyes was one of the most important intelligence officers that the Soviet Union possessed at the time. Which came with risks when you're transmitting top-secret information from Britain to the Soviet Union using a wireless radio.

So for Sonia, the huge risk was that MI5 would pick up one of her radio messages. They would assume that it could be a German agent operating in Oxford. What Sonia had to do was continue to send messages to the Soviet Union, but not be discovered.

by people who were both technically adept at the discovery, because not least they wanted to get German spies, but also understood that she was a communist and that therefore she might be up to something. Picture the scene. Sonia plays with her three children in the morning, bakes some scones in the early afternoon and then delivers them to her favourite neighbours en route to meet Klaus Fuchs,

one of the most notorious and devastatingly effective atomic spies of the 20th century. They would go for a stroll in the park, where Fuchs would relay the most valuable secrets of the British nuclear project to Sonia. Sonia would then pass this information on to the Soviets. She found an extremely ingenious way of doing that. Sonia's radio was no secret. Her neighbours noticed the aerials,

In fact, MI5, the radio security service and special branch, even knew its precise location. And because they knew the precise location, they could quickly verify that she wasn't using it at all.

They'd even come round to have a look. What they didn't twig was that Sonia and her new husband, Len Burton, had hired a second house north of Summertown on the road to Kidlington at 134 Oxford Road, Kidlington.

And that house, in my opinion, was the key house where Sonia's real radio equipment and functioning aerials were utilised by her. It was this house that Antony believes was used almost exclusively for the communication to the Soviets of Klaus Fuchs' material from October 1942 to December 1943.

This was at the height of his contribution to the Tube Alloys Project, Britain's programme to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. And why was that not discovered? A simple matter of wireless radio traffic. It was right next to, literally 200 metres, 300 metres, next to a wartime airport at Kiddlington in Oxford. And for obvious reasons...

There were radio signals going out and going in all the time at that airport. And it would be impossible for anybody to work out what was an RAF signal and what was a signal possibly used by a Soviet communications officer. No wonder she was thought by many to be Stalin's favourite spy.

Three years after her daughter's been kidnapped, Miriam has kind of established herself as the preeminent investigator for the cause of the missing and the disappeared. And the more she knows, the more she realizes the specific danger she's in. And yet she knows that she's not going to stop. This is New York Times journalist Azem Ahmed speaking about Miriam Rodriguez's

a 56-year-old Mexican shopkeeper and grieving mother who took on the cartel that murdered her daughter, the Zetas. The Zetas and others were pioneering new ways to inflict cruelty on their enemies. In True Spies 2 Parter, The Disappeared,

Arzem told the story of how Miriam turned into someone feared by the Zetas. She's sort of like a general contractor of her own justice. It's just an absolute ironclad resoluteness to do the unthinkable, to basically take on a suicide mission. To find the person who murdered her daughter, she becomes a special kind of spy, combining open-source intelligence, undercover casework, and investigative skills,

she's devastatingly effective. It's 2016 in Tamaulipas, a northeastern state of Mexico. Using her suspect's nickname, Miriam is doing a social media deep dive. She's seeing profiles of his family members and, crucially, where some of them live. Posing as a newcomer to the area, Miriam introduced herself to her new neighbor, the Zeta members' grandmother.

And so began spending time with her as casual friends. After a few weeks, she inquires about the grandmother's family. What about the man whose picture is on the mantelpiece? His grandmother says, oh, he's, you know, he's doing really well. Finally, he's a born again Christian. And he's actually involved with this evangelical church in Ciudad Victoria. It's located here. Miriam starts attending the church every day. After a couple of weeks, she's sure the altar boy is here.

That's him. And she orchestrates the arrest. Miriam Rodriguez is mastering the art of investigation. She slowly arms this remarkable and diffuse campaign. And what she comes to realize is investigations are no magic endeavor. They are just about effort. It's about showing up at the ice cream store day after day after day. It is about action.

calling numbers until you find the person willing to admit they are the relative of so-and-so and then concocting a ruse that allows you to get close to them but while espionage is often a monotonous process Miriam knows it also requires moments of creativity by pretending to be someone else she finds where these centers are located including one who has now also gone clean got a formal job

But she doesn't know where. So she cleverly goes to the Social Security Agency of Mexico. Because she knows this person has a formal job, formal employment, she knows he'll be in there. At the agency, Miriam befriends one of the clerks. She helps Miriam look up the person's information, gives her his birth certificate, gives her his address. After Miriam hands all the information over to her police contacts, this target is also arrested.

Now four Zetas are behind bars, all because of Miriam. She is the wizard pulling all the strings, the person with the master plan who is feeding information and strategically placing information in the hands of the police. Eventually, Miriam becomes so knowledgeable about the Zetas' operation that the authorities are turning to her for intel on the group.

Who the key players are, how they operate. She becomes an incredibly valuable asset, having real deep relationships with the police and with prosecutors. But it's not just the Zetas Miriam's building intelligence against.

She's also developing legal expertise to ensure they stay behind bars. She reads all the victims' rights laws. She begins taking courses to understand how the law is meant to work so that she can use it against the authorities denying her justice. Like, no, no, no, when someone breaks into a home and something is stolen, that elevates the level of crime they've committed. Therefore, when we arrest this person, we need to charge them like this because that will mean more time in prison when they're convicted.

Soon, Miriam Rodriguez is known across Tamaulipas and beyond. She has established herself as the preeminent investigator for the cause of the missing and the disappeared. But there was one Zeta that even Miriam was struggling to gather any intel on. Someone that she referred to as El Florero. A relatively recent recruit, El Florero's whereabouts had proven elusive. That is, El Florero.

Until Miriam finally discovered who the man's closest friend was in the group. While the friend was now dead, his wife was not. So Miriam posed as an old friend of her husband's, wanting to get back in touch. Building a rapport with the widow, she asks about her husband's friends. Whatever happened to El Florero? Miriam asks. The widow, sure enough, gives her his location. On a bridge in Matamoros selling sunglasses.

Miriam heads for the bridge, alone. Spotting her mark, she pulls a pistol from her purse. Approaching from behind, she inches up to him. And holds him at gunpoint. Only then does she call in police backup, wanting to confront the man herself first. After that, Miriam and the authorities working by her side go on a spree of arrests.

It becomes this wild, almost chaotic scheme to capture all of these people. But after three years of hunting down her daughter's killers, Miriam's campaign meets catastrophe. There's a prison break at the main prison in Ciudad Victoria. Designated specifically to house Zeta inmates. And among those Zetas are many of the people that Miriam has put in prison. On the evening of May the 10th, 2017, outside her home,

The Zetas murder Miriam in cold blood. History has a way of repeating itself. The fallout from Miriam's murder sweeps the entire state of Tamaulipas. Thousands attend the funeral, including many of the region's top authorities. The scene confirms just what a force this grieving mother had become in the area.

Her murder also sets in motion the hunt and capture of her killer by her son Luis, who uses the tradecraft skills and techniques his mother had used so successfully before. History has a way of repeating itself.

The new Showtime original series, The Agency, is now streaming on Paramount+. The all-new political thriller follows Marcin, played by Michael Fassbender, a covert CIA agent ordered to abandon his undercover life and return to London Station.

When the love he left behind reappears, romance reignites. His career, his real identity, and his mission are pitted against his heart, hurling them both into a deadly game of international intrigue and espionage. The 10-episode spy thriller features a stellar cast, including Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Richard Gere. ♪

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Miriam mastered the art of undercover work to track down and arrest targets. But once you have your target, you need to get them to talk. They would have American soldiers, German American soldiers, dressed up in Nazi German uniforms, and they would become the actors for interrogations. This is Robert Sutton, former chief historian for the U.S. National Park Service.

Fort Hunt, aka P.O. Box 1142, was the military base that became one of the most secretive centers in U.S. intelligence history. They never called it Fort Hunt. No one who was there ever said Fort Hunt. The people who were there were sworn to secrecy. What's fascinating is that nobody else had a clue what they were doing.

A base that processed hundreds of the Nazis' elite officers and scientists, before disappearing without a trace shortly after the end of World War II. And by "processed," I mean pumped for information. Fort Hunt's interrogators honed several techniques to get their captives to talk. One saw them wear a similar rank to the Nazi officer being questioned, a tactic learnt from the British.

The British learned that when you're interrogating prisoners, you have a lot more success if the interrogator is either at or like one rank below the person you're interrogating. They used that at Fort Hunt. So many of the soldiers who were there were young. You know, they were like private first class or something, or maybe a sergeant. But when they were interrogating a major, they would put the major badges on.

Another tactic involved recruiting informers, or stool pigeons, among the detainees. One example was a fellow by the name of Count Maximilian Koreth. An Austrian aristocrat, Count Koreth's father had been imprisoned by the Nazis following the Anschluss. He didn't like Hitler, he didn't like what was going on. He came to them and said that he'd be interested in doing what he could to help. And as the second-in-command on a German U-boat...

Koreth had the credentials necessary to get his comrades to talk. And so he roomed with a number of German U-boat prisoners, and he was very, very effective in getting information out of them. Including crucial intel on the Nazis' new T-5 acoustic torpedo. The prisoner got really excited. His voice went up. He just started describing it in great detail.

The torpedo honed in on the sound of propellers, rendering even inaccurate launches a danger to its targets. All of this was gold to the Allies, knowing what military innovations the Germans were bringing to the battlefield and how they could potentially foil them. In some cases, though, captives refused to play ball, flatly denying knowledge of just about anything. Unbeknownst to them, however,

The men at Fort Hunt had a backup plan. They would have hidden microphones to eavesdrop on conversations of these German prisoners.

Which proved particularly useful when uncooperative detainees returned from interrogations. For example, one German pilot, he said, you know, he's just a regular pilot, no big deal. When he got back to his room, however... Told his roommate, he says, you know, I told them I'm just a pilot. Actually, I'm a very high-ranking pilot. But now I have to make sure that they think that I'm a low-ranking pilot.

And not only that. He said, I lied about where this particular manufacturing plant was. I said, I didn't know where it was. I knew exactly where it was. I said there were 10,000 people who worked there. Actually, there were 20,000 people. In line with the secrecy surrounding Fort Hunt...

The eavesdropping unit was stationed in its own building, codenamed the Honeysuckle. Usually there were 12 soldiers listening in on conversations. If there was something significant, they would make a transcript of the conversation. Over the period Fort Hunt was in operation...

Nearly 3,500 Nazi soldiers, sailors and scientists passed through the camp. Most of them, in fact, that we talked to who were at Fort Hunt had escaped from Germany or Austria in the 1930s. And I think that's one of the really wonderful stories that we have. From a large team obtaining top secret information from individuals to one person gathering intel while operating undercover inside an extremely dangerous organization.

The FBI came and said that the ALF are the number one domestic terrorist threat in the United States. I think one of the things that made me a better undercover than most people is I'm kind of low key. So I could go sit in a coffee shop and I see a group time after time after time and I wasn't going to go up and just start talking to them. And eventually they started talking to me. This is undercover FBI agent Dana Ridenour.

She featured in True Spy's episode, The Gathering, which told the story of how the Bureau sought to bring down the number one domestic terrorist threat in the United States at the time, the Animal Liberation Front. But Dana's journey begins where every good FBI undercover agent's journey begins, with training.

And it wasn't for the faint-hearted. There were no gaps and no separation, so we didn't get the weekends off. And we started really early in the morning. We went into the wee hours of the morning. So we were averaging about an hour and a half, two hours of sleep a night. And they did that on purpose. They wanted to get the undercover candidates as tired and as exhausted as possible to see how you could think under pressure, how you would react under pressure.

Each night, the candidates are put through scenarios. Situations ranging from trying to stay inconspicuous in a crowd to remembering every single detail of a contrived backstory. Most of them were no-win situations, so it was just think on your feet as fast as you can and hope you survive the scenario to move on to the next one.

Dana remembers one scenario in particular. There was one that I always kind of thought was really funny because FBI agents were trained never, ever, ever to do drugs. And we all have clean backgrounds or we wouldn't be FBI agents to begin with. So they used a scenario in a pool hall setting where the undercover was presented with cocaine, snorting coke. At first, the atmosphere was relaxed.

It was kind of an easygoing party at first, so you could come up with excuses why you didn't want to snort the cocaine. But as the night wore on... The guns came out. The course trainers become agitated, threatening the candidates, before eventually... If there's a gun to your head, are you going to snort the cocaine?

Even then, many of the candidates went by the book and refused, which was an instant fail. But they put that scenario in there for a reason. One, to get you thinking, OK, I'm not an FBI agent. I'm a bad guy. I'm an undercover. And I can snort the cocaine if I have to. While the gun was a fake, the situation simulated and the trainers known to the candidates...

The exercise hit home for Dana. It was so ingrained not to do drugs that that scenario would trip up a lot of people and also to kind of get you thinking, well, if this really happens in real life, how am I going to handle it? Many of the candidates realized that, in fact, they can't handle it.

About 50% do, they wash out of the school every time. And I think it's because everybody thinks they can be a great undercover agent, but when it comes down to reality, it's a lot harder than what you think it is. Dana was a great undercover agent, but the work did take its toll.

A few years later, Dana retired from the job she was so good at. I had gone back to undercover school as a role player, and I always told the candidates, "Look, people, if the hair on the back of your neck stands up, it's doing it for a reason. Back up. Don't do what you're about to do." And I started to feel like the hair on the back of my neck started standing up. So at that point, I thought, "Am I the person who's going to take my own advice, or am I the person that's going to be stupid?"

I got in the car, I drove back to my office and I told my supervisor, you know, I'm six months away from retirement. I'm done with undercover work. I'm done. I just feel like I did my duty. I've done more undercover work than most of the agents we have. And it was time for me to hang up my undercover shoes, so to speak. A reminder that, yes, it's interesting and exciting hearing about the lives of our true spies.

But in all these highly stressful and dangerous situations sits a human being, albeit a highly skilled and trained one, with all the tradecraft at their fingertips to get them into and out of sticky situations. But sometimes the best piece of tradecraft you can use is knowing when to stop. I'm Rhianna Needs. Join me next time for another liaison with true spies.

Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. If you're enjoying this podcast, please click now to give it a five-star rating or leave a review. Ratings and reviews help people discover the podcast and help us bring you more great stories. And if you have some time, why not forward the podcast to a friend?

In East Berlin, the Red Army's telephone lines are down. A team of East German technicians and a Red Army signal crew dig into the pavement. They came across some sort of trap door. And on that door, a warning. Entry is forbidden by order of the commanding general. It becomes evident that it's some kind of tapping operation.

A vast tunnel stretches into the distance. There's a U.S. Army installation across the border, seems to be heading in that direction. Berlin is the new frontier of East and West. There was a great deal of fear and anxiety of inadvertently triggering a shooting war. The Americans know that the Red Army is at the other end of their tunnel. The Americans had set up a .50 caliber machine gun

If the Russians breach American territory, they will be greeted by the echoing clang of the machine gun's bolt being pulled. True Spies, from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.