In part two of our mini-series on "mystery", we'll explore the thrilling world of espionage, from the Russian sleeper agents in the United States to the daring missions of spies during World War II.
We'll uncover how spycraft has evolved into modern digital espionage, with a surprising personal story that might just be connected to the world of secret intelligence.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our mini-series on the loose theme of mystery.
[00:00:28] In part one, we talked about the strange world of secret societies, both past and present, and learned about Yale’s Skull & Bones society, the Knights Templar and the FreeMasons.
[00:00:40] In part three, the next episode, we are going to talk about some civilisations lost to time, or at least, perhaps lost to time.
[00:00:49] And in today’s episode we are going to talk about spycraft, the art of espionage.
[00:00:56] In this, we will take a sweeping look at the history of espionage and its major developments, and keep listening to the end as I will also tell you a personal story about someone I know quite well who may or may not have been a spy…
[00:01:14] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:19] To the outside world, Anna Chapman was a successful internet entrepreneur.
[00:01:26] She arrived in New York in 2006 at the age of 24 with little more than a dream, and a few years later, she was running an apparently successful online estate agency, employing 50 people.
[00:01:41] But in the summer of 2010, she got an unexpected knock on her door.
[00:01:49] It was the FBI.
[00:01:52] She was arrested for being part of a Russian spy ring, sent by Moscow to the United States to live and exist, on the face of it, regular, mundane, normal lives.
[00:02:07] Chapman, or Kushchenko, as she was before she married and took her husband’s name, was one of the so-called Illegals Program, a group of at least 10 Russian sleeper agents.
[00:02:20] They were sleeper agents in that, on the face of it, they lived very ordinary, unremarkable lives. They bought houses, they sent their kids to American schools, their neighbours remarked on how much effort they put into pruning their flower beds.
[00:02:37] They were not doing James Bond-style jumping out of aeroplanes or even hiding in forests with their telescopes; their instructions were to melt into American society so that they would appear just like any, good, law-abiding citizen.
[00:02:55] Their ultimate goal was to get information that might be useful to the Russian state, information about US foreign policy, US policy towards Russia, military secrets and so on, and the idea was that they would make friends and business contacts with people who could provide them with information that might be useful.
[00:03:18] Unfortunately, they didn’t do a particularly good job.
[00:03:22] Some of the spies in the group had been active for almost a decade, but they hadn’t managed to collect any particularly useful information. We know this because for several years they were being watched by the FBI; the undercover Russian mission had been uncovered, and was being tracked by a secret American operation named Operation Ghost Stories.
[00:03:48] In this mission, the FBI successfully intercepted messages, bugged telephone lines, and cracked secret codes, thereby minimising the chance that these spies would be able to find and send anything useful back to Moscow.
[00:04:05] The spies were arrested, and ultimately deported to Russia in a prisoner swap for Russian prisoners who had been spying for the West.
[00:04:14] This is just one recent example of what is sometimes called the world’s second-oldest profession: spying.
[00:04:23] Now, the rationale for spies to exist, and for countries to use them, barely needs elaboration.
[00:04:31] Knowing what other people are doing or thinking, knowing what your enemy might be planning or what military capabilities they have, this is and always has been extremely valuable.
[00:04:44] Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese military theorist and author of The Art of War, dedicated an entire chapter to the use of spies, even listing the different types of spies and explaining how to turn an enemy spy into a double agent.
[00:05:02] It’s thought that he lived and wrote this sometime between 500 BC and 200 BC, but he was not the first nor the last to dedicate himself to thinking deeply about the role and effective management of spies.
[00:05:18] By the way, if you’d like to learn more about Sun Tzu and The Art of War, we made an episode about him. It’s episode number 128 if you haven’t listened to that already.
[00:05:29] But back to spying.
[00:05:31] There is evidence of spies being used by everyone from the Ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs, the Ancient Greeks to the Mongols under Genghis Khan.
[00:05:42] But it wasn’t until the 16th century or so that spying, or espionage, became a specialised and highly skilled profession in its own right.
[00:05:54] A man called Sir Francis Walsingham was perhaps the first real spymaster, the first leader of something akin to an intelligence agency.
[00:06:04] He was a key advisor to Queen Elizabeth I of England, and as a very brief recap of what was going on while she was on the throne, it was a time of heightened religious tensions between Protestants, like Elizabeth, and Catholics, like her relative and rival for the English throne, Mary Queen of Scots.
[00:06:25] By the way, we also have episodes on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, episodes 339 and 187. I’ll put a link to them below, in case you haven’t listened to those ones yet.
[00:06:38] Anyway, it was a time of religious tensions and plots, and therefore, information was of the utmost importance.
[00:06:47] Walsingham managed to bring together a crack crew of spies, people skilled at opening letters without breaking seals, as well as codebreakers.
[00:06:58] If you imagine a James Bond movie in which Bond inspects the latest gadgets and spying devices, well, Walsingham created the 16th-century version of that.
[00:07:11] In one particularly successful mission, Walsingham and his agents had the task of intercepting the communications between Mary Queen of Scots, who was imprisoned in a castle, and her supporters on the outside.
[00:07:26] Now, Mary knew that her letters would be read by her captors if they were sent openly, but her supporters managed to arrange a special way to get a message to her—by smuggling them into a castle hidden in a waterproof box inside a beer barrel.
[00:07:46] Mary, perfectly reasonably, thought this seemed like a cunning plan, but she still didn’t want to take any chances.
[00:07:55] All letters to and from her were encrypted, so not only were they hidden and smuggled in secretly, but anyone who did manage to intercept one would think that it was a random collection of numbers and letters; they wouldn’t be able to understand what was written.
[00:08:14] She and her collaborators on the outside thought that her secret plan was working magnificently.
[00:08:22] Unfortunately, the entire beer barrel idea was masterminded by Sir Francis Walsingham, whose double agents and code-cracking specialists were intercepting and deciphering each and every one of those letters.
[00:08:38] And unlike the Russian spy ring you heard about a few minutes ago, Walsingham’s spies did manage to find some useful information.
[00:08:47] They discovered a plot against Elizabeth I, and Mary was swiftly arrested, put on trial for treason and executed, in a decisive example of how spycraft can change the course of history.
[00:09:02] And moving forward a few hundred years, as technology continued to develop and information could be passed through telegraph cables rather than through hushed whispers or hidden in beer barrels, the role and importance of espionage only increased.
[00:09:21] The ability to intercept, decode, and analyse messages became a powerful tool for nations, and espionage grew into a vast and complex operation that would shape the outcome of wars and the direction of world politics.
[00:09:37] Take the First World War, for example.
[00:09:40] Spies weren’t just gathering information—they were intercepting it, decoding it, and then using it to gain strategic advantages.
[00:09:50] To give you just one example of this, one of the most significant moments in the war was the interception of the Zimmermann Telegram.
[00:10:00] This was a secret communication from Germany to Mexico, proposing a military alliance against the United States, and suggesting that Mexico could invade the United States and recover their “lost territories” of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.
[00:10:19] British intelligence intercepted the message, decoded it, and passed it along to the Americans, who were understandably outraged.
[00:10:29] Of course, the objective of the British intelligence services wasn’t just an “FYI to a friend”, it wasn’t done out of the goodness of their heart; the purpose was to sway public opinion in favour of the U.S. joining the war.
[00:10:46] And, it worked, or at least a couple of months after it was made public, the United States declared war on Germany and sent troops to mainland Europe.
[00:10:57] Then, World War II took espionage to an entirely new level.
[00:11:03] It wasn’t just a weapon in the shadows—it became a key part of the Allied strategy.
[00:11:09] The British, for example, excelled at deception and codebreaking.
[00:11:15] At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and his team worked tirelessly to crack the German Enigma Code, a feat that allowed the Allies to anticipate enemy movements and win critical battles, including the Battle of the Atlantic.
[00:11:31] Now, this work at Bletchley Park is credited with shortening the war by at least two years, thereby saving millions of lives on both sides.
[00:11:42] But espionage during WWII wasn’t just about sitting in rooms filled with machines and deciphering codes—it was also about action.
[00:11:53] In 1940 the UK formed something called the Special Operations Executive, which was an organisation created to send undercover intelligence officers into areas of mainland Europe under Nazi control.
[00:12:08] These agents numbered as many as 13,000, of whom a quarter were women, and their objective was to support local resistance movements and undermine Nazi control.
[00:12:22] Or, as Churchill reportedly briefed the leader of the operation, “Go and set Europe ablaze."
[00:12:30] One particularly inspiring character from this period was a woman called Nancy Wake, codename “The White Mouse”.
[00:12:39] She was parachuted into Nazi-occupied France in 1944.
[00:12:44] She led daring missions, coordinated with guerrilla fighters, once cycled 500 kilometres to pass a message back to her superior, and even killed a Nazi soldier with her bare hands, earning her a place as one of the war’s most remarkable spies.
[00:13:03] Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, was laying the groundwork for what would become the CIA.
[00:13:15] American agents were testing everything from psychological warfare to creative gadgets like exploding pens and hollowed-out coins, all in a bid to outsmart their enemies.
[00:13:27] In the Pacific, intelligence from spies and codebreakers helped turn the tide against Japan, particularly in the pivotal Battle of Midway.
[00:13:37] By the time World War II ended, the value of espionage was undeniable.
[00:13:44] And in the Cold War, spies became the front-line soldiers in an ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, a battle fought, for the most part, not with guns and tanks but with information.
[00:14:00] Both sides recruited double agents, placed operatives in embassies, and used defectors to gain insights into their rival’s plans.
[00:14:10] The Berlin Wall, for example, became a hotbed of espionage.
[00:14:15] East German and Soviet agents worked to prevent defections, while Western agents smuggled people and information across the border.
[00:14:25] But the Cold War also gave rise to new types of spies—ones who operated not in enemy territories, but within their own nations.
[00:14:35] You might remember a mini-series we did on The Cambridge Five. It involved young British men, some of whom had reached the very top of British society but were secretly passing information to the Soviet Union.
[00:14:49] If you haven’t listened to that miniseries already, I highly recommend it; it’s episodes 346 through 348.
[00:14:58] Perhaps unsurprisingly, modern-day spying is far less about tuxedos, martinis, and seduction than spy movies would have you believe.
[00:15:08] The days of glamorous field agents infiltrating cocktail parties to gather state secrets are largely a thing of the past, or rather, the thing of Ian Fleming’s imagination.
[00:15:20] Instead, today’s espionage is overwhelmingly focused on information gathering, often from a distance and without the need for a human presence.
[00:15:31] It is no longer about humans extracting information from other humans but is more likely to be algorithms and viruses extracting information from or damaging the systems of enemy states.
[00:15:44] Now the question isn’t about how persuasive your spies are or how well they blend into a crowd, but how advanced your technology is.
[00:15:55] And the nature of it is that it never reaches the public domain; it is kept secret, hidden in classified dossiers, known by only a select few.
[00:16:07] But not always.
[00:16:10] Take cyber espionage, for example.
[00:16:13] In 2010, the United States and Israel carried out a highly sophisticated cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
[00:16:22] Known as Stuxnet, this malware was able to infiltrate computer systems and sabotage centrifuges used for uranium enrichment. It was espionage, sabotage, and warfare rolled into one—and all of it done without a single human stepping foot on Iranian soil.
[00:16:45] This is a prime example of modern spying, much more likely to be conducted from thousands of kilometres away, surrounded by walls of screens, rather than through a hushed conversation on a park bench or an exchange of documents in a brown paper envelope.
[00:17:02] And a modern spy, or modern intelligence agent, I should say, is less likely to look like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan and much more like, well, someone like Edward Snowden.
[00:17:15] Edward Snowden, in many ways, epitomises modern espionage.
[00:17:21] As you will probably know already or will remember from Episode 434, he first worked as a contractor for the NSA, the National Security Agency, before going rogue and handing over a bucketload of classified information to Wikileaks.
[00:17:39] His revelations about the NSA showed the extent to which intelligence agencies now rely on vast amounts of data collected through digital means—tracking emails, phone calls, and even internet searches—to monitor not just enemies, but their own citizens.
[00:17:58] Of course, not all spy stories are as dramatic or public as Edward Snowden’s. Sometimes, they’re far more subtle—and personal.
[00:18:08] So, here we go. I promised to tell you about a personal spy-related experience.
[00:18:15] A friend of mine from university had a girlfriend. She was nice, always quite quiet, and fiercely intelligent.
[00:18:24] She spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese; I think her parents were originally from Hong Kong.
[00:18:30] She didn’t go to the same university as us; she was studying engineering at Oxford, and we were in London.
[00:18:37] She would come down to visit on the weekend, and there would be occasional jokes about her being a prime candidate to get a job as a spy.
[00:18:47] And after university, she moved to a small town to work, she said, for an engineering company that made landing gear for aeroplanes.
[00:18:59] The town she moved to was called Cheltenham.
[00:19:03] It is a relatively small spa town, and there is, I should add, an engineering company there that does make equipment for aeroplanes.
[00:19:13] But few of us believed she had ever walked through the doors of that company.
[00:19:19] The biggest employer in Cheltenham is GCHQ. It´s the UK’s spy agency, the British equivalent of the NSA.
[00:19:29] We would joke with her about being a spy, and of course, she would always deny it and claim that her job was just something boring to do with aeroplanes.
[00:19:39] And a few years later, her company, so she said, posted her to Hong Kong.
[00:19:44] It seemed even more certain than before, especially because she didn’t seem to remember many details about where her office was in Hong Kong or the type of work she was supposedly doing.
[00:19:56] Now, she always maintained that she was not a spy and my friend and her are no longer together, so I cannot tell you for sure either way.
[00:20:07] Spy or no spy, all I will say is that for someone who supposedly spent 10 years working for an aeroplane equipment company, she certainly did not know very much about aeroplanes.
[00:20:21] OK then, that is it for the history of espionage and the weird and murky world of spies.
[00:20:27] As a reminder, this was part of a three-part mini-series on the loose theme of mystery and the unknown. Part one was on secret societies, and next we are going to take a look at the very mysterious world of lost civilisations.
[00:20:42] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:47] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our mini-series on the loose theme of mystery.
[00:00:28] In part one, we talked about the strange world of secret societies, both past and present, and learned about Yale’s Skull & Bones society, the Knights Templar and the FreeMasons.
[00:00:40] In part three, the next episode, we are going to talk about some civilisations lost to time, or at least, perhaps lost to time.
[00:00:49] And in today’s episode we are going to talk about spycraft, the art of espionage.
[00:00:56] In this, we will take a sweeping look at the history of espionage and its major developments, and keep listening to the end as I will also tell you a personal story about someone I know quite well who may or may not have been a spy…
[00:01:14] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:19] To the outside world, Anna Chapman was a successful internet entrepreneur.
[00:01:26] She arrived in New York in 2006 at the age of 24 with little more than a dream, and a few years later, she was running an apparently successful online estate agency, employing 50 people.
[00:01:41] But in the summer of 2010, she got an unexpected knock on her door.
[00:01:49] It was the FBI.
[00:01:52] She was arrested for being part of a Russian spy ring, sent by Moscow to the United States to live and exist, on the face of it, regular, mundane, normal lives.
[00:02:07] Chapman, or Kushchenko, as she was before she married and took her husband’s name, was one of the so-called Illegals Program, a group of at least 10 Russian sleeper agents.
[00:02:20] They were sleeper agents in that, on the face of it, they lived very ordinary, unremarkable lives. They bought houses, they sent their kids to American schools, their neighbours remarked on how much effort they put into pruning their flower beds.
[00:02:37] They were not doing James Bond-style jumping out of aeroplanes or even hiding in forests with their telescopes; their instructions were to melt into American society so that they would appear just like any, good, law-abiding citizen.
[00:02:55] Their ultimate goal was to get information that might be useful to the Russian state, information about US foreign policy, US policy towards Russia, military secrets and so on, and the idea was that they would make friends and business contacts with people who could provide them with information that might be useful.
[00:03:18] Unfortunately, they didn’t do a particularly good job.
[00:03:22] Some of the spies in the group had been active for almost a decade, but they hadn’t managed to collect any particularly useful information. We know this because for several years they were being watched by the FBI; the undercover Russian mission had been uncovered, and was being tracked by a secret American operation named Operation Ghost Stories.
[00:03:48] In this mission, the FBI successfully intercepted messages, bugged telephone lines, and cracked secret codes, thereby minimising the chance that these spies would be able to find and send anything useful back to Moscow.
[00:04:05] The spies were arrested, and ultimately deported to Russia in a prisoner swap for Russian prisoners who had been spying for the West.
[00:04:14] This is just one recent example of what is sometimes called the world’s second-oldest profession: spying.
[00:04:23] Now, the rationale for spies to exist, and for countries to use them, barely needs elaboration.
[00:04:31] Knowing what other people are doing or thinking, knowing what your enemy might be planning or what military capabilities they have, this is and always has been extremely valuable.
[00:04:44] Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese military theorist and author of The Art of War, dedicated an entire chapter to the use of spies, even listing the different types of spies and explaining how to turn an enemy spy into a double agent.
[00:05:02] It’s thought that he lived and wrote this sometime between 500 BC and 200 BC, but he was not the first nor the last to dedicate himself to thinking deeply about the role and effective management of spies.
[00:05:18] By the way, if you’d like to learn more about Sun Tzu and The Art of War, we made an episode about him. It’s episode number 128 if you haven’t listened to that already.
[00:05:29] But back to spying.
[00:05:31] There is evidence of spies being used by everyone from the Ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs, the Ancient Greeks to the Mongols under Genghis Khan.
[00:05:42] But it wasn’t until the 16th century or so that spying, or espionage, became a specialised and highly skilled profession in its own right.
[00:05:54] A man called Sir Francis Walsingham was perhaps the first real spymaster, the first leader of something akin to an intelligence agency.
[00:06:04] He was a key advisor to Queen Elizabeth I of England, and as a very brief recap of what was going on while she was on the throne, it was a time of heightened religious tensions between Protestants, like Elizabeth, and Catholics, like her relative and rival for the English throne, Mary Queen of Scots.
[00:06:25] By the way, we also have episodes on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, episodes 339 and 187. I’ll put a link to them below, in case you haven’t listened to those ones yet.
[00:06:38] Anyway, it was a time of religious tensions and plots, and therefore, information was of the utmost importance.
[00:06:47] Walsingham managed to bring together a crack crew of spies, people skilled at opening letters without breaking seals, as well as codebreakers.
[00:06:58] If you imagine a James Bond movie in which Bond inspects the latest gadgets and spying devices, well, Walsingham created the 16th-century version of that.
[00:07:11] In one particularly successful mission, Walsingham and his agents had the task of intercepting the communications between Mary Queen of Scots, who was imprisoned in a castle, and her supporters on the outside.
[00:07:26] Now, Mary knew that her letters would be read by her captors if they were sent openly, but her supporters managed to arrange a special way to get a message to her—by smuggling them into a castle hidden in a waterproof box inside a beer barrel.
[00:07:46] Mary, perfectly reasonably, thought this seemed like a cunning plan, but she still didn’t want to take any chances.
[00:07:55] All letters to and from her were encrypted, so not only were they hidden and smuggled in secretly, but anyone who did manage to intercept one would think that it was a random collection of numbers and letters; they wouldn’t be able to understand what was written.
[00:08:14] She and her collaborators on the outside thought that her secret plan was working magnificently.
[00:08:22] Unfortunately, the entire beer barrel idea was masterminded by Sir Francis Walsingham, whose double agents and code-cracking specialists were intercepting and deciphering each and every one of those letters.
[00:08:38] And unlike the Russian spy ring you heard about a few minutes ago, Walsingham’s spies did manage to find some useful information.
[00:08:47] They discovered a plot against Elizabeth I, and Mary was swiftly arrested, put on trial for treason and executed, in a decisive example of how spycraft can change the course of history.
[00:09:02] And moving forward a few hundred years, as technology continued to develop and information could be passed through telegraph cables rather than through hushed whispers or hidden in beer barrels, the role and importance of espionage only increased.
[00:09:21] The ability to intercept, decode, and analyse messages became a powerful tool for nations, and espionage grew into a vast and complex operation that would shape the outcome of wars and the direction of world politics.
[00:09:37] Take the First World War, for example.
[00:09:40] Spies weren’t just gathering information—they were intercepting it, decoding it, and then using it to gain strategic advantages.
[00:09:50] To give you just one example of this, one of the most significant moments in the war was the interception of the Zimmermann Telegram.
[00:10:00] This was a secret communication from Germany to Mexico, proposing a military alliance against the United States, and suggesting that Mexico could invade the United States and recover their “lost territories” of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.
[00:10:19] British intelligence intercepted the message, decoded it, and passed it along to the Americans, who were understandably outraged.
[00:10:29] Of course, the objective of the British intelligence services wasn’t just an “FYI to a friend”, it wasn’t done out of the goodness of their heart; the purpose was to sway public opinion in favour of the U.S. joining the war.
[00:10:46] And, it worked, or at least a couple of months after it was made public, the United States declared war on Germany and sent troops to mainland Europe.
[00:10:57] Then, World War II took espionage to an entirely new level.
[00:11:03] It wasn’t just a weapon in the shadows—it became a key part of the Allied strategy.
[00:11:09] The British, for example, excelled at deception and codebreaking.
[00:11:15] At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and his team worked tirelessly to crack the German Enigma Code, a feat that allowed the Allies to anticipate enemy movements and win critical battles, including the Battle of the Atlantic.
[00:11:31] Now, this work at Bletchley Park is credited with shortening the war by at least two years, thereby saving millions of lives on both sides.
[00:11:42] But espionage during WWII wasn’t just about sitting in rooms filled with machines and deciphering codes—it was also about action.
[00:11:53] In 1940 the UK formed something called the Special Operations Executive, which was an organisation created to send undercover intelligence officers into areas of mainland Europe under Nazi control.
[00:12:08] These agents numbered as many as 13,000, of whom a quarter were women, and their objective was to support local resistance movements and undermine Nazi control.
[00:12:22] Or, as Churchill reportedly briefed the leader of the operation, “Go and set Europe ablaze."
[00:12:30] One particularly inspiring character from this period was a woman called Nancy Wake, codename “The White Mouse”.
[00:12:39] She was parachuted into Nazi-occupied France in 1944.
[00:12:44] She led daring missions, coordinated with guerrilla fighters, once cycled 500 kilometres to pass a message back to her superior, and even killed a Nazi soldier with her bare hands, earning her a place as one of the war’s most remarkable spies.
[00:13:03] Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, was laying the groundwork for what would become the CIA.
[00:13:15] American agents were testing everything from psychological warfare to creative gadgets like exploding pens and hollowed-out coins, all in a bid to outsmart their enemies.
[00:13:27] In the Pacific, intelligence from spies and codebreakers helped turn the tide against Japan, particularly in the pivotal Battle of Midway.
[00:13:37] By the time World War II ended, the value of espionage was undeniable.
[00:13:44] And in the Cold War, spies became the front-line soldiers in an ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, a battle fought, for the most part, not with guns and tanks but with information.
[00:14:00] Both sides recruited double agents, placed operatives in embassies, and used defectors to gain insights into their rival’s plans.
[00:14:10] The Berlin Wall, for example, became a hotbed of espionage.
[00:14:15] East German and Soviet agents worked to prevent defections, while Western agents smuggled people and information across the border.
[00:14:25] But the Cold War also gave rise to new types of spies—ones who operated not in enemy territories, but within their own nations.
[00:14:35] You might remember a mini-series we did on The Cambridge Five. It involved young British men, some of whom had reached the very top of British society but were secretly passing information to the Soviet Union.
[00:14:49] If you haven’t listened to that miniseries already, I highly recommend it; it’s episodes 346 through 348.
[00:14:58] Perhaps unsurprisingly, modern-day spying is far less about tuxedos, martinis, and seduction than spy movies would have you believe.
[00:15:08] The days of glamorous field agents infiltrating cocktail parties to gather state secrets are largely a thing of the past, or rather, the thing of Ian Fleming’s imagination.
[00:15:20] Instead, today’s espionage is overwhelmingly focused on information gathering, often from a distance and without the need for a human presence.
[00:15:31] It is no longer about humans extracting information from other humans but is more likely to be algorithms and viruses extracting information from or damaging the systems of enemy states.
[00:15:44] Now the question isn’t about how persuasive your spies are or how well they blend into a crowd, but how advanced your technology is.
[00:15:55] And the nature of it is that it never reaches the public domain; it is kept secret, hidden in classified dossiers, known by only a select few.
[00:16:07] But not always.
[00:16:10] Take cyber espionage, for example.
[00:16:13] In 2010, the United States and Israel carried out a highly sophisticated cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
[00:16:22] Known as Stuxnet, this malware was able to infiltrate computer systems and sabotage centrifuges used for uranium enrichment. It was espionage, sabotage, and warfare rolled into one—and all of it done without a single human stepping foot on Iranian soil.
[00:16:45] This is a prime example of modern spying, much more likely to be conducted from thousands of kilometres away, surrounded by walls of screens, rather than through a hushed conversation on a park bench or an exchange of documents in a brown paper envelope.
[00:17:02] And a modern spy, or modern intelligence agent, I should say, is less likely to look like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan and much more like, well, someone like Edward Snowden.
[00:17:15] Edward Snowden, in many ways, epitomises modern espionage.
[00:17:21] As you will probably know already or will remember from Episode 434, he first worked as a contractor for the NSA, the National Security Agency, before going rogue and handing over a bucketload of classified information to Wikileaks.
[00:17:39] His revelations about the NSA showed the extent to which intelligence agencies now rely on vast amounts of data collected through digital means—tracking emails, phone calls, and even internet searches—to monitor not just enemies, but their own citizens.
[00:17:58] Of course, not all spy stories are as dramatic or public as Edward Snowden’s. Sometimes, they’re far more subtle—and personal.
[00:18:08] So, here we go. I promised to tell you about a personal spy-related experience.
[00:18:15] A friend of mine from university had a girlfriend. She was nice, always quite quiet, and fiercely intelligent.
[00:18:24] She spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese; I think her parents were originally from Hong Kong.
[00:18:30] She didn’t go to the same university as us; she was studying engineering at Oxford, and we were in London.
[00:18:37] She would come down to visit on the weekend, and there would be occasional jokes about her being a prime candidate to get a job as a spy.
[00:18:47] And after university, she moved to a small town to work, she said, for an engineering company that made landing gear for aeroplanes.
[00:18:59] The town she moved to was called Cheltenham.
[00:19:03] It is a relatively small spa town, and there is, I should add, an engineering company there that does make equipment for aeroplanes.
[00:19:13] But few of us believed she had ever walked through the doors of that company.
[00:19:19] The biggest employer in Cheltenham is GCHQ. It´s the UK’s spy agency, the British equivalent of the NSA.
[00:19:29] We would joke with her about being a spy, and of course, she would always deny it and claim that her job was just something boring to do with aeroplanes.
[00:19:39] And a few years later, her company, so she said, posted her to Hong Kong.
[00:19:44] It seemed even more certain than before, especially because she didn’t seem to remember many details about where her office was in Hong Kong or the type of work she was supposedly doing.
[00:19:56] Now, she always maintained that she was not a spy and my friend and her are no longer together, so I cannot tell you for sure either way.
[00:20:07] Spy or no spy, all I will say is that for someone who supposedly spent 10 years working for an aeroplane equipment company, she certainly did not know very much about aeroplanes.
[00:20:21] OK then, that is it for the history of espionage and the weird and murky world of spies.
[00:20:27] As a reminder, this was part of a three-part mini-series on the loose theme of mystery and the unknown. Part one was on secret societies, and next we are going to take a look at the very mysterious world of lost civilisations.
[00:20:42] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:47] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our mini-series on the loose theme of mystery.
[00:00:28] In part one, we talked about the strange world of secret societies, both past and present, and learned about Yale’s Skull & Bones society, the Knights Templar and the FreeMasons.
[00:00:40] In part three, the next episode, we are going to talk about some civilisations lost to time, or at least, perhaps lost to time.
[00:00:49] And in today’s episode we are going to talk about spycraft, the art of espionage.
[00:00:56] In this, we will take a sweeping look at the history of espionage and its major developments, and keep listening to the end as I will also tell you a personal story about someone I know quite well who may or may not have been a spy…
[00:01:14] So, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:19] To the outside world, Anna Chapman was a successful internet entrepreneur.
[00:01:26] She arrived in New York in 2006 at the age of 24 with little more than a dream, and a few years later, she was running an apparently successful online estate agency, employing 50 people.
[00:01:41] But in the summer of 2010, she got an unexpected knock on her door.
[00:01:49] It was the FBI.
[00:01:52] She was arrested for being part of a Russian spy ring, sent by Moscow to the United States to live and exist, on the face of it, regular, mundane, normal lives.
[00:02:07] Chapman, or Kushchenko, as she was before she married and took her husband’s name, was one of the so-called Illegals Program, a group of at least 10 Russian sleeper agents.
[00:02:20] They were sleeper agents in that, on the face of it, they lived very ordinary, unremarkable lives. They bought houses, they sent their kids to American schools, their neighbours remarked on how much effort they put into pruning their flower beds.
[00:02:37] They were not doing James Bond-style jumping out of aeroplanes or even hiding in forests with their telescopes; their instructions were to melt into American society so that they would appear just like any, good, law-abiding citizen.
[00:02:55] Their ultimate goal was to get information that might be useful to the Russian state, information about US foreign policy, US policy towards Russia, military secrets and so on, and the idea was that they would make friends and business contacts with people who could provide them with information that might be useful.
[00:03:18] Unfortunately, they didn’t do a particularly good job.
[00:03:22] Some of the spies in the group had been active for almost a decade, but they hadn’t managed to collect any particularly useful information. We know this because for several years they were being watched by the FBI; the undercover Russian mission had been uncovered, and was being tracked by a secret American operation named Operation Ghost Stories.
[00:03:48] In this mission, the FBI successfully intercepted messages, bugged telephone lines, and cracked secret codes, thereby minimising the chance that these spies would be able to find and send anything useful back to Moscow.
[00:04:05] The spies were arrested, and ultimately deported to Russia in a prisoner swap for Russian prisoners who had been spying for the West.
[00:04:14] This is just one recent example of what is sometimes called the world’s second-oldest profession: spying.
[00:04:23] Now, the rationale for spies to exist, and for countries to use them, barely needs elaboration.
[00:04:31] Knowing what other people are doing or thinking, knowing what your enemy might be planning or what military capabilities they have, this is and always has been extremely valuable.
[00:04:44] Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese military theorist and author of The Art of War, dedicated an entire chapter to the use of spies, even listing the different types of spies and explaining how to turn an enemy spy into a double agent.
[00:05:02] It’s thought that he lived and wrote this sometime between 500 BC and 200 BC, but he was not the first nor the last to dedicate himself to thinking deeply about the role and effective management of spies.
[00:05:18] By the way, if you’d like to learn more about Sun Tzu and The Art of War, we made an episode about him. It’s episode number 128 if you haven’t listened to that already.
[00:05:29] But back to spying.
[00:05:31] There is evidence of spies being used by everyone from the Ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs, the Ancient Greeks to the Mongols under Genghis Khan.
[00:05:42] But it wasn’t until the 16th century or so that spying, or espionage, became a specialised and highly skilled profession in its own right.
[00:05:54] A man called Sir Francis Walsingham was perhaps the first real spymaster, the first leader of something akin to an intelligence agency.
[00:06:04] He was a key advisor to Queen Elizabeth I of England, and as a very brief recap of what was going on while she was on the throne, it was a time of heightened religious tensions between Protestants, like Elizabeth, and Catholics, like her relative and rival for the English throne, Mary Queen of Scots.
[00:06:25] By the way, we also have episodes on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, episodes 339 and 187. I’ll put a link to them below, in case you haven’t listened to those ones yet.
[00:06:38] Anyway, it was a time of religious tensions and plots, and therefore, information was of the utmost importance.
[00:06:47] Walsingham managed to bring together a crack crew of spies, people skilled at opening letters without breaking seals, as well as codebreakers.
[00:06:58] If you imagine a James Bond movie in which Bond inspects the latest gadgets and spying devices, well, Walsingham created the 16th-century version of that.
[00:07:11] In one particularly successful mission, Walsingham and his agents had the task of intercepting the communications between Mary Queen of Scots, who was imprisoned in a castle, and her supporters on the outside.
[00:07:26] Now, Mary knew that her letters would be read by her captors if they were sent openly, but her supporters managed to arrange a special way to get a message to her—by smuggling them into a castle hidden in a waterproof box inside a beer barrel.
[00:07:46] Mary, perfectly reasonably, thought this seemed like a cunning plan, but she still didn’t want to take any chances.
[00:07:55] All letters to and from her were encrypted, so not only were they hidden and smuggled in secretly, but anyone who did manage to intercept one would think that it was a random collection of numbers and letters; they wouldn’t be able to understand what was written.
[00:08:14] She and her collaborators on the outside thought that her secret plan was working magnificently.
[00:08:22] Unfortunately, the entire beer barrel idea was masterminded by Sir Francis Walsingham, whose double agents and code-cracking specialists were intercepting and deciphering each and every one of those letters.
[00:08:38] And unlike the Russian spy ring you heard about a few minutes ago, Walsingham’s spies did manage to find some useful information.
[00:08:47] They discovered a plot against Elizabeth I, and Mary was swiftly arrested, put on trial for treason and executed, in a decisive example of how spycraft can change the course of history.
[00:09:02] And moving forward a few hundred years, as technology continued to develop and information could be passed through telegraph cables rather than through hushed whispers or hidden in beer barrels, the role and importance of espionage only increased.
[00:09:21] The ability to intercept, decode, and analyse messages became a powerful tool for nations, and espionage grew into a vast and complex operation that would shape the outcome of wars and the direction of world politics.
[00:09:37] Take the First World War, for example.
[00:09:40] Spies weren’t just gathering information—they were intercepting it, decoding it, and then using it to gain strategic advantages.
[00:09:50] To give you just one example of this, one of the most significant moments in the war was the interception of the Zimmermann Telegram.
[00:10:00] This was a secret communication from Germany to Mexico, proposing a military alliance against the United States, and suggesting that Mexico could invade the United States and recover their “lost territories” of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.
[00:10:19] British intelligence intercepted the message, decoded it, and passed it along to the Americans, who were understandably outraged.
[00:10:29] Of course, the objective of the British intelligence services wasn’t just an “FYI to a friend”, it wasn’t done out of the goodness of their heart; the purpose was to sway public opinion in favour of the U.S. joining the war.
[00:10:46] And, it worked, or at least a couple of months after it was made public, the United States declared war on Germany and sent troops to mainland Europe.
[00:10:57] Then, World War II took espionage to an entirely new level.
[00:11:03] It wasn’t just a weapon in the shadows—it became a key part of the Allied strategy.
[00:11:09] The British, for example, excelled at deception and codebreaking.
[00:11:15] At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and his team worked tirelessly to crack the German Enigma Code, a feat that allowed the Allies to anticipate enemy movements and win critical battles, including the Battle of the Atlantic.
[00:11:31] Now, this work at Bletchley Park is credited with shortening the war by at least two years, thereby saving millions of lives on both sides.
[00:11:42] But espionage during WWII wasn’t just about sitting in rooms filled with machines and deciphering codes—it was also about action.
[00:11:53] In 1940 the UK formed something called the Special Operations Executive, which was an organisation created to send undercover intelligence officers into areas of mainland Europe under Nazi control.
[00:12:08] These agents numbered as many as 13,000, of whom a quarter were women, and their objective was to support local resistance movements and undermine Nazi control.
[00:12:22] Or, as Churchill reportedly briefed the leader of the operation, “Go and set Europe ablaze."
[00:12:30] One particularly inspiring character from this period was a woman called Nancy Wake, codename “The White Mouse”.
[00:12:39] She was parachuted into Nazi-occupied France in 1944.
[00:12:44] She led daring missions, coordinated with guerrilla fighters, once cycled 500 kilometres to pass a message back to her superior, and even killed a Nazi soldier with her bare hands, earning her a place as one of the war’s most remarkable spies.
[00:13:03] Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, was laying the groundwork for what would become the CIA.
[00:13:15] American agents were testing everything from psychological warfare to creative gadgets like exploding pens and hollowed-out coins, all in a bid to outsmart their enemies.
[00:13:27] In the Pacific, intelligence from spies and codebreakers helped turn the tide against Japan, particularly in the pivotal Battle of Midway.
[00:13:37] By the time World War II ended, the value of espionage was undeniable.
[00:13:44] And in the Cold War, spies became the front-line soldiers in an ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, a battle fought, for the most part, not with guns and tanks but with information.
[00:14:00] Both sides recruited double agents, placed operatives in embassies, and used defectors to gain insights into their rival’s plans.
[00:14:10] The Berlin Wall, for example, became a hotbed of espionage.
[00:14:15] East German and Soviet agents worked to prevent defections, while Western agents smuggled people and information across the border.
[00:14:25] But the Cold War also gave rise to new types of spies—ones who operated not in enemy territories, but within their own nations.
[00:14:35] You might remember a mini-series we did on The Cambridge Five. It involved young British men, some of whom had reached the very top of British society but were secretly passing information to the Soviet Union.
[00:14:49] If you haven’t listened to that miniseries already, I highly recommend it; it’s episodes 346 through 348.
[00:14:58] Perhaps unsurprisingly, modern-day spying is far less about tuxedos, martinis, and seduction than spy movies would have you believe.
[00:15:08] The days of glamorous field agents infiltrating cocktail parties to gather state secrets are largely a thing of the past, or rather, the thing of Ian Fleming’s imagination.
[00:15:20] Instead, today’s espionage is overwhelmingly focused on information gathering, often from a distance and without the need for a human presence.
[00:15:31] It is no longer about humans extracting information from other humans but is more likely to be algorithms and viruses extracting information from or damaging the systems of enemy states.
[00:15:44] Now the question isn’t about how persuasive your spies are or how well they blend into a crowd, but how advanced your technology is.
[00:15:55] And the nature of it is that it never reaches the public domain; it is kept secret, hidden in classified dossiers, known by only a select few.
[00:16:07] But not always.
[00:16:10] Take cyber espionage, for example.
[00:16:13] In 2010, the United States and Israel carried out a highly sophisticated cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
[00:16:22] Known as Stuxnet, this malware was able to infiltrate computer systems and sabotage centrifuges used for uranium enrichment. It was espionage, sabotage, and warfare rolled into one—and all of it done without a single human stepping foot on Iranian soil.
[00:16:45] This is a prime example of modern spying, much more likely to be conducted from thousands of kilometres away, surrounded by walls of screens, rather than through a hushed conversation on a park bench or an exchange of documents in a brown paper envelope.
[00:17:02] And a modern spy, or modern intelligence agent, I should say, is less likely to look like Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan and much more like, well, someone like Edward Snowden.
[00:17:15] Edward Snowden, in many ways, epitomises modern espionage.
[00:17:21] As you will probably know already or will remember from Episode 434, he first worked as a contractor for the NSA, the National Security Agency, before going rogue and handing over a bucketload of classified information to Wikileaks.
[00:17:39] His revelations about the NSA showed the extent to which intelligence agencies now rely on vast amounts of data collected through digital means—tracking emails, phone calls, and even internet searches—to monitor not just enemies, but their own citizens.
[00:17:58] Of course, not all spy stories are as dramatic or public as Edward Snowden’s. Sometimes, they’re far more subtle—and personal.
[00:18:08] So, here we go. I promised to tell you about a personal spy-related experience.
[00:18:15] A friend of mine from university had a girlfriend. She was nice, always quite quiet, and fiercely intelligent.
[00:18:24] She spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese; I think her parents were originally from Hong Kong.
[00:18:30] She didn’t go to the same university as us; she was studying engineering at Oxford, and we were in London.
[00:18:37] She would come down to visit on the weekend, and there would be occasional jokes about her being a prime candidate to get a job as a spy.
[00:18:47] And after university, she moved to a small town to work, she said, for an engineering company that made landing gear for aeroplanes.
[00:18:59] The town she moved to was called Cheltenham.
[00:19:03] It is a relatively small spa town, and there is, I should add, an engineering company there that does make equipment for aeroplanes.
[00:19:13] But few of us believed she had ever walked through the doors of that company.
[00:19:19] The biggest employer in Cheltenham is GCHQ. It´s the UK’s spy agency, the British equivalent of the NSA.
[00:19:29] We would joke with her about being a spy, and of course, she would always deny it and claim that her job was just something boring to do with aeroplanes.
[00:19:39] And a few years later, her company, so she said, posted her to Hong Kong.
[00:19:44] It seemed even more certain than before, especially because she didn’t seem to remember many details about where her office was in Hong Kong or the type of work she was supposedly doing.
[00:19:56] Now, she always maintained that she was not a spy and my friend and her are no longer together, so I cannot tell you for sure either way.
[00:20:07] Spy or no spy, all I will say is that for someone who supposedly spent 10 years working for an aeroplane equipment company, she certainly did not know very much about aeroplanes.
[00:20:21] OK then, that is it for the history of espionage and the weird and murky world of spies.
[00:20:27] As a reminder, this was part of a three-part mini-series on the loose theme of mystery and the unknown. Part one was on secret societies, and next we are going to take a look at the very mysterious world of lost civilisations.
[00:20:42] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:47] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
