The International Spy Museum and I

Meet the new host of SpyCast, the country's oldest podcast on intelligence.

At the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where SpyCast episodes are taped. (Emily Rens for the International Spy Museum)

I’ll never be a James Bond girl. And I never expected to be. Really, who does? Even so, I’ve been working beside six decades of Bond vehicles for the past few months. When I’m not writing HUMINT stories, I’m walking into the International Spy Museum, past its Bond in Motion exhibit and into a retro-vibe podcast studio.

The museum, an award-winning production company called Goat Rodeo, and I are launching a new version of SpyCast, the oldest intelligence podcast in the United States. Since 2006, SpyCast’s historian hosts have interviewed innumerable spies and other professionals in their ecosystem — including analysts, defectors, and molehunters. They have brought voice to the complex world of espionage and covert action.

Now, for the first time, a journalist will be asking the questions. I will be SpyCast’s first journalist and woman host. Between the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, the swift toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and its consequences for Russia and Iran, the growing cooperation between U.S. adversaries, changes to the intelligence community during the Trump administration, and new stories emerging from history, there will be no shortage of material. Intelligence is extracted from arcane mines. My goal is to take you into places you may rarely explore, to map the human emotion and strategy, to capture the mystery and demystify, conversation by conversation.

Every job has its oddities, and being an intelligence reporter is no different. I personally have sat down in secure rooms at the CIA, written from a secret military base in Ukraine, and stepped inside a Chinese police station hidden above a ramen shop in New York City. I have been accused of being a CIA asset. A honeytrap. And one time a guy, in a hot tub no less, asked me if I had ever killed anyone. Sorry, you got the wrong gal.

This beat is hard and elusive. And maybe that’s why I am drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid, I was a question-making machine. I wanted to understand. Feeling stifled in my hometown, I intentionally dialed wrong numbers from my landline telephone, hoping to chat with people I didn’t know. I believed that I could find some precious parcel in every person, some piece that could teach me something, anything. If you met me today, you’d still see a glimmer of that girl. But the years that make us older hardened me a little. I realized I couldn’t trust everyone at their word, that I didn’t always know why they said what they were saying or did what they were doing.

Journalism was the only real path for me. There was no other work I saw for myself, even though I sometimes had to take other jobs to pay my bills. Some other day, I’ll have the courage to tell you more parts of my story. But suffice to say that as a reporter, the intrigue of the intelligence community drew me in. And I found a place where the stakes are high, the oversight is low, and a lot of people are working hard for no credit. The ambitious missions, the gadgets and disguises, the far-off deserts and glowing cities have inspired popular movies and series. But I think the truth is more exciting.

The new SpyCast is set to begin on Jan. 14. In between my HUMINT reports, I’ll share links to weekly episodes here. Get your ears and minds ready.