John Kiriakou's Dead Drop

IN THIS EPISODE So, what happened - or seemed to happen - the night of February 28, 1986, the night someone shot Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme to death on a Stockholm street corner as he walked beside his wife Lizbeth after a night at the cinema? There were a number of eyewitnesses - but not all of their stories align. Especially problematic: the story told by eyewitness Lizbeth, the victim's wife. She seems to have attended a different assassination. How one of the most important investigations in Sweden's history went off the rails as the list of suspects grew.

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IN THIS EPISODE As the hot war - WW2 - ended, a "cooler" but equally fervent Cold War replaced it. The stay-behind networks described in episode one quickly became a whole subset of cold warriors. How the Cold War happened - and why - and how that set the stage for the life and death struggle that would pit old allies against each other. Walking onto that stage as Sweden's Prime Minister, Olof Palme (judging by his social class) should have been a safe bet. He was anything but. A committed socialist, Palme drove Sweden to the left - making it both prosperous and happpy. But he also wanted to negotiate with the Soviets and halt all nuclear proliferation. That made some Western leaders nervous. It made others angry enough to do something about it. Like set an assassination plot in motion.

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IN THIS EPISODE One of the most remarkable stories that no one knows - which is remarkable in itself - is the assassinatioin of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme on a Stockholm street on February 28, 1986. Palme's murder is to Sweden what JFK's is to America: a demarcation point between a sense of goodness and integrity, and corruption. As of now, the crime still remains unsolved - though much work has gone into trying to figure out who did this terrible thing and why. Though we may think the Cold War is a museum piece, we still live in the darkest part of its shadow. The assassination of Olof Palme wasn't just a dark day in Sweden's history. It was a dark day in lots of other places, too - including the United States - because the US may have been guilty of helping that assassination happen. In episode 1 of this 7 part series, we'll introduce you to the "Stay-Behinds", a secret, anti-fascist army made for World War Two but repurposed - and rebranded as anti-Communist - for the Cold War, with branches and combatants all over Western Europe.

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IN THIS EPISODE In the previous two Spy Academy episodes, we talked about liars and how to spot them. Now it's time to put all that knowledge to good use as we deep dive into interrogating a true psychopath, the former leader of Iraq Saddam Hussein. While it would be easy to see Saddam as an unsophisticated bumpkin, it also would be a profound mistake. Saddam may have struggled to understand American motives and actions in the lead up to the American invasion of Iraq, but he understood his corner of the world as well as if not better than anyone. As he stared across the table at his interrogator, Saddam believed he was the host and that the Americans were his guests. In fact, Saddam was so cagey that he managed to interrogate his interrogators even as they were interrogating him. This episode's guest, former intelligence officer John Nixon, had studied Saddam, for years; getting the chance to interrogate the man himself, truly a monster metaphorically speaking, was not just a career-defining moment, it was a personal triumph.

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If you enjoyed this podcast, please sample the rest of our podcast lineup at Costard & Touchstone Productions. Your next podcast obsession is just a click away!
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IN THIS EPISODE

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