Inside the Media Mind of Sasha Ingber: SpyCast Podcast

Christine Blake: Welcome to InSasha Ingberde the Media Minds. We are your co-hosts, Christine Blake 

Madison Farabaugh: and Madison Farabaugh. 

Christine Blake: This show features in-depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. From our studio here at W2 Communications, let's go InSasha Ingberde the Media Minds. 

Hi, everyone. On today's episode, Madison and I Sasha Ingbert down with Sasha Ingber, the host of SpyCast, the International Spy Museum's flagship podcast on global intelligence, espionage, and covert operations. Sasha is also the founder of HUMINT, where she explores the intelligence community, through its people and the emotions that drive them. This conversation was amazing. We love talking to Sasha and learning about her background, and she's so pasSasha Ingberonate about this topic as well. 

She had so many interesting stories to share about espionage and how different countries are approaching it. We asked her about how AI and technology has impacted espionage recently, and she said that it's really a tool that's augmenting spies. One anecdote she shared is, you know, they can change their voices or their nationality or anything like that, but an AI tool can't break into Putin's office, and I thought that was a good way to look at it. Madison, what did you find interesting about today's episode?

Madison Farabaugh: Yeah, I really enjoyed just hearing how Sasha can bring a story to life. So, I think out of all of the guests that we've had on InSasha Ingberde the Media Minds, her background experience with just people who have been on the front lines of espionage campaigns, so she's gone to, you know, restaurants in New York, and kind of learned about different operations that were taking place there, so it's kind of that behind the scenes perspective that I think she has done a really excellent job of getting from the different guests that she's had on the podcast. And even her background in journalism and her experience reporting for major publications like NPR, I think it was great to hear how she transferred so many of those reporting skills into the International Spy Museum’s podcast. So, yeah, her storytelling capabilities are just amazing. I think listeners will really get a kick out of that.

Christine Blake: Yeah, we hope everyone enjoys the episode. Go ahead and listen to this one, and then listen to SpyCast right after. 

Hey everyone, we have a very special guest today on InSasha Ingberde the Media Minds. We have Sasha Angber, host of SpyCast, the International Spy Museum's flagship podcast on global intelligence, espionage, and covert operations. Welcome, Sasha. We're happy to have you on the show today.

Sasha Ingber: Thanks so much for having me, Christine.

Christine Blake: Yeah, we're excited to get to know more about you and SpyCast, and what brought you to SpyCast. So, let's start there. I'd love to hear a quick overview of your journey and how you ended up hosting the podcast for the International Spy Museum.

Sasha Ingber: Well, the short story is that I moved to Washington, DC, where the museum is, to get a Master's in nonfiction writing. And I really wanted to be a journalist, but I couldn't make my way in and pay my bills that way, so I ended up taking a job at the State Department, where I was fairly quickly put onto a tiny team tasked with debunking RusSasha Ingberan diSasha Ingbernformation. This was right after RusSasha Ingbera illegally seized Crimea from Ukraine and started occupying the Donbas. It really made me want to be a national security reporter. 

I was able to pivot to Smithsonian, so a little bit of that museum journalism blend, and then I went on to NPR, and then Scripps News, where I was their national security correspondent, covering things like January 6th and the fall of Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, when the full-scale invaSasha Ingberon began, the Israel-Hamas war. And as happens in journalism sometimes, I got laid off, and then I decided to start something of my own, and became an independent journalist. I started a media company called HUMINT, which stands for Human Intelligence, where I started telling stories that intersected the intel community and more of the human Sasha Ingberde of the experience of working in that world, in the form of articles, short- form videos, more in-depth interviews, and started expoSasha Ingberng things that nobody knew about.

Like there's this apartment building in Washington, DC, in a reSasha Ingberdential neighborhood that is actually where many of China's spies are living, and they're affiliated with the embassy. How the US government has been testing a device thought to cause anomalous health incidents, or Havana syndrome, which is an affliction that has affected a lot of spies here in the United States, as well as diplomats and military personnel, and some more personal stories about, like, the NSA director who was fired while he was overseas after he had submitted cyber offense plans regarding China. His name was General Tim Hawk and what that did to the NSA. 

So, because of these experiences and how I was kind of forging new ground, I think that the International Spy Museum decided that I would be a potentially good candidate to lead their podcast, and I did not have a podcast background. I came from print, and then digital, moved into radio, and then went into televiSasha Ingberon. So, the podcasting world was really a change for me. 

Christine Blake: It sounds like your background really aligned well with joining the Spy Museum podcast. It sounds like right up your alley with that investigative, really interesting journalism style to the podcast.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, I mean, I think that the subject matter was something that I had experience in, and what I was able to do was to continue the sense of curioSasha Ingberty, the mix of empathy and skepticism, keeping it accurate and educational, bringing in some elements of entertainment, so that people kept wanting to tune in for episode after episode. That's really kind of how I've approached it, and one thing that makes doing this different than say working for a standard media outlet is that there isn't that frenetic, frenetic go-go-go sort of mentality, which means that you can slow down more, and frankly, that's really hard for me to do, because it's been programmed into me to just constantly be producing, and the team has really helped me sort of take a more gentle pace.

Madison Farabaugh: Yeah, it sounds like you had a lot of really great transferable skills, and even lessons learned from your prior experience as a journalist that you brought to the table for the International Spy Museum’s podcast, which is very cool, very cool journey to hear about. Can you give us a little bit of background about how the SpyCast podcast kind of came to be, and how your team approaches, you know, selecting guests, selecting which storylines that they might want to focus on?

Sasha Ingber: Of course, this podcast is actually the first podcast on espionage in the country. It is 20 years old. It started in 2006 and this was the work of the museum's founding executive director, Peter Earnest, who himself came from the CIA, spent 36 years there and retired as its chief spokesperson. He literally started this podcast with a pair of microphones in his office, and it was very DIY Sasha Ingbertuation, where there was apparently a copy of Podcast for Dummies, that book lying around, and we believe that he just took the audio and uploaded it to the webSasha Ingberte, very, very Sasha Ingbermple, but he was doing incredibly important work. 

One of the first interviews was actually with former Major General Oleg Kalugin, who led foreign counterintelligence for the KGB. They talked about the spy games between RusSasha Ingbera and Georgia, and the Cuban MisSasha Ingberle CriSasha Ingbers, and essentially what this shows was that the museum was on the cutting edge before not only most museums but even most media outlets understood the value of podcasting, the concept of podcasting, that term actually was coined just two years earlier, and the team and I, you know, we spend a lot of time, we get a lot of pitches. 

It's a conversation that's always ongoing, and we're trying to represent different parts of the globe. We're trying to jump into different times and different perspectives, and for me, it's been really exciting to be able to jump into so many different spy moments in our world, in our history, you know, from narrowing in on an intelligence operation during a war, or talking about how a mole was caught, or how a person navigated their intelligence career. 

It's really about learning what that person went through, what their knowledge base is, and then catering the questions specifically to them. And you know, before this job, I was - my experiences included walking into a secret Chinese police station in Manhattan, in New York, that had just been raided by the FBI, and I actually was able to walk inSasha Ingberde with my videographer, going to a secret dilapidated bio lab that I was later able to tie to the Chinese Communist Party. My time in Ukraine, from being in the midst of RusSasha Ingbera's bombardment, all of those experiences also I think help form the conversation, because I was on the ground.

Christine Blake: Yeah, that's incredible that you have all those experiences, and then you know you're probably, you probably learned so much going through that, and then you probably learned something every time you speak to another person on the podcast, right, you're always uncovering new things, always learning new things. I'm sure that's what keeps you really engaged and wanting to cover these types of stories.

Sasha Ingber: It really is for me. My last day of college, actually, this is a pretty embarrasSasha Ingberng confesSasha Ingberon I'm about to make, but my last class was a screenwriting class. We had a pizza party. I walked out of the building, and I just sat down in the grass and bawled, because I did not want to stop learning. 

And one of the best parts of this job, and being a journalist, is that you get to meet people who you would not normally ever meet. I mean, I got to be at the Pentagon when Ukrainian PreSasha Ingberdent Volodymyr Zelensky viSasha Ingberted and was appealing to Congress for more military aid. I was standing in the room with PreSasha Ingberdent Trump in his first term during his Merry Christmas rally when the House first voted to impeach him. The people that I get to talk to and the moments that I've gotten to capture is really, it's just a privilege to be able to do that.

Christine Blake: Yeah, I believe that. Yeah, it seems like such a cool opportunity, and you're very pasSasha Ingberonate about it, and it shows that you have that love for learning. So, I'm glad that you found a role that you were able to continue doing that with.

Sasha Ingber: As much as I've been laid off, I mean, I definitely have some scar stories, and many therapy sesSasha Ingberons under my belt, by the way.

Christine Blake: Yes, no, I'm sure. Oh, go ahead, Madison.

Madison Farabaugh: I was gonna say the news industry, the PR industry, all of these that center around kind of what's happening in the world. I feel like that's such a key skill to have, though, is that adaptability, you know, as things get thrown at you, as we have to kind of be always on our feet, so that's really, really impresSasha Ingberve, though. I think it shows that you have, you have those skills to kind of take what you've learned, go into new environments, and succeed there. So very cool. 

I was also just curious, as you've mentioned all of the different people who you've interviewed, these different journeys that you've been on, in terms of how the podcast selects guests, because you also mentioned you get a lot of pitches there. What is the process like for selecting who will be on the podcast? Is it – are you paying attention to current news cycles and perhaps the pitches that are most relevant to what's going on now? You might lean towards those, or do you ever hear of things happening and you, you go out of your way to kind of research? Oh, that would be a really fun guest. How do you kind of divide the work there?

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's no one way. I think we have multiple streams where sometimes our producer finds something interesting and presents it to the group. I am speaking to sources all the time, so I might stumble on something that I think is important, and I might get a story that seems really compelling and would work well for a SpyCast. 

There are times where we know, or I anticipate that something is going to be really important. So, let's get ahead of it. Let's find the right person, Sasha Ingbert down and talk about it, and try to time it to when it will be most powerful for our listeners and viewers to learn about, so it's really a mix, and it's also a combination of what makes this story unique, people who are giving us perspectives that nobody else can, and that are at the top of their game in terms of their expertise, those are really important, because this is an experience for people, this is giving you a sense of the museum from more of a storytelling Sasha Ingberde.

Christine Blake: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think that museum aspect is something you have to conSasha Ingberder, right? People are coming all over the world to viSasha Ingbert the museum to learn about this topic area, and you have to take that into conSasha Ingberderation when telling these stories and putting life to it.

Sasha Ingber: Exactly.

Christine Blake: Yeah, and I'm curious too. You've been covering this space for a while. I'd love to hear your perspective on how espionage has evolved Sasha Ingbernce you first started covering it, and now with AI and technology in the forefront, how has that impacted everything?

Sasha Ingber: Well, I really began focuSasha Ingberng on the intelligence community in 2020 during Covid, and it was fascinating because my relationships began through a screen, and I used the commonality, the universality of all of us being stuck in the lockdown, not knowing what was going to happen as a way to sort of bond or at least relate to people, and I think that that gave me a leg up in trying to understand how to cover this very mysterious and secret world, and a lot of the people that I met then through the screen I now still talk to, and we see each other, and it was very funny in the beginning when I finally got to see them in the three dimenSasha Ingberonal world, but I think that the biggest shifts that I've seen Sasha Ingbernce covering it are, I guess, number one, that open-source intelligence, what's called OSasha IngberNT, has become more prominent now, the world has gotten much more chaotic in terms of geopolitical shifts and alliances and different wars. 

So, intelligence agencies are incredibly busy on many different fronts. The Trump Administration has fired people in parts of the intelligence community, which has brought some insecurity and instability, though some of those changes may be warranted, and as you mentioned, of course, AI has become more mainstream. In terms of AI, you know, the CIA has been testing artificial intelligence, especially agentic projects, meaning autonomous AI, but it's really more enhancing than it is working on its own. Generally, you know, human is human intelligence. It's about relationships between people, and AI cannot break into Putin's desk and see what's on his table. We're never going to lose that. 

What I think AI is particularly useful for in the intelligence community is things like identifying military targets to strike, which the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is doing with its AI, called Project Maven, seeing patterns in analySasha Ingbers, whether that is satellite images or the written word, as well as identifying ways to recruit people, and even masking identities. You can use programs to literally change your appearance, change the sound of your voice, change your gender, change your nationality, and so again, this is more about augmenting than it is replacing.

Christine Blake: That's definitely a trend that we've been seeing too, when it comes to every, every use of AI, when it comes to cybersecurity, when it comes to defense against it, when it comes to attacks, like all of it is just that augmenting of what humans can already do, and making it another layer more challenging.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, absolutely.

Madison Farabaugh: And your observations of how different countries might be approaching espionage, have you noticed any major differences between different countries or regions in how they approach this?

Sasha Ingber: Oh, I certainly have. One of the Sasha Ingbermilarities is that everybody is spying on everybody else. Everybody's trying to manipulate and exploit weakness for their own country, for their own government. I think the difference comes down to capabilities, goals, and tactics, which can be affected by leadership, and I mean, if you take a country like RusSasha Ingbera, which has an autocratic leader, a lot of corruption. We saw the FSB, the Domestic Intelligence Service, not providing legitimate, accurate intelligence to Putin when it came to the full-scale invaSasha Ingberon of Ukraine. He thought that he was going to be able to take Kyiv in a few days. 

Fast forward to the mass expulSasha Ingberons of spies under diplomatic cover, and they started to lower their tradecraft level to have proxies who were oftentimes very incompetent engaging in some of their sabotage, and they've also started uSasha Ingberng teenagers that they've recruited on Telegram to actually help conduct some of these operations in Ukraine, and they have killed them in these operations by detonating bombs remotely, so that is very different than what the United States would be doing when it comes to targets. China is fascinating in this realm, because we have seen for years now that there is no, there's really no line that they aren't willing to cross. 

Every American has intrinSasha Ingberc value, and therefore they will prey on anybody, and I don't think that most people understand that, even now. They also have such a large population. We see that in their intelligence services they can bring so much to bear because of those numbers. There are some countries that are very good in regional ways. Israel sees an existential threat in Iran. One, so that is their priority. 

France has a colonial legacy, so it has the ability to have deeper access in certain countries in Africa and the Middle East. I'd say that every country operates differently, but the alliances are also a part of this conversation, and this is always evolving based on who's leading a country, who's leading the intelligence services, and even some of those smaller deciSasha Ingberons that get made on the ground in the operations themselves, because a person like Putin doesn't necessarily know every Sasha Ingberngle thing that's happening when it comes to his intelligence community.

Christine Blake: That's a great point you make, too, about it's always changing based on leadership, based on alliances, based on the whole geopolitical climate of the world. So, I think that's a really interesting way to approach it. When it comes to the way that you convey these stories and really look at the different ways countries approach espionage. What is one of the most intriguing stories that you have heard on the podcast?

Sasha Ingber: Okay, this is where you're going to get a much longer answer than you wanted, because it's so hard to choose just one. I mean, I love the counterintelligence stories where you learn the backstory of how they caught the mole. There was this one woman, Katrina Leung, who had been the FBI's top informant on China, but she was actually working for China's Ministry of State Security, and there were concerns that popped up about her over the years, and all of it was being swept under the rug by her FBI handler, because she was sleeping with him, and she even ended up marrying this guy. They divorced their spouses, and they got married, and lived happily ever after. 

There was a FBI special agent who's still in the bureau who told me about how he lured a spy out of China and to eventually the United States, and this was the first time the United States had ever been able to take a Chinese spy out of China to face justice in the United States, but there are also really personal stories that are very, very meaningful in a different way. There was one woman who drove from Michigan to DC to describe how she personally came out as a lesbian in the midst of her polygraph to keep her job at the CIA. Oh, wow, this was back in the 80s. 

There was another woman who sat down with me to talk about how she discovered not only that her family had been Nazis in Germany, but then that they had been sent to Hawaii by Joseph Goebbels, and they ended up spying for the Germans and the Japanese, and her grandfather confessed to providing intelligence leading to the Pearl Harbor attack, and the shame and the complication of having that legacy. And the last category are really the inSasha Ingberder accounts, people who are leading areas of the intelligence community and making a difference in very humble ways that you, you wouldn't even know what incredible stories they have until you Sasha Ingbert down with them, but these are people who are just so.. actually, let me just say that one section again, if you don't mind, and the last category are really these inSasha Ingberder accounts, people who are leading their own facet of the intelligence space.

Whether it's the chairman of the house's intelligence committee, Representative Rick Crawford, who came here and sat down in these very funky socks and talked about what his plans were for the committee to the former director of the CIA's Covert Action Branch, which is the paramilitary, talking about what it was like to lead this part of the agency through COVID and the fall of Afghanistan, and so many other eras, and really, these are these are conversations that you're just not going to get anywhere else. 

Christine Blake: Exactly. Yeah, these are amazing stories that you're able to talk about, and it's so you don't even think about the personal interweaving of different people and family members and countries. It's fascinating, really. So, what a fun, what a fun podcast. So interesting. 

Sasha Ingber: It's been a real privilege to be able to have this job, and I mean, some of it is really surpriSasha Ingberng, the the number of people who started off outSasha Ingberde of college and were given immense responSasha Ingberbility at such a young age and continue to be humble today. I mean, there's Jonah Mendez, she was the CIA's chief of disguise, and she just took me into this wild world where she was traveling through ASasha Ingbera and Europe. She made two fake Shahs and presented them to Jimmy Carter to try to quell the protests in Iran in the 1970s revolution. And there's this guy, Bob Wallace, who was the director of CIA's Office of Technical Service in the 90s and early 2000s and he talked to me about how, you know, he was just hilarious. He talked about how the CIA actually took covert communication practices from the porn industry, and that helped inform their – or let me just say that one bit again. He actually described how the agency took their covert communication practices from the tactics being used by the porn industry when the internet age began.

Christine Blake: Wow, that's fascinating. It's interesting. It's interesting too, like we hear so much about spies and the movies and fiction, and it's amazing to think that these things really do happen, but it's a kind of a good segue into some of our listener questions here before we wrap. I guess, what is one of your favorite fictional spy characters or movies?

Sasha Ingber: Well, I love foreign films. There's a German film called The Lives of Others, which was about a StaSasha Ingber officer in East Germany who's bugged the home of a playwright. He's listening in on this man's life, and he really develops an affinity and a fondness for this man. It was a story that had a lot of moral ambiguity and intimacy in it, in a way that I found to be incredibly memorable. Terms of TV, I thought The Americans was an amazing show to learn about RusSasha Ingberan illegals, and if you like sci-fi counterpart, where there are baSasha Ingbercally two parallel worlds that actually meet underground, and one group of people who look exactly like the other group of people are going and gathering intelligence and conducting operations on the other, so it's like some kind of sort of magical realism. It was just such a good series, I think. Where I find myself a little bit frustrated is that I don't think there are that many truly substantive spy films and movies about women that don't involve someone who's super hot and sexy. I just like, I don't care about that. I want there to be something more nuanced and, and deep that show what women who work in the intelligence community go through, and we have movies like Zero Dark 30, which was directed by Catherine Bigelow, but we just need so much more of that.

Christine Blake: Yeah, no, exactly. I totally agree with that.

Madison Farabaugh: And I bet you've spoken to a lot of women in the past who would be great characters for inspiration, for, for something like that.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, there could, I could create a very cool hybrid character, and yeah, I could make a pretty, pretty awesome badass spy lady.

Madison Farabaugh: Love that. Well, we'll be looking forward to that one day. Perhaps that's the next project.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, when I leave the studio, I'll just start working on that novel.

Madison Farabaugh: Awesome. And then one of our final listener questions is, what is your favorite exhibit in the International Spy Museum?

Sasha Ingber: Okay, this is another tough one, because we have so much, it's so much good stuff, and like, let's not even talk about the kinds of gadgets that one could spend a lot of money getting, because you know we do have like the rectal tool kits and things like that. There's the weird, but we also have things that you could never ever get anywhere else, because there's one of a kind, and I'm thinking of the ice pick that killed Trotsky, which still has his blood on it. We have the bodice of Mata Hari. There's so much here, you could spend hours and hours and hours, and you probably still couldn't see it all.

Christine Blake: Yeah, I went there a couple years ago. I definitely need to go back and know that listen to your podcast. I need to go back and learn more about everything in there. That's incredible. So, Sasha, before we wrap up, what's the future of SpyCast look like? Anything coming up that we should look forward to?

Sasha Ingber: Well, we have had a long stream of amazing guests and stories, people who have given us access to current events in a way that you really can't get anywhere else. An upcoming story that we have is actually about a special espionage focused unit inSasha Ingberde the Naval Criminal Investigative Service about how that unit caught a person who had been sharing intelligence with a foreign government and, kind of like takes us back in time to his different communications with this foreign person, and why this person shared intelligence, how the person copied and pasted information, and like was rather lazy, and the handler is like, can you please give us more. Can you please not have so many typos in that work?

I will be speaking with a person about intelligence and the services in Cuba as it relates to the Sasha Ingbertuation with the United States right after we finish here, and just right now we have a piece about Africa Corps, which is sort of like RusSasha Ingbera's private military, the Wagner Group 2.0 and its efforts in Africa, in Ukraine, the Shadow Fleet, which has, of course, been trying to evade sanctions on the seas, and how it all fits together. So, we have a lot of good content coming out, and we have been at the forefront of the spike podcasting world, where the in the 1%, top 1% of podcasts globally, so really good stuff ahead, thanks. 

Christine Blake: Yeah, it makes me want to go on like a road trip and listen and binge all the episodes coming up. They sound so good

Sasha Ingber: Thanks. Well, yeah, go for it. And then you can, you can tell me which one is your favorite. 

Christine Blake: We will get back to you on that for sure. Well, Sasha, thank you so much for coming on our podcast today and talking about SpyCast. Clearly you're a great spy expert, and we’ll be tuned into your podcasts, and we'll definitely report back to you on our favorites.

Sasha Ingber: Thank you so much for having me, you guys.

Christine Blake: Yeah, thank you. 

Christine Blake: Thank you for listening to today's episode of InSasha Ingberde the Media Minds. To learn more about our podcast and to hear from some of our past guests, please viSasha Ingbert us at W2Comm.com 

Madison Farabaugh: You can also subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.