Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Den of Spies with Craig Unger

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Was there a secret conspiracy between Ronald Reagan’s campaign and Iran to help him win the 1980 election? NYT bestselling author Craig Unger unpacks the plot in his most recent book, “Den of Spies,” a story he worked on for 30 years. The Iran hostage crisis had plagued Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and was seen as one of his biggest failures. Reagan’s campaign worried that an October hostage release would give Carter a boost to win reelection. So, Unger explains, Reagan’s team hatched a plan to get Iran to hold the hostages until Reagan was president, trading weapons for their cooperation. It’s a real-life spy thriller filled with CIA operatives, code names, and countless people who tried to stop Unger from uncovering the truth. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You are going to need to buckle up for this episode. My guest is Craig Unger, who has written a book called Den of Spies. Reagan Carter and the secret history of the treason that stole the White House. Now this is not about election conspiracy theories, but it is about the secret effort to undermine the release of the American hostages being held in the Iranian embassy, something that ultimately cost Jimmy Carter the election. You are gonna wanna stick around for this conversation,

so let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. Thank you so much for being here. Well thanks for having me. First of all, let's set the stage for what the Den of Spies actually is. It's a spy thriller, but it's a real life spy thriller, and it's about a covert operation that took place in 1980 during the presidential election. And it's been controversial for many, many years. I've been on and off the story for more than three decades, and I believe

I've finally really put together a spy story of how it happened. This is a secret, treasonous covert operation that sabotaged an American presidential election. And it was the foundation of the birth of modern conservatism. This is the birth of the Reagan era in 1980, just after Iran had seized 52 American hostages. Okay. So to give the listeners a little bit more context, we have the Iranian hostage crisis at the tail end of the Jimmy Carter presidency. And this occupies all of Jimmy Carter's time.

He's obviously like so focused on trying to get these hostages released that he doesn't even feel good about going out and hitting the campaign trail, right? He's like, I got to stay here. I got to focus on getting these people out. Doesn't matter if I win again, if they're still being held hostage in Iran. Tell us a little bit more, just because not everybody is super up on their 20th century history. Tell us a little bit more, like set the stage. What is the context for this spy story? And then I want to get into it a little bit more, but what

is the backdrop against which all of this is happening? Well, this is the elemental issue in the 1980 presidential campaign. If Carter can bring the hostages home, he'll be seen as a hero just before the election. And presumably that would push him over the top. The Republicans know that they're going to do everything they can to stop it, but they can't appear to stop it. What I report is what was really going on behind the scenes,

and that the campaign manager for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush was running as vice president, the campaign manager was Bill Casey. To my mind, he's one of the greatest master spies in American history. He's dazzlingly brilliant. He's a fabulous character. I describe him as sort of a cross between James Bond and Mr. Magoo. He is known for mumbling.

The joke was when he became head of the CIA that all the other top guys had to have scramblers on their phone, but not Bill Casey. No one could understand what he said anyway. His table manners were embarrassing. It's Bill food all over himself. It spit on people when he talked. It seemed to be going a dozen different directions at once. And yet secretly, he was incredibly effective and had a real secret intelligence team that could sell weapons

to Iran, a hostile foreign power that was embargoed, while on the other hand, he was running a winning presidential campaign. So the thrust of the Den of Spies is this secret plan to make sure that the hostages would not get released during the Carter presidency, right? And the motivation is to get Ronald Reagan elected. Am I understanding that correctly? Absolutely. And I want you to think about it.

One is Iran has just had the Iranian revolution. Before that, the Shah was in control and he was basically an American puppet. And thanks to the Shah, who had been installed by the CIA, we had powerful allies in the Middle East. And even more important, we had access to lots of cheap oil from 1953 to 79. Suddenly, the Shah is toppled. And you have these theocratic Islamic fundamentalists who are taking charge. And the whole world is agog. In Iran, they're chanting, Death to America. They'd refer to America as the great Satan and Israel as the little Satan.

And on the same time, the Republicans are making jokes about how when Reagan gets elected, they will burn Iran to the ground. And those are the jokes during the campaign. What's red and flat and glows in the dark, Tehran after Reagan is elected. So the idea that this was going on behind the scenes is just unimaginable. And yet what William Casey is doing is he is aligning with the hardline theocracy, not the moderate secular Democrats in Iran, but he's aligning with them. He's giving them weapons, even though they're holding American hostages.

And in return for giving those weapons, what does he want? He wants Iran not to release the hostages, at least not before the election. And that's exactly what happens. How does a political operative who's running a campaign, how does he traffic weapons to a foreign country? Well, that's a wonderful question and speaks to who Bill Casey is. And it is quite extraordinary. During World War II, he was a key member of the OSS,

the Office of Strategic Services, which was a key member of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor of the CIA, and he did brilliant work against the Nazis, and more power to him for that. But he also did it against the Democrats nearly 40 years later. And even though he was not officially in the CIA during this period, later during Reagan, he became head of the CIA, but not at this time. What I discovered was, even though he was a private citizen,

he'd had private meetings with the head of Israeli military intelligence on a regular basis. He had meetings with South African arms dealers who sold weapons to Iran. He had this secret team of cutouts and operatives who were able to set up meetings with Iranian officials in Madrid, Paris, and elsewhere. And it took me more than three decades, but I finally got into Iran, I went to Israel, I went to Paris to find research to support all these allegations.

AMT. SIEGEL It's really quite extraordinary, Craig, what you have managed to not just hint at. This is something that's been hinted at or gossiped about for a very long time, but to actually do the work to definitively prove it, including all of this big international travel, it's quite remarkable. Talk a little bit more about what it took to gather the evidence, the hard evidence where you feel like, I can now say without question that this is what happened.

Well, this book was very different for me. And I've done six books about major malfeasance in one way or another during elections. And this book was very different for me because it was personal. And when you start investigative reporting, one of the things they say is, it's not about you. Don't write about yourself. And I kind of followed that credo for more than 50 years. This time I decided to make a break and make a much more personal book because it was a

real journey for me. And I started out in 1991. I first started investigating this. I did a big 10,000 word piece for Esquire magazine in which I sort of laid out the narrative. And then Newsweek magazine, I mean the media was very very different back 30 years ago too and Newsweek was a very powerful organ that played a major role in shaping the national conversation. It's not like it is now, but it had over three million subscribers and it was the kind of publication that could break major stories and do major investigations.

But when I went to Newsweek, something extraordinary happened. All the material I've been collecting and the whole narrative surrounding the October surprise took a 180. And I saw it suddenly became gospel that anyone who was stupid enough to investigate this was a gullible and was being taken in by frauds and phony arms dealers and people like that. And it was all a big hoax and people like me had been taken. And the whole issue was sort of whitewashed really. The congressional investigation came up with nothing and the conventional wisdom became that the October surprise was a hoax. But for me, who had actually been investigating it,

I had sources all in and off the record who were giving me very Explosive information and I kept following it for decades afterwards So you felt like this was just like a story you could not let go You know, like there was like a personal element of like man. I need to button this up I need to write a book about it. People need to know the truth This was one of those things that you just felt like there's an element here that like my personal reputation or my personal feelings about this have to play a part in writing this story. Is that true? Well, one of my major sources was Elliot Richardson, who was the former attorney general. And he

to me was sort of the hero of Watergate, but he refused to fire the special prosecutor. And he was sort of the man of great moral courage. And he was one of my sources on this. And he said, look, Watergate was nothing compared to what really went on here. And he had a lot of information that he gave me. So I kept following for many reasons. Over the years, I got to Israel where the head of military intelligence told me that he had been talking to Casey on a regular basis.

He also verified that some of the arms dealers I'd been talking to had been trading arms to Iran on behalf of the Republicans. And this material is really explosive if you think about it. Israel was an active partner in a covert operation that sabotaged an American presidential election. America is Israel's biggest supporter. They're not supposed to be doing that to us. This is our sovereignty. I know you were talked about in The Atlantic and basically in The Atlantic they say something like the obsession that would overtake Craig Unger's life, get him labeled a member of the tin foil hat

brigade, and nearly destroy his career as an investigative reporter took root on an April morning in 1991. And he talks about how you were just drinking your coffee reading the New York Times and you came across this piece of information about this plot that had sabotaged Jimmy Carter's reelection efforts. Tell us a little bit more about that moment when you were drinking your coffee and you came across this piece of information. What was that moment like for you? Well it was sort of staggering because this was an op-ed piece in the New York Times by a man named Gary Sink and Gary had been on the National Security Council

under Jimmy Carter and before him on President Gerald Ford. So he was the Iran specialist, and he was really very much of an intelligence analyst. He's been a scholar at Columbia University, a very sober-minded, just the fact fan kind of guy, the farthest from a conspiracy nutcase that you can imagine. I remember meeting with him just after he printed that, and I took his piece and for me it was very much a roadmap.

Because I saw it even though it's supposedly an opinion piece, its opinions come from facts. He was an intelligence analyst, and I used it very much as a roadmap for my first piece in Esquire. It was very well received when it was published in Esquire. And Newsweek immediately hired me to pursue the investigation. But a few weeks into that, things took a 180. And it was sort of horrifying what I saw. And I think it's very much a precursor of what we're going through now. That is, today it's as if you have two Americas

who don't share the same set of facts at all, and there's a chasm between them. And back then it was starting to happen, but in a much more discreet sort of undercover kind of way. And this is where I saw it start to happen. I had a front row seat at Newsweek when I could see the forces that were changing the reporting.

And that reporters are sort of addicted to their sources and almost a prisoner of them. And I think one of the bans of American journalism is what is called access journalism. That is, back in the 90s, if Henry Kissinger was a big source of yours, well, wow, your career was golden. You could get story after story and your career was made, but you would have to carry water for him. You'd have to do as he said. And that would change the narrative entirely. And to my mind, it often resulted in inaccurate reporting. As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having Hey friends, I'm excited to share a podcast with you that I think you're going to love.

I recently joined Elise Lunin on her podcast,ing the Thread to chat about historical secrets and my approach to judging people from the past and my perspective on our current moment in time. I also tell a story that may convince you to work with instead of against your enemies. Each week, Elise sits down with today's leading thinkers, authors, experts, doctors, healers, scientists, to try to answer life's big questions. Why we do what we do, how we can know and love each other better, and how we can heal ourselves and our world.

You can find my episode and all of Elise's incredible conversations on Pulling the Thread with Elise Lunen on the free Odyssey app and everywhere you get your podcasts. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. There was a personal cost for you too,

to pursue this story. You were sued over investigating this, right? I was sued, I won the lawsuit, but even that means you're tied up in court for, I guess it was about five years, and it puts a question mark over your reputation. I did win the lawsuit and I got back on my feet. I came back to New York and was with Vanity Fair for 15 years.

And I've written, this is my eighth book. But I never wanted to let go of this. To me, this was a story, as Elliot Richardson said, that was bigger than Watergate. And October Surprise is an explosive development that changes the course of the election. And that worked out two ways in 1980. The Republicans were trying to say that Jimmy Carter was going to stage an October's surprise

by bringing home the hostages. Secretly, they were manipulating it so he couldn't. Secretly, they were manipulating it so he couldn't. Whose idea was it to begin negotiating with Tehran and saying, you know what, no matter what they do, don't release the hostages? Who came up with this plan? Well, Casey was the master spy. And it's really interesting. What I accomplished most was showing that he'd been putting together a network for many years, even before they ran hostage crisis.

So he had his best friend with a guy named John Shaheen, who was an oil millionaire in New York. Shaheen was Casey's best friend going back to the days of World War II. And he was a cutout. That is, he was the middleman in covert operations. So Casey would talk to Shaheen, and Shaheen would do the dirty work. And one of the ways I found a lot of information is the FBI had wiretaps on Iranian arms dealers, two brothers named Cyrus and John Sheet Hashemi.

And during the wiretaps, it was clear they were talking regularly to John Shaheen, and Shaheen was Casey's friend. So that's how the communications went at least for a major part of this. And the Hashemis went to the Carter administration and said, oh, we'd love to help you release the hostages. But secretly, they were double agents working for Bill Casey. AMT – So in your mind, Bill Casey is the mastermind behind this plan, which he believes is like sort of the golden ticket to ousting Carter and getting Reagan elected. Was that his main motivation with partisan politics?

BD – It was party over country, party over country. And that's what you see in these October surprises. And there have been different versions of these in 1968, even earlier, during the Vietnam War, Nixon was running against Hubert Humphrey. And the Nixon administration sent an intermediary to make sure the Paris peace talks were disrupted, which embarrassed the Democrats enormously and helped put Nixon over the top.

So this has happened in several elections. And in 1980, you know, it was sort of extraordinary because the hostages were released literally minutes after Reagan took the oath of office when he was inaugurated. And it was almost comical. And if you just had logically put two and two together, you knew there had to be a fishy deal somewhere. That's part of what has always interested me. It's reported that Jimmy Carter, even though he knew

he lost the election, spends the morning of inauguration day kind of like sleepless in his office and his wife comes downstairs and is like, you have got to get ready, like shave and brush your teeth and put on your clothes, because we got to go do the inauguration. And of course he's going to give up power. He knows he's not staying in office, but he wanted it for his legacy,

that he had been able to help release the hostages. He didn't want to leave on that moment. But then when the very first thing Ronald Reagan talks about during his post inauguration is the fact that these hostages have been released, how could that not be suspicious? How did he manage to get them released in the five minutes since he's been president? You know what I mean? Like, that's weird.

That's a strange situation. Who plans that? And I think that goes back to Casey. I mean, even, you know, the onion, the satirical magazine had an end of the century book for the 20th century. And for that day, they had a fake headline saying, Reagan inaugurated urges America

not to put two and two together. Well he certainly kicked off his presidency on an upward trajectory certainly was like wow we really did the right thing by electing him it certainly set the stage for American opinion of him, right? Absolutely. But I mean, that's why I think it's so important for people to understand the truth. I mean, imagine bribing a hostile foreign power not to release American hostages.

OK. How much was Reagan involved in this? How much did he know? How much did he approve of it? Because you know that there's going to be people who talk about the negative legacy of Bill Casey, but who feel like this wasn't Reagan's idea. It wasn't his doing. It wasn't on him. How much did Reagan know and how involved was he in this? Richard P. Cotter – Truman's slogan, of course, was the buck stops here. Reagan's

slogan was, I didn't hear that. And Casey was renowned for mumbling. And Reagan famously said, you know, I can never understand a word Bill Casey says, and I can ask him to repeat himself once. I can ask him a second time, but you can't ask a third time. It's just rude. And so I just nod my head.

And so it's very hard to prove exactly what Reagan knew. He was asked by reporters and once on the tarmac as he was about to board a plane, he looked back at a reporter and said, oh, we were doing something the other way, whatever that means. And there was some evidence, though. There was a letter to Nancy Reagan from the former governor of Texas, John Conley. And John Conley had taken a trip. He was another operative of Bill Casey. And he had a disastrous run for the Republican presidential nomination, but he wanted a cabinet post and he wanted to stay close to Reagan and Casey.

So on behalf of Casey, he took a trip to the Middle East and he visited various foreign leaders. I have a photo of him in my book with Anwar Sadat of Egypt. And he was telling all of them, look, Iran shouldn't release the hostages. They should keep them till after the election. It's very important that Iran's leadership know that and do that. And Connolly later wrote a letter to Nancy Reagan. So it's certainly

suggestive that Ronald Reagan may well have known about it, and he certainly knew about it in broad terms. LESLIE KENDRICK He had to have known something was going on because it's not like, you know, his speech moments into his presidency where he's announcing the release. Wouldn't it have occurred to him, like, how did we do that? How did this happen? Yeah, I mean, I think he was smart enough not to show his hand like that. And when it came to the debate between Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Casey had orchestrated the theft of Jimmy Carter's briefing papers, and he put them on the desk of James Baker, who

was a Reagan aide. So Reagan had the advantage of preparing with Carter's briefing papers, and that's firmly established by the congressional investigation. They also had a sub-part of the campaign called the October Surprise Committee, and they were on the lookout. They were hoping, you know, would the Carter administration try and rescue operation? What would they do? Any troop movements might tip off

that the hostages were being released early. So they had a very sophisticated intelligence operation going. Why is Bill Casey willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of Americans, because for every day that they were in captivity, their lives were at risk? Why is he willing to allow

them to stay in, you know, a prison setting essentially? Why is he willing to allow them to remain imprisoned in the embassy in an effort to get Ronald Reagan elected? Yes, we all know that there's people who, you know, would do nearly anything to get their favorite person elected. But it seems like there needs to be some bigger driving force behind this long-term sort of operation where you're talking about how he has a den of spies. It's not just like one phone call. It takes effort to be able to work with a foreign government and to make all these backroom deals and traffic and arms. And if you do this, we'll do that. This is not a like overnight emergency development.

This was planned for and worked for. What is his motivation? What is he going to get out of it other than getting Ronald Reagan elected? Why would he be willing to sacrifice Americans to get his preferred candidate elected? I mean, one is they weren't sacrificed permanently, just for a few hundred extra days. Yes, yes. But it's a wonderful question. And if you look at American foreign policy between the end of World War II and 1975,

the CIA was just ruthless. I mean, in terms of doing coup d'etats all over the world, they overthrew the government in Syria, in Guatemala in 1954, in Iran in 1953. They installed the Shah of Iran. They later did it in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. They were running a foreign policy by themselves in a way. And there was a big crackdown in the mid-70s from Congress. The Church Committee investigated for the first time there was real oversight.

And when Jimmy Carter became president, his head of the CIA, Stansfield Turner, immediately fired 800 agents who were part of the operations directorate. These are hardcore CIA operatives. When they saw that we had lost Iran, that Jimmy Carter being a weak president who had lost one of the most powerful countries that was an American proxy, we got huge amounts of oil from Iran and it had enormous strategic importance in the Middle East.

They were furious and Casey loved those guys. They were all part of his network. He was very much a Manichaean man. When it came to the Cold War, he didn't want to just contain the Russians. He wanted to roll back all their gays. He loved these coup d'etats that the CIA had been doing. So he got to work and it was essential for the campaign. But I suspect he would rationalize it that it was really important for American interests to have power in the Middle East at the same time when you look at what he actually did.

He installed the same repressive theocracy that's in Iran today, and they are not friends of the United States, they're not friends of Israel, so I think what he did was horrible. I'm Jenna Fisher, and I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends, and together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office

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Well we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. You bring up a really good point that the United States covertly via the CIA had a vested interest in maintaining our control, so to speak, over a Middle Eastern power and that they viewed Jimmy Carter as a threat to the operations that they had been running around the world for decades. And they felt like Ronald Reagan would help them restore this idea of like, yes, this is an appropriate use of CIA power to have these coups that install leaders that are failing to the United States. And that is in the United States' best interest. That

was their belief at the time. And of course, today we might think that seems ridiculous, but in post-World War II Cold War America, where many of these men like Bill Casey were coming up, that was not the belief system that they had. Casey's belief system was forged by the Nazis, really, and one could see it that way. But he turned the same tactics on the Democrats. So that, to me, is what is sort of shocking. LESLIE KENDRICK Yeah, he then begins not just wielding this

power in foreign countries, he begins wielding it against other Americans in America. And that's like an interesting part of this entire story to me. GEOFFREY STROHAUER Right. Well, this is, to me, an act of treason and is the sabotage of an American presidential election. This covert operation is about far more than just getting one president elected, right? Because the election of Ronald Reagan, who becomes the standard bearer for the American conservative movement, he is the archetype of conservatism. He is the peace through strength guy. He's the, we're not afraid of using US military power. He's the trickle down economics guy.

He is the modern archetype for American conservatism in many of the same ways that LBJ is the modern archetype for the American liberal movement. And the election of Ronald Reagan to eight years in the White House, it's difficult to overstate how much that changed the course of United States history and consequently changed the course of world history. This is not just like a couple of dudes in a back room, like, no, release them on January 20th and not a day before, and

then, you know, he'll be elected. And yay, the outcome of this covert operation massively affects the history of the world. Absolutely. And it's not just two terms of Ronald Reagan. After that, you had George H.W. Bush, and then you had his son for two terms. So that's five administrations. And off the top of my head, I don't know how many Supreme Court justices they appointed, but it's part of the reason we have this Republican majority in the Supreme Court today. I mean,

it has really changed the nation. What is it that you hope people take away? What do you want them to have learned from having read this? What are we supposed to do with this information, Craig? You know, like, now that we know it, what are we supposed to do? So what are the takeaways and what do you hope people do with this? Craig S. Luttrell, Ph.D., Ph.D. The bottom line to me is that we have to come terms with our history and we have to accept it, even the dark parts of our history. And it's the oldest cliché in the book that those who don't remember the history are doomed to repeat it. But this became very personal for me and I started thinking about it in terms of how I'd grown up thinking about history. And when I was just a kid, I think I was 13 years old,

my father took me on my first trip to Europe and I happened to be Jewish. But we were in Germany and he took me to the concentration camps to Dachau. And but we were in Germany and he took me to the concentration camps, to Dachau. And going there, I realized that it was a monument honoring the victims. And that Germany was saying, we did this, we committed these horrible atrocities. And Germans, I have German friends, they grow up learning that, that Germans were Nazis and they had the death camps and they killed six million Jews. And the president of Germany said a few years ago, to truly love Germany, you have to love it with a broken heart.

After I was in Germany, I went back to Dallas where I grew up and I was in eighth grade and we went on a Texas history trip, which of course took us to the Alamo. And in America, people know about the Alamo. Everyone does, don't they? to the Alamo. In America, people know about the Alamo. Everyone does, don't they? I remember the Alamo. I grew up with Davy Crockett and a Krumskid half and all that stuff. I went to that and paid homage to the heroes of the Alamo.

It wasn't until decades later until I learned the whole story, which is at the time, Texas was a province in Mexico. Mexico had just abolished slavery. So we were rooting for the slave owners and That turns everything on its head. Why is it important that we know the truth? I mean, I totally agree with you that we cannot build pride on a lie that we have to know the truth in order to Truly love something so I agree with you about the only way you can love Germany is with a broken heart and that's in many ways

true of America too. You know like we can think of a million reasons why it's important that we understand our very dark past when it comes to enslaving other human beings and that we can't just sweep it under the rug and be like oh the war of northern aggression, states rights, blah blah blah like that's silly that's silly to do that. It's important to know exactly what we did. And when you love something, you wanna make it better. Right, you want it to be the best it can be.

It's like your own children. When you have children, you don't want them to be lazy slobs who get Fs in school and who never make their bet. You want them to be the best they can be in part because you love them. Right, you want what's best for them. So I would love to hear you talk a little bit more before we sign off. Why is it important that America grapple with the sort of more dark aspects

of our past? Why is that something that's incumbent upon us to do now? Right. Well, like I say, you know, it is the oldest cliche, if you will. Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it. And you see it again and again with the October Surprise that it happened in 1980. It happened before that. We never acknowledged it. It was swept under the rug. When I was investigating it for Newsweek, it was quashed. And it never became part of our shared history. And we don't really acknowledge these things. When I started out in journalism, for better or worse, when you watch CBS News, Walter Cronkite was talking to all Americans, or so it seemed. Today, that's not

the case. We're captives of Twitter or X, and we're all in our little silos, and no one talks to each other. The internet doesn't connect us. I think it divides us quite a lot. And there is such a thing as factual realities. Things happen. And when I was reporting this for Newsweek, I knew they happened. I saw Americans being lied to. One of the shocking things about that experience back then was Newsweek not only said it didn't happen, it ran three stories in a row in sequence saying the October surprise didn't happen. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. It ran three stories in a row in sequence saying the October surprise didn't happen, it didn't happen, it didn't happen. And if you're a journalist you know that news is when something does happen. When something

doesn't happen you don't have to tell people that again and again. And what I saw was just information happening. You see it enormous amounts of it now and I think that's why the book is so relevant today is that we've got to learn from the past. And if we don't, we're going to be in real trouble. Well, you have written a very, very compelling book, Den of Spies. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for your decades of work chasing down this story. I really enjoyed reading it. I'm not happy about all the facts in the book, Craig, but I'm glad to know them. Some things, I like to

say that some things are difficult to hear but important to know and I think this is one of those stories that falls in that category. So I appreciate your time today. Well thank you very much. I enjoyed it. You can buy Craig's Den of Spies wherever you get your books. If you want to support a local bookshop, head to yours or you can go to bookshop.org. Thanks for being here today. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show?

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