These are stories you were never meant to hear. The invisible but vital work of the world’s intelligence services: secret operatives playing to very different rules. The Spy Who, hosted by Indira Varma and Raza Jaffrey, takes you deep inside that shadow world to meet spies who risked everything in the national interest – or, sometimes, their own.Listen to The Spy Who ad-free on Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/the-spy-who now.
66 episodes transcribedFew spies have motives as hard to decipher as those of Oleg Penkovsky. Was he a hero, an egotist or a madman? The Spy Who's Tristan Donovan s...
It’s 1962 and Oleg Penkovsky has gone to ground after spotting a KGB surveillance team tracking his MI6 contact Janet Chisholm. But when the...
Oleg Penkovsky is back in the USSR, ready to feed Soviet secrets to his new MI6 contact: a pram-pushing mother of three. But with the Berlin...
After months of missed opportunities, the CIA and MI6 are about to meet Penkovsky. But with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev squaring up to t...
It’s 1960. The world hangs on the brink of nuclear war. But in Moscow, a man’s about to emerge from the shadows with an offer for the CIA. Hi...
Aimen Dean talks Raza Jaffrey through the highs and lows of his eight years as an undercover agent and why he chose to spy for the British ra...
Aimen Dean is now on a mission to thwart a deadly plot to release poison gas on the New York Subway. But when his British spymasters decide t...
Aimen Dean is now working undercover posing as a loyal jihadi in Afghanistan, while actually spying for the British intelligence service MI6....
Aimen Dean is trapped. He wants out of al-Qaeda and Afghanistan, but no one gets to leave the jihadi training camps without permission. So wh...
It’s 1994 and 16-year-old Aimen Dean wants to die. He’s heading to war-torn Bosnia to join the Mujahideen and save fellow Muslims. He hopes t...
The endeavors of the women of the Special Operatives Executive were vital to many of Britain's successes during WW2. But the secretive nature...
After months on the run Noor Inayat Khan's luck takes a turn for the worse. But she doesn't go down without a fight - and the Nazis soon...
Britain’s Prosper spy network is falling apart in Northern France. Every day the Gestapo seems to arrest yet another agent and Noor Inayat Kh...
Noor Inayat Khan is back in France, eager to use her radio skills to help fight back against the Nazi occupation. But when two other agents f...
It’s June 1940 and the German forces are closing in on Paris. Noor Inayat Khan escapes to Britain just in time but is determined to return to...
Why was the Cambridge Five scandal so embarrassing to MI5? And how significant was Oleg Lyalin's success in restoring faith in British Intell...
Operation Foot is now happening. And British government knows that its attempt to neutralise the KGB in London will be met with hostility fro...
There’s panic at MI5 headquarters. Oleg Lyalin, their man inside the KGB, has just been arrested for drunk driving putting Operation Foot in...
Oleg Lyalin is now compromised. To survive, he must now find a way to maintain the fictions of his multiple lives. But when his messy love li...
MI5 is on its knees at the dawn of the 1970s: Soviet spies are running free around the country and the government won’t boot them out for fea...
