Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast. I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Vigelin, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark, and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from throughout history.

Go to Explorespodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app.

That's the Explorers Podcast.

Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Inber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage,

intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

Washington and Tehran have a long and complicated history, with tensions that rise, fall, and then

rise again.

Reza Olangian, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen, left behind his life in Silicon Valley

to spy for the military in Tehran.

And by the time DEA special agent Jeffrey Higgins found out about him in 2011,

Alangian was trying to acquire hundreds of surface-to-air missiles.

That kicked off an elaborate multi-country sting operation and ultimately a 25-year

prison sentence. I talked to Jeff about how he helped find, capture, and prosecute Olangian.

He says the Iranians are using more surrogates to acquire weapons today.

Jeffrey, today Reza Olangian, he's 64, he's sitting behind bars in a federal prison in

L.A. But who is he? Yeah, so to meet Reza, you wouldn't think he was involved in

weapons trafficking or trying to obtain, you know, weapons of mass destruction.

He was just a bespeckled, diminutive man, fairly soft-spoken, well-educated.

He looked more like a community college professor than a weapons trafficker.

He's the kind of guy I'd be sitting next to you in Starbucks, and you'd have no idea what he was involved in. How did you get tipped to the fact that he was

looking to buy these surface-to-air missiles? Russian-made, man-portable, and with a high probability of

...