Decoder Ring | The Red String Board Conspiracy

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Arts, Tv & Film, Music

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There’s a ubiquitous prop in just about every police procedural and conspiracy thriller: a cork board pinned with documents, newspaper clippings, and Polaroid photos, all connected by a web of red string. They go by many names, including pin boards, string boards, evidence boards, investigation walls, conspiracy walls, and walls of crazy. These boards can be vehicles of insight or manifestations of madness—and in many cases, both. But where did they come from? And can they really solve a crime? In this episode, we try to unwind the red string board all the way to its center. To aide in our investigation, we enlist the help of Aki Peritz, a former CIA analyst and the author of Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History. You’ll also hear from Shawn Gilmore, editor of The Vault of Culture and creator of the Narrative String Theory project; and Dr. Anne Ganzert, author of Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television. And we learn about the intricacies of building a string board from production designers Michael Scott Cobb (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and John D. Kretschmer (Homeland). This episode was written and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. It was edited by Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected] or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281. Sources for This Episode Benson, Richard. “Decoding the Detective's 'Crazy Wall',” Esquire, Jan. 22, 2015. Coley, Rob. “The case of the speculative detective: Aesthetic truths and the television ‘crime board’,” NECSUS, May 28, 2017. Ganzert, Anne. Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Gilmore, Shawn. “Narrative String Theory,” The Vault of Culture. McGarry, Andrew. “Did Orwell's nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four inspire the Snowtown murders?” Australian Broadcasting Corporation News, May 21, 2019. Peritz, Aki. Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History, Potomac Books, 2021. Peritz, Aki. “The FBI Is Going Crazy-Stringboard Crazy,” Slate, Feb. 1, 2022. Stiehm, Jamie. “My So-Called Bipolar Life,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2012. Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2006, Aki Peretz was working as a counter-terrorism analyst at the CIA when he was called in about an alarming report.
0:14.1	We received some intelligence to suggest that something really big was going to happen in London sometime in the summertime.
0:20.2	But they couldn't make
0:21.3	heads or tails out of it. Aki became one of many people working to comprehend a massive plot.
0:27.5	Imagine if you're given a jigsaw puzzle, but you don't get the top and you don't get all the
0:31.6	pieces. In fact, you only get some of the pieces and you get none of the edge pieces. And the pieces
0:36.2	keep changing. And people keep throwing new pieces into the mix, which may or may not be important.
0:41.0	Agents from across the NSA, CIA, the UK, and Pakistan went into overdrive, scrambling to put it
0:47.5	all together in a matter of months, which turned out to be just in time.
0:53.1	Al-Qaeda came very, very, very close to blowing up several airplanes over the Atlantic over a two-hour period.
1:02.1	Police believed the plan was just weeks away from fruition,
1:05.6	when they launched the operation to arrest their main suspects.
1:09.1	Their goal to kill at least 2,000 people.
1:12.6	And they almost got away with it.
1:14.6	Aki wrote about how the conspiracy was unraveled in his
1:17.6	2021 book, Disruption, inside the largest counterterrorism investigation in history.
1:22.6	By the time it was published, he'd left the CIA and become an associate research scientist at the University of Maryland,
1:29.3	while continuing to work on and write about national security activities, including at the Defense Department.
1:35.3	And then, in 2022, he came across something that gave him pause.
1:40.3	And it was coming from inside the FBI itself.
1:44.8	When I saw that, I was like, I have to write something.
1:47.0	What he saw was a series of images and videos posted on the agency's website as part of a new recruitment campaign.
	...

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