Former CIA Spy on Putin’s Secret War Against the West | Sean Wiswesser | EP. 406
The Team House
dee takos
4.7 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 April 2026
⏱️ 95 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode digs into why Russia still views the U.S. as its primary adversary, how corruption shapes the Kremlin’s security services, and what the West still gets wrong about Putin’s long-running shadow war.
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00:00 — Start
03:00 — Growing up working class and discovering Russia in the early ’90s
07:30 — Student travel mishaps and why Sean chose government service
12:00 — Joining CIA and the reality of denied-area tradecraft
18:00 — Why Russia still sees America as its main enemy
25:00 — The corruption and criminal side of Russian intelligence
32:00 — Russian assassinations, sabotage, and failed covert ops
40:20 — What CIA actually cleared Sean to reveal about handling assets
48:00 — Russian illegals, sleeper agents, and deep-cover operations
57:00 — Ukraine war: Russian intelligence failures and Putin’s blind spots
01:08:00 — Hybrid warfare in Europe: sabotage, cable cuts, and gray-zone ops
01:25:00 — Final thoughts: how the West should respond to Russia today
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, guys. Welcome to episode 406 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest, Sean Wieswesser. He is the author of Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks, Russian Intelligence, and Putin's Secret War. I just finished reading this book myself this morning. Off the top here, Sean, when is the book coming out? It's a couple weeks, right? Oh, it's out. Yeah, just two weeks. It's out 21 April, officially. Awesome. And people can go find this on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Yeah, so Naval Institute's actually shipping it already. Amazon should have it on your doorstep 21 April if you order it. |
| 0:38.4 | And yep, so thanks for having me on, Jackson. |
| 0:40.6 | I'm an honor to be with you. |
| 0:41.3 | So Sean is a 20-year CIA veteran served all over the world. |
| 0:48.2 | Eurasia. |
| 0:49.3 | He's fluent in Russian, so he's a Russian expert at the CIA. |
| 0:56.5 | And that's, of course, what led him into writing this book. So we'll talk about as much of it as the CIA will let you. |
| 1:03.0 | That's right. So, Sean, let us start off. Tell us a little bit about your origin story, |
| 1:08.8 | kind of how you grew up and that path towards the intelligence community. |
| 1:14.5 | Yeah, sure. |
| 1:15.1 | So I, from Reading, Pennsylvania, grew up very, very much a working class family, four kids and living in a two and a half bedroom, old 100 year old townhouse in Reading. |
| 1:29.3 | And I had a life-changing event after eighth grade |
| 1:34.3 | decided I wanted to try to do something different. |
| 1:37.3 | I wasn't really necessarily doing a grade in public school, |
| 1:40.3 | just was kind of in the wrong crowd, |
| 1:42.3 | so I wanted to change my life. Got an opportunity |
| 1:45.1 | to go on almost a full scholarship to an outstanding boys prep school in Potsdown, PA, called |
| 1:49.9 | the Hill School. And it really changed my life, had awesome opportunities there, among other things, |
| 1:54.8 | they had Russian language and they had great language programs there. So studied Russian language |
| 1:59.3 | for four years there with an excellent instructor |
| 2:01.6 | named Rick Borger. And I placed into third year Russian. I went to University of North Carolina, |
| 2:06.6 | Chapel Hill. I was a more head scholar there on a full ride. And so because I had four years for free, |
... |
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