You're Hello and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in

Washington DC. I'm Mark Stout historian of the museum. I'm a PhD author and historian who served for 13 years as an analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks with authors,

scholars, and practitioners who has something to do with the world of

intelligence and espionage.

We're joined today by R Bruce Craig who teaches American history at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada.

Mr Craig is the author, among other things, of Treasonable Dou Doubt the Harry Dexter White Spy Case

which came out in 2004 and he's currently working on a biography of Alger

Hiss so Bruce welcome to the International Spy Museum. Thank you, Mark.

So Espionage Bruce is a shadowy business,

and in some sense, we might almost think of historians like yourself

as being sort of a form of spy hunters in some way.

But it's a difficult business.

Few records are kept about it on purpose.

And many of those that are kept are locked up in safes

in intelligence headquarters and police headquarters and thus out of reach.

So can you just help our audience understand just a little bit?

When you're looking into espionage cases or Soviet intelligence operations in particular we'll talk

about today of 50 or 75 years ago what's available for historians to work with

how how complete a set of records is there to draw on?

Well, there's, certainly it depends on the nature of the case and the type of case that you're working with.

Government records, of course, are available through the National Archives and Records Administration.

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