You're listening to The CyberWire Network, powered by N2K.

Welcome to Spycast.

My name is Dr. Andrew Hammond, a historian and curator here at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Every week, Spycast explores a world of intelligence and espionage by bringing you in-depth conversations, spies, spy masters, intelligence officers and authors.

We explore the stories, secrets, tradecraft and technology of a world that looms beneath the surface of everyday life.

Welcome to this week's episode of Spycast.

This week's guest is Alma Katso.

Alma is seriously impressive and I don't even know where to begin.

She was in the intelligence community for over 30 years, where she done things as varied as being a recruiter, a director of her search lab, a technology forecaster and a leader.

She spent the first two-thirds of her career at the National Security Agency and the latter-third at the CIA.

Since she left the intelligence community, she's been the author of six books, one of which, on the Donner Party, was described by The New York Times, is supernatural suspense at its finest.

Her most recent book, Red Widow, was on the intelligence community.

Alma and I sat down to talk about it and about her career. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. Alma was amazing.

I'm so pretty excited to speak to you for a whole variety of different reasons, but the most obvious one is your book. Could you tell us a little bit more about your book?

Sure. Red Widow is my first spy novel after writing five other novels that were all in sort of the more fantasy realm.

I was thrilled to get the opportunity from my publisher to do this book. I'd always wanted to write a spy novel, but I never, well, for various reasons, which we'll probably get into later, I just didn't have the opportunity.

But I got this idea and one of the reasons I'm so proud of it is because it has mainly female characters.

The protagonist is a female. It's the story of a young CIA officer who was a rising star at the agency and she ends up having a little bit of a career downturn.

And she gets the opportunity to head a task force looking for a mole in the agency, someone who's giving away all of their Russian assets to the Russians.

And so as she's doing this investigation, she makes the acquaintance of another officer, Teresa Warner, the red widow herself, and she got that nickname because her husband was killed in a operation in Moscow gone horribly wrong.

Lindsay, the main character is doing the investigation. She gets drawn into this web of intrigues, the secrets that she was never intended to find out.

And the secrets leads straight to the death of Teresa Warner's husband.

...