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Hi and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.

I'm Dr. Andrew Hammond, the Museum's historian and curator.

Every week, Spycast brings you conversations with practitioners, authors and scholars who live in the world of global espionage.

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So I'm absolutely thrilled to be joined by J8 and has background and his story could easily fill up from now until midnight.

But we'll do the best that we can to keep it within the hour.

So I'm really and there's just so much to really dig into.

And I think I should start by saying that J8's graphic novel Red Atlantis came out on election day.

So I read it twice now and it's a really great read.

So a nice little plug for the book at the beginning.

So I want to come back to the book J8, but I just want to start off with how did Alexei Yurievich Artmonov become genuine?

So in our text for tonight, we had what you could call the choice in 2008 and it sounds like something from a Hollywood movie.

You were given three choices, put a bullet in your own head, wait for someone else to do it or run.

How did you find yourself there? That must have been terrifying.

That must have been something that most of the if not all of our listeners could can never even contemplate other than an nightmare.

Tell us a little bit more about what was going on then.

Well, at this moment, it was my final assignment for Russian government.

And I was a deputy head of economic security in actually the impacts bank.

Which was back and then as a let's say semi government platform for multi billion dollar international money laundering operations.

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