“Snake-Eaters, Detachment A, CIA” – A Conversation with James Stejskal

SpyCast

News, History, Education

4.4 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Spook. Warrior. Author. This week’s guest is one helluva interesting guy. He was in a clandestine Special Forces unit in Berlin during the Cold War, “stay behinds” who would sabotage, subvert and generally wreak havoc should World War III break out. He was badly wounded after driving over a land-mine in Somalia in 1992, almost losing his entire leg and suffering a serious head injury. In a subsequent life, James was a CIA officer in Africa when the US embassies were blown up in Kenya and Tanzania and saw the Agency pivot in the aftermath of 9/11. Oh, did I mention, he also dabbles in combat archaeology. “Hours and hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” If this sounds like your last trip down the I-95, listening to your blowhard uncle at Thanksgiving, or what it’s like to watch Jets vs. Giants, it’s purely coincidence – for it’s how this week’s guest characterized Army life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to The CyberWire Network, powered by N2K.
0:12.0	Hey, Spycast listeners, I'm Maria Varmazes, host of another N2K podcast, called T-Space Daily.
0:21.0	I'm a big fan of Andrew Hammond and Spycast.
0:25.0	That voice, right?
0:27.0	I love the world of spies and intelligence, and I bet you do too.
0:31.0	That's why I know you'll also love our show, T-Space Daily.
0:36.0	If you want to unravel the world of space mysteries, T-Space Daily gives you the latest from across the space industry around the world and into the cosmos.
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0:54.0	from science and technology to business and espionage, then join me every day for T-Space Daily.
1:02.0	We are T-Space Daily.
1:04.0	Now sit back, relax, and back to you, Andrew.
1:08.0	Introducing ArcSipe Intelligence by OpenText, an Enterprise Behavior Analytics solution.
1:26.0	Intelligence repurposes data you're probably already collecting to uncover patterns of behavior, missed by other UEBA offerings.
1:36.0	With its powerful unsupervised machine learning models trained continuously and exclusively on your data, intelligence is your ally in detecting insider threats and novel attacks.
1:49.0	No rules to maintain or thresholds to update just context-rich threat hunting leads.
1:55.0	Learn more about ArcSite Intelligence by visiting arcsite.com slash cyberwire.
2:07.0	Welcome to Spycast. My name is Dr. Andrew Hammond, historian and curator here at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.
2:18.0	Every week, Spycast explores a world of intelligence and espionage by bringing you in-depth conversations with spies, spymasters, intelligence officers and authors.
2:30.0	We explore the stories, secrets, tradecraft and technology of a world that looms beneath the surface of everyday life.
2:38.0	I'm really pleased to get a chance to speak to you Jim's four listeners that are just coming across you for the first time or those who've met you before but just need a refresher.
2:47.0	Could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and about your background?
2:52.0	Well, I'm actually an escape felon and I'm being sought by the FBI right now. No, actually.
	...

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