Tinker, Tailor, Shortstop, Spy: An Interview with Former CIA Analyst Bryan Soderholm-Difatte Part 1

SpyCast

Education, News, History

4.4 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2014

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Baseball has been played in the United States since the mid-19th Century, and from the very beginning teams were trying to gain a competitive edge against their rivals. In many cases, this involved stealing signs – the messages passed from coaches to players or from catchers to pitchers. In essence, this is a signals intelligence operation: one team is encrypting its messages, while the other is attempting to intercept these messages, decrypt them, and use the resulting intelligence to their advantage. SPY Historian Vince Houghton sat down with Bryan Soderholm, a former CIA analyst who is now putting his training to use analyzing baseball statistics and history. They discussed the influence of spycraft on the game of baseball – in particular, the infamous case of the 1951 New York Giants, who set the standard for baseball espionage.

Transcript

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1:06.0	That's spycloud.com slash cyberwire and we thank spy cloud for sponsoring our show. Hello and welcome to SpyCast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.
1:33.0	I'm Dr. Vince Hoat, the Museum's historian and curator.
1:36.0	Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks
1:39.0	with authors, scholars, and practitioners
1:42.0	who live in the world of global espionage.
1:44.0	Join us as we take a closer look at the secret world of intelligence.
1:49.0	My guest today is Brian Sauterholm to Faddy, who spent more than three decades as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency and for the National Counterterrorism Center.
2:00.0	He spent time working with counter-narcotics for the CIA.
2:03.5	He worked in the Inspector General's office for CIA,
2:06.2	and he finished his career as a senior analyst for the National Counterterrorism Center,
2:10.9	where he wrote analysts intended for senior policy makers
2:15.0	under pressure oftentimes to provide insight and analysis on fast-breaking events.
2:20.3	Since he retired in 2012 from Intelligence Analysis, he has taken these skills that he learned with the CIA and applied them to the study of baseball.
2:29.0	Brian is a member of the Society for American Baseball research, better why is known as Saber.
	...

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