Mission Implausible

In March 1944, three American OSS officers parachuted into Hungary on a mission to be taken prisoner. A story that was classified for decades, the team — a Dartmouth graduate, a World War I fighter pilot and a former New York Giants lineman who became an advertising executive — planned to get caught, tortured by The Gestapo, and “confess” to an Allied invasion that was a complete fiction. The OSS (the precursor to the CIA) knew what Hitler wanted to hear and how he’d react. This is what it looks like when an actual conspiracy of deception works. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Our summer holiday is over. All new episodes coming soon. We didn't always assume the government was hiding aliens. The Manhattan Project was a crash course in how to run a secret program. Some secrets were real and necessary. Some were real and needing exposure - The Vietnam War, The Pentagon Papers, Watergate. So now people distrust everything the government tells us -- from UFO's to 9/11. Bestselling author and historian Garrett Graff has been reporting on this phenomenon via oral histories. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

In 2016, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele produced a series of intelligence memos that were leaked and widely called “The Steel Dossier” containing allegations about Russia's interference in the US election and links between Trumpworld and the Kremlin. In a highly unique conversation, Steele and John & Jerry look into the many hot-button conspiracy theories and real conspiracies that Steele has intelligence on — going all the way back to the death of Princess Diana and through Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement with Russian espionage. And how Trump’s behavior has made America so untrustworthy that it can no longer function effectively at worldwide intelligence gathering. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Investigative journalist and BAFTA-winning filmmaker Richard Kerbaj discusses The Defector, his book on Oleg Lyalin — the KGB officer who walked into a North London police station in 1971 and exposed over 200 Soviet spies in Britain, partly to escape his marriage. He and the hosts trace how MI5's decision to withhold him from the CIA broke James Angleton's decade of paranoia, then take apart the Five Eyes: its origins, its budget imbalance, and whether it survives the current moment. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Now that Adam Davidson is a national expert on AI, he worries about how it will change worldwide politics, military power and international economic structures. Not just the AI itself, but all its underlying physical infrastructure. When it comes to spycraft, it can help sort through the millions of pages of data collected every day, but it also makes it impossible to keep a secret. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

What's been done to American intelligence and what it costs: the 35 declassified documents that don't say what the president claims they say, analysts fired for accurate assessments, clearances stripped as punishment, rumored loyalty oaths, and the question of how any future administration cleans this up without another round of retribution. Looking outward — what Beijing is taking faway rom the Iran war, whether Taiwan is watching closely enough, what a protracted fight with Iran looks like, and why America's allies have stopped waiting for things to go back to normal. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Stephen Miller runs National Security now. Julia Curlee spent over 20 years as a CIA analyst, rising to being Acting Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the NSC. When Trump 2 began, she stayed on, as is custom, to help transition. Her team was fired on Day 3, and Curlee on Day 69, leaving The White House woefully uninformed to this day. But maybe that was the point.“Vulnerability isn't really a foreign adversary, but the erosion of institutions and processes that otherwise allow presidents to make decisions based on objective evidence rather than politics.” Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Two of John & Jerry’s old friends and agency colleagues swap war stories and tall tales, starting with their training at The Farm and including their time in Moscow. Some of the characters in their anecdotes: Nazi Bob, Steven Seagal and the CIA mermaids. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

More on Trump's $2 billion is new money in the past year -- Financial investigative journalist (and Mission Implausible producer) Adam Davidson illuminates Trump's business model: money-laundering, ass-kissing and rent-seeking. His zero-sum view of how things work doesn't just enrich himself, it damages overall world economic growth. He's more a post-Soviet oligarch than a Western capitalist. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

- Journalist Gabriel Gatehouse returns to Mission Implausible with the strange premise behind his podcast Foul Play: the claim that the CIA poisoned England goalkeeper Gordon Banks before the 1970 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in order to help the Brazil to support Brazil’s government. It turns out that international sporting events are hotbeds of attempted subterfuge and quasi-governmental manipulation. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Journalist Gabriel Gatehouse returns to Mission Implausible with the strange premise behind his podcast Foul Play: the claim that the CIA poisoned England goalkeeper Gordon Banks before the 1970 World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in order to help the Brazil to support Brazil’s government. It turns out that international sporting events are hotbeds of attempted subterfuge and quasi-governmental manipulation. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Former OSCE ambassador and Pentagon and NSC official Michael Carpenter argues Russia is weaker than it appears yet keeps being rescued by a West gripped by fear of escalation. And that the newly transactional, alliance-busting American foreign policy undermines the remarkable success of NATO. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Former CIA Iran ops officer Mark Fowler joins Jerry and John to explain why Iran is one of the hardest targets on earth. From running agents and sources, Fowler has insight into the Iranian worldview: a persecuted Shia minority that sees walls behind every wall, craves American attention while calling us the Great Satan, and negotiates by treating signed contracts as opening bids. He separates the educated, reform-minded Iranian people from a regime led by men forged in the trenches of the Iran-Iraq War and traces the IRGC's rise from teenage revolutionary militia to a corrupt, self-sufficient parallel army that controls Iran's missiles, ports, and economy. On the current conflict, Trump jumped in without preparation against an adversary that has spent a generation planning for exactly this. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

In 2003, a single Iraqi refugee — codenamed Curveball — fabricated stories about Iraqi weapons. The U.S. intelligence community, desperate for sources after 9/11, laundered his claims into a National Intelligence Estimate produced in under three weeks. Bob Drogin, the award-winning journalist who broke the story and wrote the definitive book on it, joins John & Jerry to examine how political will, institutional groupthink, and bureaucratic cowardice allowed a con man’s tales to be treated as fact. But history repeats itself as now, in 2026, fuzzy claims about Iranian weapons undergirds another Middle East war. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

ENCORE EPISODE - Gabriel Gatehouse is a journalist and broadcaster and author of “The Coming Storm” that looks at Q Anon and the January 6th conspiracies. And he’s British! Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

In light of this week's resignation of Tulsi Gabbard, we're re-running our recent very illuminating episode about her. Also, check out John Sipher's timely piece on her in The Bullwark on May 19. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/tulsi-gabbard-office-shouldnt-exist-director-national-intelligence-9-11 Our current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was born into The Science of Identity Foundation, a secretive, authoritarian religious group led by guru Chris Butler. What are the beliefs of The SIF and how did they influence Gabbard's political career? Some believe that she's still under their direction, if not outright control. If so, the international criminal investigations of the organization, along with the local Hawaiian suspicions of it, raises serious national security questions for someone in that role. Then why does it appear that even a standard FBI background check of Gabbard was skipped? The reporting on Gabbard's origins had been sparse... until now. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Nuclear weapons-usable uranium, biolabs for biological warfare, secret chemical facilities -- In Operation Sapphire, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Andy Weber found and disposed of them. Where are the current threats? What does Iran still have? Biological threats may ultimately prove even more dangerous than nuclear ones. How do we control them? https://thesteadystate.org Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Former CIA and NSA attorney Jim Petrila explains the legal decisions about covert action, presidential power, and the legal guardrails surrounding America’s intelligence agencies. He argues that the Trump-era expansion of executive power, combined with the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling and the dismantling of institutional oversight, represents a fundamental threat to the rule of law. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Forget hotel rooms and presidential merch, this time around, the Trumps are making untraceable billions with ventures like World Liberty Financial and a Trump-backed stablecoin. It’s a new world of buying influence and access. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod

Award-winning author Ilana Berry explores the gap between how espionage is portrayed and how it actually works. Drawing on her experience in the CIA, the Department of Defense, and er firsthand view of the Arab Spring in Bahrain. She explains why secrecy fuels conspiracy theories, and why even insiders often struggle to separate truth from manipulation. Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod Watch Mission Implausible on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MissionImplausiblePod