From OSS to a winery.

After The Bunburyist featured the TV movie Deadly Harvest, in which a vintner finds Soviet agents on his trail, is it any wonder to find that truth is stranger than fiction? In this podcast, Peter Earnest of the Intl Spy Museum talks to Peter Sichel, who worked for the OSS, the CIA, and Blue Nun Wines. In the clip below, Sichel discusses his work in the wine business and mentions his intelligence background.



Update. Part 2 of the discussion with Sichel here.

Spies in fiction on SpyCast.

William Le Queux,  NYPL

In this podcast, University of Toronto professor Wesley Wark and International Spy Museum historian Mark Stout discuss the history of spy fiction, including mention of William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Erskine Childers (author of The Riddle of the Sands, 1903), Graham Greene, Peter Cheyney, Ian Fleming, and John le Carre.

I Spy.

The International Spy Museum in DC holds regular "SpyCasts" with cloak-and-dagger guests; recent podcasts feature Milt Bearden, a former CIA station chief; Jonna Hiestand Mendez, a former head of the CIA's Office of Technical Services (which develops gadgets, among other things); and Tony Mendez, who extracted six Americans from Iran with the help of the Canadian Embassy during the 1979 hostage crisis.