Alfred Redl rose to head the counterintelligence arm of Austria-Hungary’s General Staff, hunting spies for the empire. Yet for roughly a decade he was also feeding secrets to Russia, and he’s believed to have sacrificed his own agents to protect himself. In 1913, postal censors intercepted envelopes containing nothing but cash, and the trail led back to Redl. Drawing on Fitzroy Maclean’s Take Nine Spies, Sean and I dig into one of the twentieth century’s most famous espionage cases: how a spy catcher became the spy, what he is believed to have given away, and where historians still disagree about his motives and the damage he did.

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Necromancy, sorcery, astrology, alchemy, prophecy — practices humanity has turned to for millennia to try to bend the unseen world to its will. Based on Robert Masello's book Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them, Sean and I trace the occult arts from ancient Babylon to the present day, and the people throughout history who risked everything — their reputations, their freedom, some would say their souls — to practice them.

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Over 300,000 foreign soldiers fought in the Vietnam War as a paid force — not volunteers, not draftees, but mercenaries hired by Washington for a price tag that would total roughly $5 billion over eight years. It's one of the least-discussed financial arrangements of the entire war, and the ally in question isn't who most people would guess. We lay out exactly how the deal worked, and what it meant for the country that took it.

More from FMT: https://linktr.ee/ThinkChangeRepeat