The Rosenbergs | Inside the CIA | 5

Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal. In June of 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for spying on the United States. They were accused of helping funnel America's nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Neither was a trained intelligence officer. They were an ordinary couple who became the only U.S. civilians ever executed for spying during the Cold War. Their story reveals the personal cost of espionage, not just for the people who steal the secrets, but for everyone drawn into this world built on deception, uncertainty, and decisions that carry enormous consequences. These stakes make it incredibly rich territory for stories, both real, like the Rosenbergs, and fiction, stories of superhuman spies and world-saving missions. My guest today has lived in both worlds. David McCloskey spent nearly a decade as a CIA analyst before joining the U.S. Department of Defense. He's now returning to fiction, where he's become a best-selling author of spy novels. He's also the co-host of The Rest is Classified, a podcast that explores the real history of espionage. We'll talk about what it's really like inside the intelligence world, how the Cold War changed espionage, and whether spies like the Rosenbergs truly shaped the course of history. Our conversation is next. The Rest is Classified Living your best life means being espionage. Living your best life means being espionage. To steal. secrets for us. So they're doing something that in their country is almost always illegal. In some cases, it can lead to long prison terms or even the death penalty. You know, protecting that source, protecting that asset is fundamentally one of the key, if not the key rule that the CIA and case officers follow when they're handling an asset. So you're communicating with them and meeting with them using forms of tradecraft to keep that association clandestine. And that usually works, but obviously with really committed, really effective counterintelligence services like you have in China or Russia or Iran or Cuba or North Korea, the way you go about doing that can be very difficult, very dangerous. And as a result, sometimes assets are caught. So Julius Rosenberg and his brother-in-law, David, given the definition of spy that we've just established, would probably fit the definition. They're less secret agents, but informants working for a foreign government. Yeah, exactly. We would call them, in our parlance, they would be assets of, I believe they were assets of the Soviet NKVD. I mean, the recruitments, I think, predated the KGB itself. But yes, they were assets or agents of Soviet intelligence, precisely. So one thing that is obviously striking about the KGB is that it's not just the KGB. It's the KGB itself. It's the KGB itself. about the Rosenberg story is the torn family tragedy at the center of it. David ultimately betrays his own sister to save his wife. And it seems that almost anyone in the intelligence business has to make, or probably has to make, enormous personal sacrifices or faces dilemmas like this. Was that true of yourself as an analyst or others you worked with? It definitely was not true of me as an analyst, although, you know, obviously, you're working in a very secretive environment. And so the things that you're doing, the things that you're doing, the things that you're doing, the things that you're doing day to day, you can't really share with people around you. It's not a normal job where you can kind of come home and really talk openly about what you may have done at the office that day. So everybody involved in the business has to deal with that in some way, shape, or form. I think the Rosenberg case is a striking and really tragic demonstration of betrayal of the business, but it's also quite exceptional. When I think about the case officers, the agency officers that I work with, I think about the case officers that I work with, I know. I can't think of an analog. I can think of cases, though, where case officers have lost assets, assets who've been arrested or killed. And there can be a sense of, you know, deep loss and certainly on the part of those assets, families, a sense that what they did often in secret was a betrayal, betrayal of family and marriage and country. And so that's certainly true. But I think one of the misconceptions about the spy business is that the case officers, the intelligence officers, the intelligence officers, the intelligence officers, the intelligence officers are walking around sort of betraying and deceiving everybody all the time. And I think that's not true. I actually think that the reality of the business, the paradox of the business, is that it is cloaked in secrecy and deception. And yet at the core of it, the bond that holds the asset to the handler and the asset to the intelligence service that he or she is working for is really grounded on a tremendous amount. trust and openness and, you know, in the best cases, a large degree of honesty about the shared mission. So this concept that there's sort of constant betrayal in the business, it does come from somewhere. The Rosenberg case highlights it very well and very starkly when you're talking about that foreign agent or asset, because what they are doing day in and day out as part of this relationship is betraying the organization they work for, the country they live in, and oftentimes friends and family. So that is true, but it's not as true for the actual intelligence officer who works for the CIA or, you know, British SIS or the Soviet NKVD or whatever it may be. 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I think that today it is perhaps a bit more mercenary than in those decades. But I think it's less true today than it was during the Cold War. You know, there's an overused but I think directionally correct acronym about what drives people, what compels people to spy. And it's MICE. M-I-C-E. M is money, I is ideology, C is control or coercion, and E is ego. And, you know, money, obviously, people can do this because they have massive debts or they want to fund a particular lifestyle. Ideology, as the Rosenberg case shows, you know, you have communists working inside sort of the U.S. technical military. establishment. The converse is also true that in Russia and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, you have Russian intelligence officers and scientists who felt that the Soviet system was rotten and wanted to work to help the United States undermine it. There are very ideologically driven cases among them. You know, coercion or control, frankly, less commonly used by Western intelligence services, but the Russians use blackmail, compromise, kind of having leverage over people to get them to then spy for you. And then intelligence officers are people with access to secrets who feel slighted by the organization they work for, passed up for promotions, not given favors. That kind of stuff can actually be very potent and very visceral for people and thus, you know, a real kind of impetus to spy. So it's always more complicated than any of MICE acronym, any of those single letters. It's usually a stew of a lot of different things. But that kind of gives you some sense of the different reasons why. And as we said in the Rosenberg case, ideology absolutely can be a factor. So in this Cold War period, this is probably the most frightened and paranoid that America and probably the Soviet Union has ever been. What role did spying have in that paranoia? Did it cause it or was it caused by it? Well, it's a great question. I mean, my sense of the Rosenberg case is it drops at a particularly sensitive time in the Cold War. So the Soviets have just tested an atomic bomb. The Korean War has kicked off at this point. We're a few years away from Sputnik and the space race. And when you zoom all the way out, you don't really have a set of rules yet for this conflict. And so it's this very heady period. And I think one of the things that the Rosenberg case in particular does is it demonstrates that there can be enemies within, which had been a fear prior. But this is a sort of visceral demonstration of just how penetrated the U.S. military industrial establishment could be. And so I think it, you know, from my sense, is that it takes on a life of its own and sort of feeds the idea that there are enemies everywhere. And that you can't know, we don't know the full extent of how many other spies like this are there. And certainly that the Soviets had very effectively penetrated the atomic bomb program. And so if you take that as a case study, you think maybe it's the same at the CIA. Maybe it's the same at the State Department. Maybe it's the same at the FBI. And I think it fuels an incredible panic that is definitely out of proportion to the actual scale of the threat, but it demonstrated practically that there was one. And so it is a bit of a chicken and an egg thing. But I think my read on kind of the, frankly, the witch hunts to come afterward are that it dramatically amplifies a fear that existed and was probably to some degree understandable and reasonable. But it blew it up into something that had its own energy and that blew the threat out of all proportion. In this Cold War moment and in the mid-20th century, the CIA is both an ambitious and overreaching organization. We can point to the 1953 coup in Iran, the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs. This is a moment maybe in which the organization is trying to professionalize, to gain a playbook. What is your assessment of how well the CIA fulfilled its mission in this period? I'll give you a bit of a controversial take, which which is, I think the CIA did pretty well in this period. And I think you have to evaluate it against the sort of directives and orders, frankly, that it's given by the White House. I think the 53 coup in Iran is successful. Guatemala is successful. Bay of Pigs isn't. But I think on the covert action front, the CIA in those years was sort of finding its way at what it meant to be a global intelligence service and what it meant to resist Russian expansionism and active measures all over the world. And so I think, when we look back at that period, I think askance in many respects to just how activist it is and how secretive the CIA was and, frankly, how unaccountable it was. This is a period where there's really no scrutiny on its budget and there's really no congressional oversight whatsoever. This is a period where there aren't memoirs written by former CIA officers. We don't have. You know, former CIA analysts going on podcasts in this period to explain the inner workings of the place. So it's a deeply secretive place. But I think, you know, it's sort of finding its way at what it means to both, from a covert action standpoint, under Biden resist Soviet expansionism and then at the same time, how do you develop an information advantage over our adversaries? And we can't give it perfect marks for that period. And obviously, there's a tremendous amount of excess that happens. I mean, goodness gracious. Like, you know, I don't know how much you've covered, your program, but your MKUltra, which is this journey into trying to find ways to actually control, you know, to essentially do mind control. It involves the CIA at one point becoming the largest purchaser and supplier of LSD in the entire world. It ends up with a whole bunch of lawbreaking. So, you know, it's very much a mixed record over this period with a lot of stains on the agency's record, and rightly so. But I think my view is that you have to evaluate it at the context of the time. And in the context of the time, you know, as you're talking about the Rosenberg story, it's a time of deep uncertainty about what the Cold War actually is and who the Russians are and what they want, and a time when we were actually quite similar to the Russians in terms of military and technical capabilities, and it was not at all clear who was going to win the Cold War. You've detailed that in this period that the CIA was largely unaccountable and gave a great example in MKUltra. So it's no surprise that the CIA did come out under scrutiny in the 1970s with the Church and then the Pipe Committee hearings, both investigating abuses by the U.S. intelligence community. What were some of the major lessons of those hearings and what changed afterward, if anything? I think the big lesson was in an open society. You can't have a completely secretive, largely unaccountable intelligence organization that when that happens, there will be abuses. And the most egregious ones to buy-bind are actually doing it. Not the foreign adventures. The really awful stuff is when the agency, I mean, repeatedly over the course of the 50s and 60s, you know, broke its charter and did things like essentially ran mind control experimentation on American citizens without their knowledge, wrote reports and spied on the domestic anti-war movement under the fig leaf or in some quarter suspicion that it connected to foreign commerce. Opened mail domestically of American citizens. And, you know, in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, had agency psychiatrists write up a psychological profile of an American citizen that was intended to be used to tar him publicly by the White House. So to my mind, those hearings uncorked all of this and revealed that when you have an intelligence service that is totally secretive and really only accountable to the American citizen, to the president and a very small number of congressional leaders, very small, that it's going to do bad things. And so I think the reforms coming out of that, they do go a long way toward making sure that there is a much more sort of sophisticated and institutionalized congressional oversight. I think tilt the balance back toward a bit more openness so that the intelligence service of the democracy can be held accountable to the laws and norms of an open society. So I think the reforms of the 70s are sort of very necessary. In that respect, to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens and showing what can happen when an intelligence service gets out of control. What if AI could recreate the voice of somebody you loved who died? What if it destroyed your reputation with words you never said? And what if you fell in love with something that was never human? I'm Mark Finnell. And in my brand new Audible original podcast, I'm traveling the globe to investigate the very personal ways AI is already changing our relationships, our memories, and our sense of what is real. Unreal. Listen now on Audible. James Arthur Ray was a charismatic self-help guru who promised his followers a path to wealth and enlightenment by becoming the best versions of themselves. But not all who followed him finished their journey. After Ray appeared on OBS, thousands flocked to his events. But what many people didn't know about were his more extreme methods. Methods that push his followers to their limits, giving some the transformative experience they envisioned and killing others. For the best bingeable series, like the one I just told you about, listen to the Audible True Crime podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. ♪♪♪ Let me ask you what you think of the term intelligence failure. It's been used quite often whenever we contemplate the ability for our government to predict or prevent things like 9-11, the intelligence that led to the Second Gulf War. But it's a term that's thrown around often like fraud, waste, and abuse. It's a term that's thrown around often and it seems like it's a catch-all. I'm just wondering, from someone on the inside, how well of a job is the CIA doing? It's hard to answer because it depends on the topic. What the CIA exists to do, and this is overly simplified, but there's basically two things. It exists to conduct covert action, so to do things deniably at the behest of the president that are intended to advance U.S. national security objectives, right? That's one thing. CIA is very, very good at doing that. It's very, very good at actually carrying that out, whether the covert action achieves the policy objective. I think it really, again, depends, and quite often it doesn't work. The other side of it, which is the biggest part of the business, is how do I collect enough information, secrets? How do I go out and steal secrets so that when I look at a topic like Iran or China or Russia, North Korea, whatever it might be, that we have an information advantage over our adversaries and competitors? And that is really dependent on geography and in the issue. So, for example, there can be some countries where we actually have, because we have recruited human assets who are in positions of power, because we have figured out creative ways to intercept the signals inside those systems, we can have a tremendous information advantage over that government or over its institutions. There are other places that we don't have that. And so it's an unsatisfying answer, but it depends. And I think when you get to intelligence failures, you know, it is a word, to your point, that is thrown around a lot. But basically what they come down to is either a failure of collection or a failure of analysis. And let's say that we actually don't have a lot of great sources on North Korea. Again, I'm making this up. I don't know. But if you don't have a lot of good sources on North Korea, if you don't have the signals intelligence platform, to be able to intercept its leadership communications, military signals, you name it, you could have a sort of a black box where we're not collecting the information that we want or we need about Kim Jong-un's plans and intentions with regard to a nuclear program. And so therefore, if something happens, we miss it. And we miss it. It's an intelligence failure because we didn't collect it. We didn't have it, right? Downstream from that, you can have failures of analysis where you actually had the information. But you didn't interpret it in an appropriate way. And, you know, Iraq WMD is a great example of both of those things happening at once, where it was a failure of collection and that we had actually not penetrated Saddam Hussein's regime effectively. And it was also a failure of analysis and that the analytic products that were being put together, albeit with fragmentary and contradictory and sometimes quite lousy information, came to judgments that were not, in my opinion, you know, not defensible on the basis of the information they had. And it wasn't because they assessed that Saddam had WMD. I actually think every intelligence service, Western intelligence service, thought he had the weapons. It was a question of how you caveat and sort of attach a confidence level to that judgment so policymakers understand the degree of confidence that you have that this may be so. So that's an example where collection and an analytical failure combine to produce an overall intelligence failure. While you were at the CIA, how would you actually communicate this uncertainty or the probability of this versus that? It sounds simple, but it wasn't done inside the CIA holistically until after Iraq, WMD. But you attach confidence judgments to your analytical lines. So if, for example, you might take a look at the information that you have, and you'd say, okay, we think Saddam has an active chemical weapons program, but we have low confidence in this judgment because, and then you'd say, well, we actually don't have a source inside his inner circle. Or we have dated reporting on this, you know, it's seven, eight years old. Or we think he's actually running a deception campaign against us. And thus, it makes it harder to evaluate the intelligence that we have at our disposal. And so you'd attach a confidence statement to it. And, you know, of course, policymakers don't like that because they just want the clear answer. But in the world of intelligence analysis, there rarely is one. So for years, historians have debated the true impact of espionage, and certainly in the Rosenberg case, whether, for example, it helped other countries build a nuclear weapon or not. Or maybe it would have happened regardless, just on a different timeline. Given your experience in the CIA, and as someone who continues to work in the espionage business in some capacity, what's your assessment of the intelligence community writ large? Has it altered the course of history? Is there a case for spying? I think that at particular moments in time, the right intelligence has done things like give a president insight into what's coming and then allowed them to shape a national security response that has changed the course of a conflict. For example, our ability to predict accurately that Putin was going to invade Ukraine enabled us in those early days to build a coalition of partners who were going to invade Ukraine. And so, you know, I think that's a very, very important point. And I think that's a very, very important point. Who were committed to stopping that aggression, however they could. Has that changed the course of history? I'm not sure. It's a counterfactual. But was it important in developing the response to a massive geopolitical development? Yes. You know, on the counterterrorism side, there have been numbers of attacks stopped mid-planning because of the U.S. intelligence community or foreign partners. So intelligence, you know, sometimes spy, fiction, and the like, they're not going to be able to stop that aggression. And so, you know, sort of paints the whole thing in a negative light. You say, okay, what's the point of all of this? Does it really matter? And I understand that perspective. But I think at certain times, in certain places, it absolutely has made a massive difference. And I think the biggest difference it makes is a really quiet one, which is secretly, it helps ideally when an intelligence system is functioning well. It gives our policymakers secrets from other countries, and then that enables them to make better decisions about our national security policy with respect to those countries. And that is not a good thing. And I think that's a very, not something that is visible to the public. And it's not something that very frequently produces some kind of earth-shattering change. But it helps us day to day as we manage the national security affairs of our government. So I think intelligence absolutely makes a difference. I think it's very valuable. But I think that it's not, it's not a cure-all for, you know, our national security policymaking. I mean, it's not something that's, it's not a silver bullet, right, for any national security problem. And sometimes, depending on the issue you're talking about, it may not actually be that helpful at all. But it just really depends on the, on the context you're talking about. David McCloskey, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal. Lindsay, thank you so much. It's been great fun. Thanks for having me. That was my conversation with David McCloskey. He's a former CIA analyst turned novelist and the co-host of the podcast, The Rest is Classified. From Audible Originals and Airship, this is Episode 5 of the Rosenbergs for American Scandal. In our next series, in the early 2000s, competition for spots at America's top universities reached new heights. Students and their families felt increasing pressure to stand out from the crowd. And in that anxiety, one charismatic college counselor saw an opportunity. Exploiting every loophole in the system, he claimed he could guarantee his client's admission to elite universities for a price. His illegal scheme would make him rich, but when it was exposed, it would bring down some of the biggest names in America. American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com. Music by Thrawn. Sound design by Gabriel Gould. Executive producer for Airship is William Simpson. Executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lauer Beckman. Head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin. Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louie. Chief content officer, Rachel Gianza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. One company changed the artificial sweetener industry forever by deleting four words from a tagline. Sales skyrocketed, rivals sued, and a multi-billion dollar war was on. Hey there, I'm David Brown, the host of the podcast Business Wars. Every season, we bring you the true stories behind the companies that shape our world, their rivalries, their reinventions, and their spectacular rises and falls. In our new season, we're diving into the bitter battle to own sweetness. When scientists, scientists discovered that chemicals could deliver the taste of sugar with none of its calories, sweet and low, equal and splendor fought for space on tabletops, in diet sodas, and on grocery store shelves across America. But as health scares hit and regulators came knocking, the fierce competition between the top three artificial sweeteners turned ugly. Make sure to follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Business Wars early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.