The Cassandra

Our friends at Yahoo News produce this seasonal show about conspiracies, real and imagined. We liked season 4 so much, we decided to share the first episode with our listeners. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 

Long before Joe Weisberg created the award-winning television show The Americans, he served in the CIA. His brief period in the agency informed story lines in the show and helped shape Weisberg's views on espionage. Eventually, he came to believe that spying does more harm than g ...  Show more

In the early 1960s the Pentagon set up a top-secret research project in an old villa in downtown Saigon. The task? To interview captured North Vietnamese soldiers and guerrillas in order to measure the effect of relentless U.S. bombing on their morale. Yet despite a wealth of gre ...  Show more

In 1969, at the height of US presence, there were over half a million Americans in Vietnam.

But why were they there in the first place? When did the conflict in Vietnam begin and how did it escalate towards US involvement?

Pierre Asselin is the author of <e ...

When CIA agent Jon Wiant began growing a spy operation in Vietnam, he ran into a pickle: the locals he wanted to hire lived in rural areas along the boarder with Laos, and they existed primarily in a barter economy -- they wanted some sort of payment, but they didn't want currenc ...  Show more

It's 1975, and in the final act of the Vietnam War, the U.S. have ordered all remaining civilian and military personnel to be withdrawn from South Vietnam. The communist Viet Cong are closing in on the city of Saigon, the hub of America’s presence, as choppers evacuate the 6000 A ...  Show more