The Bastard Brigade - The Strangest Man | 4

As the Nazis inched closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon, panic grew among the Allied forces. The Alsos Mission — otherwise known as the Bastard Brigade — was put in charge of gathering intelligence on Hitler’s bomb project, seizing stores of Nazi uranium, and hunting down mem ...

The Alsos mission had a hard-charging leader in Boris Pash and an eccentric band of recruits. But if the so-called Bastard Brigade was going to track down the Nazi atomic bomb, they would also need scientific expertise. For that, they turned to the Dutch-American physicist Sam ...

In 1976, at the height of the Cold War, Robert Hanssen joins the FBI to work in their counterintelligence division. Hanssen is valued for his technical skills, and put in charge of databases containing some of the country’s most valuable secrets. But he’s socially awkward, and ...

In 1944, a brilliant, young Harvard physics student named Ted Hall was recruited to work on the super-secret mission that had already assembled the country's top scientists: the Manhattan Project. Soon, Hall was on his way to Los Alamos, where he worked on the implosion mechanism ...  Show more

Robert Hanssen was a conundrum - an FBI agent and self-proclaimed patriot who became the most damaging spy in the bureau's history. Amid the nuclear threat of the Cold War, America's prized secrets were falling into the hands of its sworn enemy—the Kremlin. The FBI's hunt for the ...  Show more

On this episode of Our American Stories, Drew Newman, of JC Newman Cigars, tells the story of cigars in the United States, a story his family played a big part in. “Wild Bill" Donovan was one of America’s most exciting and secretive g ...