The Brutal End of the CIA's First Soviet Spy | True Life Spy Stories

Book your place with Tradecraft Travel on the Dead Drops & Double Agents tour - a spy tour of Berlin, Leipzig, Prague, and Vienna with former CIA Chief of Station John Sipher and Tradecraft Travel founder Jack Buchanan. Get the full briefing at https://tradecrafttravel.com/philip Ways to support the channel: Become a Member:    / @philipthompson   Buy Me a Coffee: ☕ https://bmc.link/philipthompson Donate via PayPal: 💸 paypal.me/PhilipT284 Listen to my spy stories on the True Life Spy Stories podcast! 🎙️https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show... In November 1952, a Soviet army officer in Vienna slipped a folded envelope through the window of a parked American diplomat's car. That single act set in motion one of the most remarkable espionage operations of the Cold War. His name was Pyotr Popov. For seven years he worked as the CIA's most valuable source inside Soviet military intelligence — exposing hundreds of GRU officers, handing over classified weapons data, and warning the agency of secrets it didn't know it had lost. Then he vanished into the Lubyanka. The CIA spent decades trying to figure out what went wrong. Was it a careless letter? A mole inside Western intelligence? A trap set long before Popov ever returned to Moscow? A document found in a Lithuanian KGB archive suggests the answer is darker than anyone in the agency was willing to admit. This is the full story of Pyotr Popov — the CIA's first Soviet spy. 📚 Sources & Further Reading (affiliate link): 📕 Mole: True Story of the First Russian Spy to Become an American Counterspy by William Hood - https://amzn.to/4ptZrPn 🎙️ Also available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms - search "True Life Spy Stories". #philipthompson #truelifespystories #espionage