The Live Drop
Booking Overview
Metrics
Episodes: 78
Frequency: Irregular
Rating: 4.4/5.0
Estimated listeners: 1,000 - 10,000
Gender skew: Male
Listener location: USA
Contact Information
Publicly listed emails
thelivedrop@gmail.com
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Host
Mark Valley - Former U.S. Army officer and actor who hosts long-form conversations about intelligence, espionage, geopolitics, and national security.
Booking Intelligence
Booking Requirements
Recent Guest Discussions
Michael Sellers - CIA Casework Under Diplomatic Cover, The Tolkachev Operation, KGB Counterintelligence, Spy Dust, Intelligence Memoirs, And Evidence-based Analysis Of Current Events.
Stephen Long - The CIA And Mi6 Covert Operation In Communist Albania, Intelligence Penetration, Counterinsurgency, Operational Failures, And Lessons For Later Covert Action.
Jack Beaumont - HUMINT, Intelligence Tradecraft, Operative Psychology, PTSD And Moral Injury, Source Recruitment, French And U.s. Intelligence Cultures, And The Role Of AI In Writing And Intelligence.
Shawnna Morris - The Cambridge Five, Soviet Recruitment, Intelligence Betrayals, Cold War Social Dynamics, Moral Ambiguity, And The Way Espionage History Is Represented In Books, Film, And Archives.
James Stejskal - Cold War Berlin, Counterintelligence, Recruiting Sources Behind The Iron Curtain, Stasi Archives, Military Culture, And Contemporary Parallels With Russian Strategy.
Recent Topics
Episodes
Michael Sellers' Moscow Memories
September 14, 2026
Michael Sellers spent a decade as a CIA case officer, with postings in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. He landed in Cold War Moscow in 1984 under diplomatic cover where uhe worked on the Tolkachev operation - subject of the new film Billion Dollar spy starting Russell Crowe coming out soon. Sellers was first recruited into the CIA after studying film at NYU. In Moscow he also ran a KGB counterintelligence officer, Sergey Vorontsov, who handed him a sample of the KGB’s chemical surveillance t...
Stephen Long Drops Into 1949 Albania
July 12, 2026
LD077: In June 1949, the CIA and MI6 secretly agreed to overthrow Albania's communist dictator Enver Hoxha. The operation — codenamed BGFiend — would use exiled Albanian dissidents, paramilitary infiltration, propaganda broadcasts from a yacht in the Adriatic, and a network of émigré communities in Rome, Athens, and West Germany. It ran for four years. It failed almost completely. Historian Stephen Long spent seven years in the CIA's declassified archive working through 6,700 pages of operati...
Jack Beaumont on Memory and the French DGSE
May 12, 2026
Jack Beaumont, a former DGSE (French external intelligence) operative, focusing on Beaumont's experiences, his writing process, and the themes of his espionage novels. Beaumont explains that his writing began as a therapeutic exercise to cope with PTSD from his intelligence work, initially not intended for publication. He emphasizes the importance of memory and meticulous detail in his novels, a habit developed from years of writing exhaustive mission reports for the DGSE, which required both...
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Publicly listed emails
thelivedrop@gmail.com
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