# CIA Russia Expert on What the West Gets Wrong About Putin's Russia | Sean Wiswesser

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/decoding-geopolitics-podcast-with-dominik-presl-6862131/cia-russia-expert-on-what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-putin-s-russia-sean-wiswesser
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/decoding-geopolitics-podcast-with-dominik-presl-6862131/cia-russia-expert-on-what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-putin-s-russia-sean-wiswesser.md
Podcast: [Decoding Geopolitics Podcast with Dominik Presl](https://stenobird.com/podcast/decoding-geopolitics-podcast-with-dominik-presl-6862131)
Published: 2026-05-03T07:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dominik-presl/episodes/CIA-Russia-Expert-on-What-the-West-Gets-Wrong-About-Putins-Russia--Sean-Wiswesser-e3ipq1h
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO1805252346.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/decoding-geopolitics-podcast-with-dominik-presl-6862131/episodes/cia-russia-expert-on-what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-putin-s-russia-sean-wiswesser
Duration seconds: 2108

## Resource

➡️ Watch the full interview ad-free, join a community of geopolitics enthusiasts and gain access to exclusive content on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingGeopolitics ➡️ Sign up to my free geopolitics newsletter: https://stationzero.substack.com/ ➡️ Buy your own Geopolitics of the Western Pacific Map Print: https://decoding-geopolitics-shop.fourthwall.com/ ➡️ Get Sean's book: Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War This is a conversation with Sean Wiswesser, a veteran CIA operations officer who spent almost three decades working for the agency deployed in various places around the world. And a majority of his career was working on and in - Russia - and in particular on Russian intelligence services - basically he was a spy, recruiting other spies. He recently wrote a book detailing what he has learned about how Russian intelligence actually works, including everything from the Russian illegals and assassinations program, their preparations for invasion of Ukraine, their many failures and what almost everyone fails to understand about them - or what does someone with decades of experience of working on Russia think about the stability of the regime and where the country is going.

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## Transcript

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