The Rosenbergs | Inside the CIA | 5

David McCloskey spent nearly a decade as a CIA analyst before becoming a bestselling spy novelist, giving him a rare perspective on how intelligence really works and how it has changed since the Rosenbergs' time. In this conversation, we discuss what motivates people to spy, what the Rosenberg case reveals about the intelligence world, and how the CIA balances secrecy, accountability, and the challenge of preventing the next intelligence failure. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lindsay Graham?

  Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 0:16Lindsay Graham?

  From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsay Graham. And this is American Scandal.

• 0:39Lindsay Graham?

  In June of 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for spying on the United States. They were accused of helping funnel America's nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Neither was a trained intelligence officer. They were an ordinary couple who became the only US civilians ever executed for spying during the Cold War. Their story reveals the personal cost of espionage, not just for the people who steal the secrets, but for everyone drawn into this world built on deception, uncertainty, and decisions that carry enormous consequences. These stakes make it incredibly rich territory for stories, both real, like the Rosenbergs, and fiction, stories of superhuman spies and world-saving missions. My guest today

• 1:24Lindsay Graham?

  has lived in both worlds. David McCloskey spent nearly a decade as a CIA analyst before turning to fiction, where he's become a bestselling author of spy novels. He's also the co-host of The Rest Is Classified, a podcast that explores the real history of espionage. We'll talk about what it's really like inside the intelligence world, how the Cold War changed espionage, and whether spies like the Rosenbergs truly shaped the course of history. Our conversation is next.

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• 3:51Lindsay Graham?

  David McCloskey, welcome to American Scandal.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Lindsey, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 3:56Lindsay Graham?

  So let's start with your experience at the CIA. You were hired as an intern when you were just 19. I'm wondering what that onboarding experience was like, specifically the lifestyle polygraph you were forced to take.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the agency obviously has an interest in doing a significant amount of vetting of people that it brings on board. So you initially apply, and it sort of feels like a normal job to start, where, you know, you send in, I was a sophomore in college at the time, so you send in writing samples, they see your resume, such as it is at that point, you know, your grades, et cetera, right? So pretty normal stuff. They do an interview, and then from that, they give you, or, you know, if you get through it, they give you a conditional offer of employment. And then from there, the fun begins. And that's the point where they, they give you kind of a full background investigation. So

• 4:54Speaker 04

  quite literally, they send investigators out to talk to your friends, your neighbors, and your family, very intrusive. They do a psychological examination, they do more interviews. And the worst part, most interesting part, is the polygraph. And there's different flavors of polygraph. And you mentioned the lifestyle polygraph, which is the most intrusive. And that's really all about establishing some facts around your background and whether or not you've lied on your application, of course. But it's also about asking you, for example, you know, do you work for a foreign intelligence service? Have you done anything nasty on government computers or computer networks, that kind of thing? And it's all

• 5:36Speaker 04

  yes or no questions, but it can take hours because you're having a conversation with the polygrapher about the question in advance. So for example, they might say, okay, I'm going to ask you a question about whether you've committed property crime. Is there anything you want to talk about in advance of answering that question? And if you happen to be like me, and you've, you know, done a little bit of light pranking that may have ended in Windows being smashed or some sort of light property damage, you might raise that with them. And then they say, okay, that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm talking about arson and blah, blah, blah. So you can confidently answer no to the question. But then what they do is even if you don't have anything to hide, they really push the

• 6:16Speaker 04

  fact that you are lying to put pressure on you and to see what comes up. So in some ways, and I think actually the core of the experience, is to put you in a very uncomfortable position and see what comes out. And so you can sit for multiple of these, they could take three or four hours. It's a, you know, I would say it was one of the more stressful experiences of my young life. But somehow, I made it through and then got in and, you know, was an analyst there. But it's a, it's an unpleasant experience to sit for one of those things.

• 6:49Lindsay Graham?

  It sounds like practice for an interrogation. What do you think they saw in you?

• 6:54Speaker 04

  You know, they're different, a lot of different jobs at the CIA. And I was applying for an analyst job. And so I think what they're looking for are really a lot of critical thinking and writing skills, and interest in the broader world and how it works. And importantly, I think they're looking for, especially when you, when you're hiring young analysts, they're really looking for someone who's kind of a blank slate, who they can teach. And so there is a, a behavioral aspect of, I think, looking for coachability. Is this someone who we could bring in and actually school in how you become an analyst? But the job of a CIA analyst would be very similar to going to work as a, you know, journalist at a newspaper or a researcher at a think tank. So it's a very similar kind of critical

• 7:38Speaker 04

  thinking, writing, set of skills that they're primarily hiring for when you're talking about analysts.

• 7:44Lindsay Graham?

  Well, you've anticipated my next question because I wanted to know with a little more detail what an analyst at the CIA is, and how closely they might relate to what we think of as a spy.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Definitely not a spy. I think that's really important. And in fact, the word spy gets overused and, and used as shorthand when you're talking about anyone who's connected at all to the intelligence business. And the way it's used inside CIA, to be quite honest, it's not used inside CIA. But the correct way to label someone a spy would be the foreign asset who is providing us with the information. They're the one who's doing the espionage. The analyst is an analyst. The case officer who runs that asset, you know, be it in Syria or Russia or Germany, wherever it might be. That person is a case officer, they're an intelligence officer, they're not, they're not actually a spy.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  And they're not an agent. That's also a, a misnomer. The analyst, though, I think the best way to think about that job is that it is, it is a version of clandestine journalism. You're doing a lot of the same things that an investigative reporter does when they're putting together a big story. You're using a bunch of different sources. You know, in this case, it could be human sources, but it could also be intercept, signals intelligence, satellite imagery, press reporting, diplomatic cables from our embassy in that country or the region. You're using all of that information. Some of it is fragmentary, some of it's going to be contradictory, some of it's better than others. And you're answering a question that's really important to policymakers. So you're basically taking a, you know, a

• 9:23Speaker 04

  big national security topic, like, for example, I worked on Syria while I was at the agency. And in the early days of the Arab Spring, one of the big questions was, well, how long can Bashar al-Assad hold on to power? And so you're answering a question like that in written form, using all of those different sources, and putting it in very simple, economical, precise language for the president or other senior policymakers or intelligence officials so that they can make better decisions about the world. Much in the same way that an investigative journalist would put together a story for a newspaper so that readers could have a better understanding of what's going on in the world or the economy or whatever. So that's essentially what an analyst does.

• 10:08Lindsay Graham?

  Just a quick follow-up on an analyst's job. Of course, some of the best investigative journalism happens with shoe leather reporting. How many of your sources are discovered or found by the analyst?

• 10:19Speaker 04

  Well, you hope none, but that doesn't always happen. It's not a particularly safe job to commit treason, right? I mean, you think about if you zoom all the way out and say, what is the CIA doing with these assets? I mean, we are recruiting them to steal secrets for us. So they're doing something that in their country is almost always illegal. In some cases, it can lead to long prison terms or even the death penalty. You know, protecting that source, protecting that asset is fundamentally one of the key, if not the key, rule that the CIA and case officers follow when they're handling an asset.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  So you're communicating with them and meeting with them, using forms of tradecraft to keep that association clandestine. And that usually works, but obviously with really committed, really effective counterintelligence services like you have in China or Russia or Iran or Cuba or North Korea, the way you go about doing that can be very difficult, very dangerous. And as a result, sometimes assets are caught.

• 11:28Lindsay Graham?

  So Julius Rosenberg and his brother-in-law, David, given the definition of spy that we've just established, would probably fit the definition. They're less secret agents, but informants working for a foreign government.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. We would call them, in our parlance, they would be assets of, I believe they were assets of the Soviet NKVD. I mean, the recruitments, I think, predated the KGB itself, but yes, they were assets or agents of Soviet intelligence, precisely.

• 11:59Lindsay Graham?

  So one thing that is obviously striking about the Rosenberg story is the torn family tragedy at the center of it. David ultimately betrays his own sister to save his wife. And it seems that almost anyone in the intelligence business has to make, or probably has to make enormous personal sacrifices or faces dilemmas like this. Was that true of yourself as an analyst or others you worked with?

• 12:23Speaker 04

  It definitely was not true of me as an analyst, although, you know, obviously, you're working in a very secretive environment. And so the things that you're doing day to day, you can't really share with people around you. It's not a normal job where you can kind of come home and really talk openly about what you may have done at the office that day. So everybody involved in the business has to deal with that in some way, shape or form. I think the Rosenberg case is a striking and really tragic demonstration of betrayal of the business, but it's also quite exceptional. When I think about the case officers, the agency officers that I know, I can't think of an analog.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  I can think of cases, though, where case officers have lost assets, assets who've been arrested or killed. And there can be a sense of, you know, deep loss and certainly other part of those assets' families, a sense that what they did, often in secret, was a betrayal, betrayal of family and marriage and country. And so that's certainly true. But I think one of the misconceptions about the spy business is that the case officers, the intelligence officers are walking around sort of betraying and deceiving everybody all the time. And I think that's not true. I actually think that the reality of the business, the paradox of the business, is that it is cloaked in secrecy and deception.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  And yet, at the core of it, the bond that holds the asset to the handler and the asset to the intelligence service that he or she is working for is really grounded on a tremendous amount of trust and openness and, you know, in the best cases, a large degree of honesty about the shared mission. So this concept that there's sort of constant betrayal in the business, it does come from somewhere. The Rosenberg case highlights it very well and very starkly when you're talking about that foreign agent or asset, because what they are doing day in and day out as part of this relationship is betraying the organization they work for, the country they live in, and oftentimes friends and family.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  So that is true, but it's not as true for the actual intelligence officer who works for the CIA or, you know, British SIS or the Soviet NKVD or whatever it may be.

• 14:44Speaker 05

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• 16:21Lindsay Graham?

  You use the phrase "shared mission," and many spies, especially of the Cold War period in which the Rosenbergs were operating, seem to have real ideological conviction. From your experience, what do you think drives most spies to take on such enormous risk?

• 16:46Speaker 04

  Well, it is certainly true that ideology can play a significant factor in the decision. I think it's less true today than it was during the Cold War. I think that today it is perhaps a bit more mercenary than in those decades. But, you know, there's a overused, but I think directionally correct acronym about what drives people, what compels people to spy, and it's MICE, M-I-C-E. M is money, I is ideology, C is control or coercion, and E is ego. And, you know, money, obviously, people can do this because they have massive debts or they want to fund a particular lifestyle. Ideology, as the Rosenbergs' case shows, you know, you have communists working inside

• 17:31Speaker 04

  sort of the US technical military establishment. The converse is also true that in Russia and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, you have Russian intelligence officers and scientists who felt that the Soviet system was rotten and wanted to work to help the United States undermine it. There are very ideologically driven cases among them. You know, coercion or control, frankly, less commonly used by Western intelligence services, but the Russians use blackmail, comprimat, kind of having leverage over people to get them to then spy for you. And then intelligence officers are people with access to secrets who feel slighted by the organization they work for, passed up for promotions, not given favors.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  That kind of stuff can actually be very potent and very visceral for people and thus, you know, a real kind of impetus to spy. So it's always more complicated than any of M-I-C-E acronym, any of those single letters. It's usually a stew of a lot of different things, but that kind of gives you some sense of the different reasons why. And as we saw in the Rosenberg case, ideology absolutely can be a factor.

• 18:39Lindsay Graham?

  So in this Cold War period, this is probably the most frightened and paranoid that America and probably the Soviet Union has ever been. What role did spying have in that paranoia? Did it cause it or was it caused by it?

• 18:53Speaker 04

  Well, it's a great question. I mean, my sense of the Rosenberg case is it drops at a particularly sensitive time in the Cold War. Soviets have just tested an atomic bomb. The Korean War has kicked off at this point. We're a few years away from Sputnik and the space race. And when you zoom all the way out, you don't really have a set of rules yet for this conflict. And so it's this very heady period. And I think one of the things that the Rosenberg case in particular does is it demonstrates that there can be enemies within, which had been a fear prior, but this is a sort of

• 19:32Speaker 04

  visceral demonstration of just how penetrated the US military industrial establishment could be. And so I think it, you know, from my sense, is that it takes on a life of its own and sort of feeds the idea that there are enemies everywhere and that you can't know, we don't know the full extent of how many other spies like this are there. And certainly that the Soviets had very effectively penetrated the atomic bomb program. And so if you take that as a case study, you think, maybe it's the same at the CIA, maybe it's the same at the State Department, maybe it's the same at the FBI. And I think it fuels an incredible panic that is definitely out of proportion to the

• 20:12Speaker 04

  actual scale of the threat, but it demonstrated practically that there was one. And so it is a bit of a chicken and egg thing, but I think my read on kind of the, frankly, the witch hunts to come afterward are that it dramatically amplifies a fear that existed and was probably to some degree understandable and reasonable, but it blew it up into something that had its own energy and that blew the threat out of all proportion.

• 20:39Lindsay Graham?

  In this Cold War moment and in the mid 20th century, the CIA is both an ambitious and overreaching organization. We can point to the 1953 coup in Iran, the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs. This is a moment maybe in which the the organization is trying to professionalize, to gain a playbook. What is your assessment of how well the CIA fulfilled its mission in this period?

• 21:05Speaker 04

  I'll give you a bit of a controversial take, which is, I think the CIA did pretty well in this period. And I think you have to evaluate it against the sort of directives and orders, frankly, that it's giving by by the White House. I think the 53 coup in Iran is successful. Guatemala is successful. Bay of Pigs isn't. But I think on the covert action front, the CIA in those years was sort of finding its way at what it meant to be a global intelligence service and what it meant to resist Russian expansionism and active measures all over the world. And so I think, and we look back at that period, I think a scant in many respects at just how activist it is and and how secretive the CIA was and frankly,

• 21:49Speaker 04

  how unaccountable it was. This is a period where there's really no scrutiny on its budget and there's really no congressional oversight whatsoever. This is a period where there aren't memoirs written by former CIA officers. We don't have, you know, former CIA analysts going on podcasts in this period to explain the workings of the place. So it's it's a deeply secretive place. But I think, you know, it's sort of finding its way at what it means to both, from a covert action standpoint, underbided resist Soviet expansionism. And then at the same time, how do you develop an information advantage over our adversaries? And we can't give a perfect marks for that period. And obviously, there's a tremendous amount of excess that happens. I mean, goodness gracious, like, you know, I don't know how much you've covered on your program,

• 22:34Speaker 04

  but your MKUltra, which is this journey into trying to find ways to actually control, you know, to essentially to bind control. It involves the CIA at one point becoming the largest purchaser and supplier of LSD in the entire world. It ends up with a whole bunch of law breaking. So, you know, it's very much a mixed record over this period with a lot of stains on the agency's record and rightly so. But I think my view is that you have to evaluate it at the context of the time. And in the context of the time, you know, as you're talking about the Rosenberg story, it's a time of deep uncertainty about what the Cold War actually is and who the Russians are and what they want.

• 23:14Speaker 04

  And a time when we were actually quite similar to the Russians in terms of military and technical capabilities. And it was not at all clear who was going to win the Cold War.

• 23:25Lindsay Graham?

  You've detailed that in this period that the CIA was largely unaccountable and gave it a great example in MKUltra. So it's no surprise that the CIA did come under scrutiny in the 1970s with the Church and then the Pipe Committee hearings, both investigating abuses by the US intelligence community. What were some of the major lessons of those hearings? And what changed afterward, if anything?

• 23:48Speaker 04

  I think the big lesson was, in an open society, you can't have a completely secretive, largely unaccountable intelligence organization that when that happens, there will be abuses. And the most egregious ones to buy bind are actually not the foreign adventures. The really awful stuff is when the agency, I mean, repeatedly, over the course of the 50s and 60s, you know, broke its charter and did things like, essentially ran mind control experimentation on American citizens without their knowledge, wrote reports and spied on the domestic anti-war movement under the fig leaf or in some quarter suspicion

• 24:32Speaker 04

  that it connected to foreign communists, opened mail domestically of American citizens. And, you know, in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, had agency psychiatrists write up a psychological profile of an American citizen that was was intended to be used to tar him publicly by the White House. So to my mind, those hearings uncorked all of this and revealed that when you have an intelligence service that is totally secretive and really only accountable to the president and a very small number of congressional leaders, very small, that it's going to do bad things. And so I think the reforms coming out of that, they do go a long way toward making sure

• 25:14Speaker 04

  that there is a much more sophisticated and institutionalized congressional oversight. I think tilt the balance back toward a bit more openness so that the intelligence service of the democracy can be held accountable to the laws and norms of of an open society. So I think the reforms of the 70s are sort of very necessary in that respect to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens and showing what can happen when an intelligence service gets out of control.

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• 27:17Lindsay Graham?

  Let me ask you what you think of the term intelligence failure. It's been used quite often whenever we contemplate the ability for our government to predict or or prevent things like 9/11, the intelligence that led to the Second Gulf War. But it's a term that's thrown around often like fraud, waste and abuse. It seems like it's a catch-all. I'm just wondering, from someone on the inside, how well of a job is the CIA doing?

• 27:44Speaker 04

  It's hard to answer because it depends on the topic. What the CIA exists to do, and this is overly simplified, but there's basically two things. It exists to conduct covert action. So to do things deniably at the behest of the president that are intended to advance US national security objectives, right? That's one thing. CIA is very, very good at actually carrying that out. Whether the covert action achieves the policy objective, I think it really, again, it depends. And quite often, it doesn't work. The other side of it, which is the biggest part of the business, is how do I collect enough information, secrets? How do I go out and steal secrets?

• 28:25Speaker 04

  So that when I look at a topic like Iran or China or Russia, North Korea, whatever it might be, that we have an information advantage over our adversaries and competitors. And that is really dependent on geography and in the issue. So for example, there can be some countries where we actually have, because we have recruited human assets who are in positions of power, because we have figured out creative ways to intercept the signals inside those systems, we can have a tremendous information advantage over that government or over its institutions. There are other places that we don't have that insight. And so it's an unsatisfying answer, but it depends.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  And I think when you get to intelligence failures, you know, it is a word, to your point, that is is thrown around a lot. But basically, what they come down to is either a failure of collection or a failure of analysis. And let's say that we actually don't have a lot of great sources on North Korea. Again, I'm making this up. I don't know. But if you don't have a lot of good sources on North Korea, if you don't have the signals intelligence platforms to be able to intercept its leadership communications, military signals, you name it, you could have a sort of a black box where we're not collecting the information that we want or we need about Kim Jong-un's plans and intentions with regard to a nuclear program.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  And so therefore, if something happens, we miss it. And we miss it, it's an intelligence failure because we didn't collect it, we didn't have it, right? Downstream from that, you can have failures of analysis where you actually had the information, but you didn't interpret it in an appropriate way. And, you know, Iraq WMD is a great example of both of those things happening at once, where it was a failure of collection and that we had actually not penetrated Saddam Hussein's regime effectively. And it was also a failure of analysis in that the analytic products that were being put together, albeit with fragmentary and contradictory and sometimes quite lousy information, came to judgments that were not, in my opinion,

• 30:36Speaker 04

  you know, not defensible on the basis of the information they had. And it wasn't because they assessed that Saddam had WMD. I actually think every intelligence service, Western intelligence service, thought he had the weapons. It was a question of how you caveat and sort of attach a confidence level to that judgment so policymakers understand the degree of confidence that you have that this may be so. So that's an example where collection and an analytical failure combine to produce an overall intelligence failure.

• 31:07Lindsay Graham?

  While you were at the CIA, how would you actually communicate this uncertainty or the probability of this versus that?

• 31:15Speaker 04

  It sounds simple, but it wasn't done inside the CIA holistically until after Iraq, WMD, but you attach confidence judgments to your analytical lines. So if, for example, you might take a look at the information that you have and you'd say, okay, we think Saddam has an active chemical weapons program, but we have low confidence in this judgment because, and then you'd say, well, we actually don't have a source inside his inner circle. Or we have dated reporting on this, you know, it's seven, eight years old, or we think he's actually running a deception campaign against us. And thus it makes it harder to evaluate the intelligence that we have at our disposal. And so you'd attach a confidence

• 31:57Speaker 04

  statement to it. And, you know, of course policymakers don't like that because they just want the clear answer. But in the world of intelligence analysis, there rarely is one.

• 32:07Lindsay Graham?

  So for years, historians have debated the true impact of espionage, and certainly in the Rosenberg case, whether, for example, it helped other countries build a nuclear weapon or not, or maybe it would have happened regardless, just on a different timeline. Given your experience in the CIA and as someone who continues to work in the espionage business in some capacity, what's your assessment of the intelligence community writ large? Has it altered the course of history? Is there a case for spying?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  I think that at particular moments in time, the right intelligence has done things like give a president insight into what's coming and then allowed them to shape a national security response that has changed the course of a conflict. For example, our ability to predict accurately that Putin was going to invade Ukraine enabled us in those early days to build a coalition of partners who were committed to stopping that aggression, however they could. Has that changed the course of history? I'm not sure. It's a counterfactual, but was it important in developing the response to a massive geopolitical

• 33:21Speaker 04

  development? Yes. You know, on the counterterrorism side, there have been numbers of attacks stopped mid-planning because of the US intelligence community or foreign partners. So intelligence, you know, sometimes spy fiction sort of paints the whole thing in a negative light. You say, okay, what's the point of all of this? Does it really matter? And I understand that perspective, but I think at certain times in certain places, it absolutely has made a massive difference. And I think the biggest difference it makes is a really quiet one, which is secretly, it helps ideally when an intelligence system is functioning well. It gives our policymakers secrets from other countries and then that enables them to make

• 34:02Speaker 04

  better decisions about our national security policy with respect to those countries. And that is not something that is visible to the public and it's not something that very frequently produces some kind of earth shattering change, but it helps us day to day as we manage the national security affairs of our government. So I think intelligence absolutely makes a difference. I think it's very valuable, but I think that it's not, it's not a cure all for, you know, our national security policymaking. I mean, it's not something that's, it's not a silver bullet, right, for any national security problem. And sometimes, depending on the issue you're talking about, it may not actually be that helpful at all,

• 34:44Speaker 04

  but it just really depends on the, on the context you're talking about.

• 34:48Lindsay Graham?

  David McCloskey, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal.

• 34:52Speaker 04

  Lindsay, thank you so much. It's been great fun. Thanks for having me.

• 34:56Lindsay Graham?

  That was my conversation with David McCloskey. He's a former CIA analyst turned novelist and the co-host of the podcast, The Rest Is Classified.

• 35:10Lindsay Graham?

  From Audible Originals and Airship, this is episode five of The Rosenbergs for American Scandal. In our next series, in the early 2000s, competition for spots at America's top universities reached new heights. Students and their families felt increasing pressure to stand out from the crowd. And in that anxiety, one charismatic college counselor saw an opportunity. Exploiting every loophole in the system, he claimed he could guarantee his clients' admission to elite universities for a price. His illegal scheme would make him rich, but when it was exposed, it would bring down some of the biggest names in America.

• 35:49Lindsay Graham?

  American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.

• 36:23Lindsay Graham?

  American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship. This episode was produced by John Reed, senior producer Andy Beckerman, managing producer Emily Burr, audio editing by Mohamed Shazib, music by Throm, sound design by Gabriel Ghul, executive producer for Airship is William Simpson, executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin, head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louis, chief content officer, Rachel Giannetta. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.

• 37:07Lindsay Graham?

  Inside a dive bar kitchen in upstate New York, the owner cracks open a box and discovers her chicken order misdelivered. All she has to work with are wings. So with a little culinary genius and a dash of luck, the Buffalo Wing is born. Well, so the story goes, that game day staple has humble origins, but its popularity gave rise to two empires, Buffalo Wild Wings and Wingstop. Hey, I'm David Brown, the host of the podcast Business Wars. Every season, we bring you the true stories behind the companies that shape our world, their rivalries, their reinventions, and their spectacular rises and falls. Buffalo Wild Wings built a sports bar empire. Wingstop went the opposite direction, focusing on getting wings out the door. For years, Buffalo Wild Wings was the undisputed king, but when Americans started

• 37:51Lindsay Graham?

  ordering in instead of going out, Wingstop was ready to tear down its rival. Make sure to follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Business Wars early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.