Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - America's Mata Hari? The Double Life of Esther Reed

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

Cautionary Conversation: When a small-town detective gets a tip about a missing woman, he believes he's uncovered a highly-trained chameleon: a foreign spy. Soon, Esther Reed is on the Secret Service's Most Wanted list, and a nationwide manhunt has commenced. But all is not as it seems. Jake Halpern joins Tim Harford to talk about the latest season of his Pushkin podcast Deep Cover: Never Seen Again. They discuss the dangers of incrementally increasing lies; how and why certain stories are escalated up the media "food chain"; and what it takes to lead a double life.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Michael Lewis. My first book, Liars Poker, told the story of my time in Solomon Brothers, which was then one of the world's most powerful banks. In three years, I went from trainee to successful banker. It felt back then like a modern day gold rush. I thought at the time I was documenting a like an unprecedented event that would never repeat itself. It turned out it was just the beginning of an era that never ended. I've recorded for the first time a full audiobook version of Liars Poker. You can get it now at pushkin.fm. Pushkin.

She was told and fabulously beautiful. Her background, her dancing and even her name were exotic. She performed in the nude, or close enough, for the standards of Paris in 1905. She was Mata Hari, the most infamous lady spy of the 20th century. At least, that's Matahari's reputation, but what she actually aspired all, was she a desperate young woman, fleeing an abusive husband, struggling to make a living in a cool world? Her real name was Marguerreta Zella, but the Matahari persona soon became much bigger and more famous than struggling single mother, Margueretta.

She had many lovers, and many of those lovers were military men of rank. That was enough to cause whispers. And while she admitted accepting money from a German official in 1915, she always denied supplying any useful information to the Germans. The French didn't believe her. In the middle of the First World War, she was arrested, accused of causing the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers, and late in 1917, she was executed by a firing squad.

A century later, the French government finally released secret documents concerning the case, and doubts about her guilt only grew. Was she ever really a spy? Was she a beautiful woman flouting the standards of polite society in a time of war? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Music This is another of our occasional cautionary conversations and my guess this time is Jake Halpun. Jake is a journalist, a novelist, nonfiction writer, comic writer, radio producer, writing teacher at Yale, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. I keep thinking there are several very talented Jake Halpun's out there, but it turns out they're all the same guy. But perhaps that's appropriate, because Jake is fascinated by people who live

double lives. He's the host of the Pushkin podcast Deep Cover, which is all about people assuming the persona of someone else. Season 3 is Deep Cover Never Seen Again, which we will be discussing, and although we'll have some spoilers in the conversation ahead, we'll try to avoid blowing everything wide open, not least because I'm only halfway through the season, and I am completely gripped. Jake, welcome to cautionary tales. Thanks so much for having me on. It's terrific to be able to talk to you. I started with Matahari, who's really mentioned just briefly in passing in deep cover. She's mentioned by one of the people you interview, a TV detective. He doesn't seem to view this Mata Hari label with any eye-winning at all,

but it seems ironic because there's a sort of Mata Hari figure much misunderstood woman at the heart of your reporting. And she's called Esther, at least, I think she's called Esther. Yes, she is. She's still called Esther. So how is it that people come to view Esther as a spy? And what parallels do you draw between her case and Artahari because I mean superficially they're very different. Yeah, so there are there are some interesting parallels both Esther and Margarita Zella who was then dubbed Mata Hari were basically trying to get away from bad home situations with

with Esther was that she had a bad relationship with her sister. Her mother had died. She wanted a fresh start and she wanted to be not found by her family. She started taking on names that weren't hers. And in order to function in modern society, you can't just have a name, you also need social security number, et cetera. And so she ends up taking on the name of a young woman who she thought was deceased and forgotten. But it turns out that there is this detective character who's actively looking for her.

The woman's name would die, it was named Brokenson. And so the small town police officer in South Carolina is looking everywhere for Brokenson. And then he, all of a sudden, gets a wind that there is a Brokenson who's enrolled at Columbia University up in New York City. This was seven years after she disappeared and he starts tracking her down.

And trying to figure out who is this. Is this the real brook and center is this an impersonator and in the course of his investigation he comes to suspect that she's a spy and this idea which is kind of half baked ends up taking hold and creating this whole juggernaut of a story about this alleged spies on the run. It is an astonishing story. I mean, the characters that you're talking to are remarkable. This small town cop who's just devoting way too much attention to this case. One of the people you describe is, I think, called the Gemfinder. He's responsible for escalating this story

about Esther and this suspicion that she's a spy, escalating it up the media food chain, which is a really striking and horrible image. So it took us to that process and how it unfolds. Yeah, so it really does escalate. What happens is, if you remember, we have the small town detective in the mountains of South Carolina who's been trying to find out what happened to a local young woman who's gone missing, Brookhenson. Then he gets when there's a Brookhenson of the same age, same name, same social security number, etc. who's at Columbia. And as he starts to track her down, she vanishes from Columbia.

And as he pokes around, he finds out that she had dated two West Point cadets and a naval academy midshipman. She appeared to be a master at creating these false identities. Anything she's a spy, although it's it's really kind of a half-bake theory. And at some point, he gets interviewed by the local media down in South Carolina and puts forth this theory that she might be a spy. And this guy Tom Colbert, the gemfinder, gets wind of this. And he's kind of a trafficker in stories, a kind of very resourceful middleman who takes these small market stories from little towns and brings them up the media food chain and sells them for a finder's fee. And so Colbert, the Gemfinder,

gets winded this small-ton detective, interviews him, hears his theories, and writes up a press release based on this. And within three days, it's on the front page of the New York Post. And not long after that, it becomes the basis for a kind of tabloid-y news story in which a detective is hired and is trying to track her down. All predicated on this theory that it hasn't really been fully vetted, and it turns out to be wrong that she's a spy. But that doesn't really matter because the media has kind of seized upon it because the narrative has this kind of it's kind of a trope Or it's kind of something that's deep in our minds. The Mata Hari story, right? This idea that she's this seductress or what have you and once the the kind of genie's out of the ball or the story is out There's kind of no taking it back and it takes on a life of its own

When it takes on a life of its own, but it is helped in taking on a life of its own by these various media entrepreneurs or journalistic entrepreneurs, I'm not sure quite what you would call them. So you start with over enthusiastic, small-town detective, he has this speculation. His speculation then gets to the local news. It's then picked up by Colbert. He then writes it up and he writes his very sensational press release. So he's kind of really, really seasoning the pot.

He's adding his chili, he's adding his spices, he's making it more and more exciting. Then it gets to the tabloids, as you say, when it gets on TV, then they're adding more to it. So they have to hire their own detective. And their own detective has to chase around trying to find Esther, but also he's kind of adding his own theories, his own ideas. And so this whole thing is much, much bigger than the original story, which is just as this girl and she's doing some slightly strange things.

Right. There's all kinds of small things that get completely conflated. Well, first of all, she's dated these Westpoint cadets. I mean, if you stopped and thought about that for a second, within this 48 hours story about the Westpoint cadets, there's a moment where they say, oh, yeah, she was inquiring with one of them, but what they were learning in class. And then this was presented as like evidence of SV&H

occurring. But when I talked, I talked to both of the former Westpoint cadets, and they said, look, this is ridiculous. This doesn't require like anything more than a closer look to see how could anything being discussed in an open classroom for training cadets at West Point, constitute sensitive military secrets that would really indicate espionage. I mean, anyone that kind of looked this for a second would be able to kind of say this doesn't quite hold up. Or there's one moment in the instant messages back and forth between her and one of the cadets. It was her boyfriend at the time where she jokingly says, oh yes, I've always wanted to be a James Bond character. And then this is paraded about as proof positive that that's precisely what she is.

By the way, if you were James Bond, would you ever say that that's what you wanted to be? Although James Bond, of course, does constantly introduce himself as James Bond. That's true. Fair enough, fair enough. But I mean, it's a striking cautionary tale in the way that are preconceived narrative shapes, what we then perceive and what we pay attention to and what we don't pay attention to, because if I were to tell you, well, this is woman and she's dating someone from West Point. Okay, fine, whatever. Oh, and she asks him about what he's learning. Well, I mean, isn't that called a relationship?

Don't know people normally ask the people they're dating about what they're doing in their lives. That doesn't mean you're a spy. When the host of the 48 hours show is interviewing the detective that's tracking her down and says, how many men has she gone through with the application that she was just kind of this operative who just these relationships were merely means to extract classroom data. I don't know what, but when you actually talked to the two cadets, these were real relationships that went on for a long period of time.

But it was this presumption that she was this operator who was only interested in men to extract some value from them because she was calculating and using her sexual wiles to entrap them. all of which plays into various spy movies and TV shows they've seen, but even a kind of a cursory review of the underlying facts didn't prop it up. So I'm curious as to what this suggests about our cultural obsessions and fears. And there's clearly a dose of misogyny in there, this idea that well, you know, there's a sexually active young woman, that's not okay. That can't be just accepted in its own right. There's this panic about national security. I mean, what else is going on in this kind of weird mix of obsessions that cable TV got so excited about?

I think you're right. I think there's clearly some misogyny at play here. I think it plays into some of the kind of tropes of spy movies that we see where there is a kind of honey pot or kind of you know this sexy woman who's seducing and kind of manipulating men to get their secrets and compromise them. We've all seen countless shows like that. And I think that what happens as storytellers is that we recognize that that is attractive, that it's a story that people like to hear, that confirms these kind of storylines that we read about in fiction. Oh, but this is a true story that proves that that happens. But I think that what we have to do is storytellers is resist that impulse to just follow that into the fictional

realm of which we think we know it. I'm friends with another journalist named Jack Hit who always says there's always a moment in a story where there's a dissonance where you're reporting differs from the story you were expecting to find. And that is the moment that you've actually discovered your story. Let me just explain what I mean by that. So, when I pitch a story as a journalist, it's usually being pitched on impartial information. I know that there's a woman who's used many identities, I know that she's Duke Columbia,

and then the part of the story that's unknown, the terror incognita of the story, I'm filled in by assumptions and those assumptions are often derived from similar stories that I've seen often in the realm of fiction. So I think the story is going to go that way, but at some point along the course of reporting, I guess you could say this is true for law enforcement as well as journalists, is that you find information that runs counter to the story you were expecting, counter to the cliché that you have kind of come to know. And then you're at this pivotal moment. How do you deal with this dissonance? Do you kind of ignore it and plow ahead with the story that you think the audience wants and the story you sit out to report or do you pause for a moment and say, huh, what's

the real story here? And is it actually possible that it's more interesting and more original than the story that I had in my head? And I think that what happened is, as folks got to that juncture, and instead of kind of pausing, they just said, oh, well, yes, sure, there may be some indications of this story isn't exactly what I thought it was going to be, but we're just going to push ahead with it. And that's what I see as the storyteller at work here.

So this is very human tendency, I think, that we see in journalists and we see sometimes in the police as well of moving along a certain preconceived track and not being able to stop and say, hang on a minute. Are these really the questions I want to be asking, is this really what I want to be doing? Do I need to rethink the whole premise of this? And it sounds like you got your friends voicing your ear when you reach this critical moment, not all of us have that. But there's somebody in the story who has this inability to stop and rethink almost more than any of the characters that we've discussed, the media, the police, and that's as to herself.

I mean, I'm really struck by how she makes some questionable decisions early on, but they're quite small things. Talk me through how it escalates to the point where anybody at all can think that she's a spy to a point where she's on America's most wanted. So just to kind of, I'm going to break it down. Let's start with Esther. I mean, this is something that I've gone over with her so many times. So I'm not going to need spoilers. I'm going to try to think about how I can explain. I find her years later, right? Let's just put it that way and spend the better part of a week kind of talking to her

and having her talk me through her story and how this kind of escalated. And so I think that what happens is the detectives and the media tends to see this as a story of a woman with a master plan. But there's never quite a good explanation of what she's up to. She doesn't appear to be taking money. The times that she gets into Colombia, she's trying to get an education, but that doesn't really make sense why you would want to get a degree in a name that wasn't yours. So from the outside, and I feel sympathetic to law enforcement here, they're looking at this and they're trying to come up with some sort of overarching

explanation that makes logical sense for why she's doing what she's doing and the spy fear even though it has a lot of problems It least attempts to make sense of it. So with Esther the real reason ends up being like much more Commonplace in the sense that she wants to get away from her family, she wants to get a fresh start. And the series of choices that she makes kind of incrementally lead her deeper and deeper into the problem. So initially she's just going by another name just so no one finds her, but she realizes that you know she can't get a job without a social security number. She needs an ID so she can drive the car. And eventually she decides she wants to take classes at a school and you need social security number to do this.

And so she makes a series of incremental decisions to kind of go deeper into the realm of having an identity that offers your protection. It's not all at once. Yeah. And by increments, she ends up deeper and deeper into it. And then people start knowing her as this other person. And then going back becomes more and more difficult because she's built this other life as this other person

and it's going pretty well. But in the back of her mind, she is aware that this is problematic. She just doesn't see a way out of it, the deeper that she gets into it. And meanwhile, law enforcement is seeing all this and thinking like there must be something very sinister at play here to answer the second part of your question. After the media kind of really escalates this, it puts pressure on law enforcement to find her and eventually she does go on a top 10 most one of lists at the Secret Service,

so these things all kind of interplay. It is incredible. The term of art, I think, in psychology, is escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. I talked about this once in a portion of detail about the Cottingley fairies, which is one of a losing course of action. I talked about this once in a Porsche Mutail about the Kottingley fairies, which is one of my favorite Porsche Mutails is all about

how Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, believed that there were fairies at the bottom of the garden, because you know, well, there were these photos of the fairies, and of course the photos were faked. And when I talk about the Kottingley fairies, of course the photos were faked and when I talk about

the cutting me fairies I often talk about So Arthur and what Conan Doyle was thinking and why he was fooled and his motivated reasoning and these various things But actually one of the most interesting people in that story is L.C. Wright the teenage girl Who fakes the photos and why she fakes the photos. And why is she fakes the photos? And why is she keeps lying about it? In the end, for almost her entire life, until she's old enough to be a great-grandmother, I think she's in her 70s or in her 80s when she finally confesses that she's fake these photos.

And it's because it's escalated that initially the photos were kind of a family joke. She wanted to slightly embarrass her parents because they'd been mean to her cousin. But then her mother showed one of these photographs to a spiritualist society and then the photographs got picked up by this major spiritualist and then they got to Conan Doyle and Conan Doyle starts writing about it and just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's one of the most famous lies of the decade,

and she only ever intended to play a joke on her mum and dad. Who, by the way, they weren't fooled, or certainly her father was not fooled. There was no point where she could pull the plug, because each time there was an opportunity to confess, it seemed that it would be a catastrophe. And in the end, she had to wait until everybody was long dead before she finally confessed. That sounds like a very much a version of this. And I think it's only by kind of thinking

about, especially those early incremental decisions, to stick to the lie, to start to make sense that you're like, okay, it's easier just to say yes, or maybe it doesn't seem like a big deal. This is eventually gonna become this juggernaut of a thing. No, I think that very much encapsulates the kind of situation that Esther was in. Corsely Tales will be back after this short break. Three tales will be back after this short break.

I'm Paul Monde, a poet who over the past several years had the good fortune to spend time with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. We talked through more than 150 tracks from McCartney's songbook, and while we did, we recorded our conversations. I mean, the fact that I dreamed of the song yesterday leads me to believe that it's not just quite as cut and dried as we think it is. As we think it is. And now you can listen to our conversations in our new podcast, McCartney, a life. McCartney has been asked many times to write his autobiography and he's always declined. But as we ventured on this journey, line by line, it became clear how much of McCartney's life is indeed embedded in his lyrics.

It was like going back to an old snapshot album, looking back on work. I hadn't thought much about for quite a few years. about for quite a few years. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and if you want to binge the entire season, add free right now. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the McCartney & Life and their show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm-plus. Your membership also unlocks access to add free binges from Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Laurie Santos and many other top hosts. I am struck by the difficulties of maintaining a double life.

You know, you've studied several of these people who created three seasons of deep cover. So what if you learned about what it means to try to leave a double life? Well, I mean, I'll start by saying something very obvious, but it's hugely stressful. I think it's something that people are curious about and maybe even romanticize, especially the undercover law enforcement officer, but I think it's something that people are curious about and maybe even romanticize, especially the undercover law enforcement officer.

I think it basically wreaks havoc on your life and you're living in more or less a constant state of anxiety that you're going to be exposed. It's certainly the case for the three seasons of the show. No, it's possible that there are people out there that are just pathological liars and are able to kind of lie without remorse or fear. But it's a tremendous amount of information to keep track of in your head constantly and to be processing which person are you, what's named you respond to at the airport, what of the things you can or cannot say, what are the tells. And then this idea of who are you? Now Esther claims in her case,

she says she was always the same person that what she was looking for was a fresh start and that the identities, the names of social security numbers, even the kind of general trappings of the backstory of where she grew up, what a pair. That this was all just a kind of a costume that she was wearing, but underneath fundamentally, she was the same person just looking for a fresh opportunity. Whereas with the first season of Deep Cover, I followed this FBI officer from Detroit,

who then is basically impersonating a kind of high-rolling drug kingpin type character. And for him, the two personas were radically different. And then it, of course, spills over into his personal life. But even with him, I think actually, now that I stop and think about it, he was a risk taker. And he liked the risk of it. And Esther also describes herself as a risk taker. Does that mean there's some appeal to this? I don't know, but I don't think so in Astor's case. I think so in Ned, the undercover BI agent from the first season. There's certainly moments where she makes some very impulsive decisions, and she confesses to you that she's panicked, and she's not very good in these stressful situations,

that's what she says. That's why she does these things that from the outside you go, that is going to make everything so much worse. But she must have been smart, because she got into an Ivy League school, albeit pretending to be somebody else. So I mean, do you have to be smart to lead a double life? I think so. I think Esther is extremely smart, and I want to do a spoiler because you haven't gotten to the sixth episode, but when you see, I know, and I'm completely hooked, by the way, I'm completely hooked. I'm loving it.

I'll give you like a little teaser, which is when you find out where she is now, it's only further proof of just how bright and capable she is. So yeah, I think you have to be really smart. I think you're not smart. You know, you're either dead in the case of the undercover agent swimming with the fishes or whatever, have the back of some boat, or you're just immediately exposed. And Esther says she doesn't handle stress well.

And she has some moments that there are several moments where she does things where she does seem to be panicking and she makes decisions that you're like, there are, they've kind of decisions decisions I would make I feel like under that kind of pressure, but She also has like what I think to be is tremendous resilience at the point where she has to vanish from Columbia she basically goes dark for a period of almost a year and a half and I talked to the guy Who is the US Marshal tracking her down. He's basically almost so we think of a bounty hunter, but he works for the federal government

and he's tracking her and he's quite good at what he does. And he says, you know, people say they like to go off the grid, but very few people have the stamina or the discipline to sever all ties with everyone and just exist on their own. And she does that. And to me, that is a sign of not just her intelligence, but also a hermental fortitude. I think I would last about two weeks

before I felt like I had to call a friend because I was going out of my mind. Having reported all three of these seasons about people leading double lives. Is there anything that you've learned from them that you think that maybe we could all use in our own lives? That's a great question. I do think that lying is seductive. I thought about this. I started off my career as a journalist at the New Republic,

and I came there right after the Stephen Glass scandal, which he was a journalist who just made things up. He ended up making up stories wholesale. I think that there's an aspect of lying and of making up where we are from, which is both seductive but is also deeply understandable that like to some degree we're all limited by where we're born, who we were,

the lives that we have kind of been allotted. And so, to me, the desire to kind of become someone else, or to kind of have that total blank slate, that to me is very understandable. I don't look at these people and think like, what on earth were they possibly thinking? I don't see the allure of it all. That's not what I think. Because to me, I get that. I mean, we all reinvent ourselves to some extent, even with just leaving high school to go to college. But if ever there was a kind of cautionary tale about writing the hot checks of lying in them coming due, these are these kind of hyperbolic examples of why lying is so problematic

because you have to keep track of everything. And in these cases, that is just exaggerated to the utmost extreme, remembering who you are, which life you're in, which person you are. And it's just hugely stressful. And I think that even on a smaller scale, you can see that that's what that's the position that lying puts us in. So even if it's like, do you want to go out for a drink tonight? No, I can't. I'm not feeling well. And then you go out with someone else and you have to remember where you were, hope you weren't seen. Like, that's what these folks are doing on this much greater scale. And to me, it just, it's just a reminder of like, why, why I don't want to go down that path for many reasons, including just how stressful it is.

There is this line in the movie Excalibur. Merlin says, when a man lies, he murders some part of the world. And there's this very dark view there of what it means to not tell the truth. But of course, I mean, we do all lie all the time for little lies, for good reason to avoid embarrassment, avoid hurting someone's feelings. It's not so easy to just draw that bright line and say, never cross it.

It's not. It's not, we do like, Oh, do I look nice in this dress? Dad, did I, did I do okay on the basketball court today? You student asking, do you think I have any ability at writing? I mean, like, there's all these moments where sometimes it's not just kind of for gain. It's, it's what we perceive is, is kind of generosity or decency or kindness that justify the small half truth. But I will tell you this, and this is just a little bit more so I'm married a woman who's almost constitutionally incapable of telling a lie. I've really never met anyone quite like her. She'll say like, well, I don't want to have drinks tonight. I'm just I'm just not feeling social like that's the

kind of thing that she will just say. And she does this all the time. She's done this in my writing too. It's like, can you tell us small lie? And her position is that everyone needs a truthful editor. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I find it too honest sometimes, but I think that her feeling is that among other things, it's just a cleaner way to live because you're never debating, you're never getting into that situation of doing the arithmetic of whether or not the lies justified, which is a space that I feel like prior to meeting her, I spent a lot of time in, even on these kind of small, so-called white lies of kind of social niceties. So I think that, I think that in some of them,

I mean, I've never really kind of put this together, but I think that there's probably, it's not a coincidence that I'm married to this truth teller, but I'm also deeply intrigued by these people who work to various degrees, masters of deception. I did not expect our conversation to end up talking about white lies and defending going out for drinks or not going out for drinks,

but it has been an absolute pleasure, Jake. Thank you for joining us. I should say, Deep Cover, Never Seed Again, is available now from pushing on all the usual pod platforms. Jake Halpen, thank you very much. Tim, thanks so much for having me. And now, here's the opening of Deep Cover, never seen again. This is a story about a young woman who ran away from home. At least, that's how it all started. I think people think that I had this master plan and I went out and did it and like, you know, like it's not fun, right?

You're constantly scared. You have no support. You have no one to talk to, which is part of the reason it got so carried away. Like, if I had just talked to somebody, they would have been like, this is crazy. Along the way, there were plenty of moments where she could have stopped running, but she didn't.

Sort of like I got on a train track. It was clearly the wrong train track and like my train is running away and at some point you're not thinking crap how to get off this train track. You're just thinking crap how do I stop this train from like going off the rails. You know, I'll just keep making a horrible decision after horrible decision after horrible decision. Just trying to keep the train from crashing and killing me at that point.

We're gonna come back to this woman and go deep into her story. So you'll hear more about all of that, but not just yet, because this is actually a story about not one, but two young women who vanished at about the same time. The two of them were roughly the same age, but in so many other ways they could not have been more different. One grew up in rural Montana, where she was raised in a sheltered, devoutly religious

home. She was shy and kind of a nerd. The other was a kind-hearted free spirit from South Carolina. She partied often and sometimes hung out with a rough crowd. They both disappeared in 1999. Their family searched for them, but didn't find many clues. And then, improbably, their stories collided when a lone investigator got involved and quickly became obsessed. I think of a situation as a sweater. So sometimes you have a loose thread and you pull the thread and you get a knot. And sometimes you pull the thread and it just keeps unraveling. And you just keep falling and falling and falling.

This investigator was convinced that the fates of these two young women, the free spirit and the nerd, were linked. And that by solving one of their cases, he might also solve the other. Not just that. He suspected that one of them was a master of deception, a highly trained chameleon who conjure way into the Ivy leagues. He began an investigation that ultimately drew in the Secret Service, the US Marshals, and the Justice Department.

The media soon got wind of this. Allegations of murder, fraud, and espionage swirled. Eventually, a nationwide manhunt got underway. All because of this one investigator and his hunch. Now, given the gigantic scope of all this, you might think that our investigator worked for some big city police department, or a fancy federal agency, or maybe even an international outfit like Interpol. Nope. He was a small town cop who just become an detective.

He didn't have a partner or for a while, even a computer. But he was doggedly stubborn, almost perversely so. I just pulled a thread and it just kept going and going and going to the whole thing unraveled. I get it. I love pulling on threads. As a journalist, I've done this so many times, pulled and pulled until I have lost track of what I was originally looking for, or whether it was worth it. And sometimes, most of the time, in fact, it's not.

But every once in a while, there's a set of facts that's so irresistibly curious that I just can't let go. And I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're a journalist or a detective or just a nosy neighbor. So many of us believe that great mysteries lurk in the periphery of our lives. So when we find an especially curious thread, we keep pulling, because we won't be satisfied until we unraveled it all. I'm Jake Halpern, and this is Deep Cover. Season 3. Never seen again. Yeah. Corsionry Tales is written by me Tim Hafed with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Edith Ruslo.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weis. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, L'Italmalade, John Schnarrs, Kylie Migliore, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano and Morgan Ratner. Corsion retails is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you want to hear the show add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple podcasts

or at pushkin.fm slash plus. I'm Paul Mondeau, a poet who over the past several years had the good fortune to spend time with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. We talked through more than 150 tracks from McCartney's songbook, and while we did, we recorded our conversations. I mean, the fact that I dreamed the song yesterday leads me to believe that it's not just quite as cut and dried as we think it is. And now you can listen to our conversations

in our new podcast, McCartney, a Life. McCartney has been asked many times to write his autobiography and he's always declined. But as we ventured on this journey, line by line, it became clear how much of McCartney's life is indeed embedded in his lyrics. It was like going back to an old snapshot album, looking back on work I hadn't thought much about for quite a few years. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts and if you want to binge the entire season, add free right now. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the McCartney Aliphonderic Showpage in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm-plus. slash plus. Your membership also unlocks access to ad-free binges from Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Laurie Santos and many other top hosts.