Show Notes
When Tom Cruise landed the role of Maverick in the 1986 box office hit "Top Gun," he probably wasn’t aware of how the Defense Intelligence Agency’s exploitation of captured MIGs played a crucial role in the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School program depicted in the movie. On this episode of DIA Connections, you’ll hear about it in a fascinating conversation with Dan Pedersen, the founder of TOPGUN. We also have a discussion with flight instructor Dave “BIO” Baranek, who not only flew aerial sequences in the film and participated in the editing process, but who also swapped stories off set with Cruise about the need for speed.
More from DIA Connections
Forty years ago, spies were being exposed at an alarming rate, which led the press to dub 1985 the Year of the Spy. In this episode, you'll hear about two DIA analysts involved in espionage that year — one working for us and the other against us. Additionally, you'll hear from DIA's chief of counterintelligence, known as CI, who explains why his team’s mission is crucial to U.S. national security.
As a specialist in a maintenance company during the Iraq War in 2003, the last thing Shoshana Johnson expected to happen was to be captured by the enemy and held in captivity for 22 days.
During the Iraq War in 2003, U.S. Special Operations Forces rescued Pfc. Jessica Lynch from a hospital in Baghdad. It was the first successful rescue of an American prisoner of war since World War II, and the first-ever rescue of a woman. In this episode, you’ll learn how a DIA team hid a camera in a gym bag to record video of the hospital’s interior, which was used for the rescue mission. You’ll also hear from former NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders, whose camera crew was embedded with a Marine unit during the war and had exclusive access to stories, including knowledge of when the rescue attempt for Lynch would take place.
Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45. On this episode, you’ll hear a DIA counter narcotics officer discuss the agency’s efforts to combat the most devastating drug epidemic in U.S. history. We also spoke with Mariana Van Zeller, an investigative reporter who went deep inside the fentanyl pipeline to Mexico’s cartel country to see how it’s produced and trafficked into the United States.
This episode of DIA Connections features highlights from Season Four. Catch up on this season's best moments with an American pilot who landed his plane safely after a mid-air collision with a Chinese fighter jet, a cosmochemistry professor who led NASA’s mission to an asteroid, a DIA analyst turned screenwriter, the speechwriter behind President Reagan’s challenge to “tear down this wall,” and the author of “The Monuments Men,” a book about the greatest treasure hunt in history.