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Everyone knows the banana skirt. Almost no one knows about the medals.

By 1939, Josephine Baker was one of the biggest stars in Europe and French intelligence had just recruited her. She carried secrets across borders in sheet music, written in invisible ink and passed through checkpoints where guards wanted her autograph instead of her papers. When German officers came to search her château, her intelligence handler was hiding inside.

She was also a woman who knew how to tell a story and whose version sometimes depended on the audience. Carlos interviews her. Sam reconstructs her voice from the historical record.

And the episode ends with a disagreement. Did America’s rejection make Josephine Baker extraordinary, or did it simply send an extraordinary woman elsewhere?

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On March 16, 1968, an American helicopter pilot landed between a group of Vietnamese civilians and the American soldiers closing in on them.

Then he ordered his crew to fire on those soldiers if they opened fire on the civilians.

His name was Hugh Thompson Jr.

In this Secondhand Séance, Sam reconstructs Thompson’s story from the historical record. He talks about the ditch at My Lai, the one child his crew pulled from it, and the report that was buried. When the story finally broke, Thompson became a target himself.

He was called a traitor. He received death threats. And it took thirty years for the Army to give him and his crew their medals.

We’d all like to believe we’d have done what Thompson did. How many of us actually would?

New episodes weekly.

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Just after midnight on September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning system reported five American nuclear missiles headed for the Soviet Union. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov had a telephone, a decision to make and no way to confirm what he was seeing.

He reported a false alarm.

He was right. But he couldn’t have known that.

On this Secondhand Séance, Sam sits in for Petrov, drawing only from the record he left behind. Carlos, the retired cop, calls the decision courageous but Petrov refuses the word hero. What follows is an argument about obedience, uncertainty and the difference between being right and knowing you’re right.

Then comes the detail neither of them can shake. Petrov wasn’t supposed to be working that night. Sometimes history turns on whoever happens to be sitting in the chair.

New episodes weekly.