Mike Baker

speaker

1,559 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Mike Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Camp Gagnon · Getting Into The CIA, How Black Budgets Work & Mormon CIA Agents | Mike Baker · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

And funny you should ask that question.

But I hosted a series for Discovery Network for a couple of seasons called Black Files to classify it.

And the whole concept started for that show.

by following the money.

And we said, okay, if we want to know what those classified programs were like, we weren't in the business of exposing classified projects, but we were looking at things that hadn't really been looked at, but were at that moment declassified, so we could dig into it.

Then the concept of the show was follow the money.

You're absolutely right.

That's how you typically, when you find a thread you can pull on, it's because somewhere there's got to be a line item, somewhere, hidden in some budget.

As an example, the agency's budget is classified.

It's buried inside, for a lot of reasons, inside the defense department's overall budget.

If somebody's got a program that they're going to, say the US Air Force wants to design a new stealth project, then yeah, they're not going to create a new file that says new US Air Force stealth plane, and then just put everything in there.

For purposes of keeping it secret, which again, the world's not a friendly place, so you do need to have some things kept secret.

They may bury that in a completely unrelated project somewhere.

And yes, then obviously the entire government works with contractors outside resources.

So it's whether it's a Skunk Works or any other organization, Raytheon or anyone, there's always that collaboration that goes on.

So Black Files Declassified was all about pulling on the threads and trying to figure out where these budgets were and how it was being spent and whether it was a space program, whether it was, again, a super soldier program, whatever it might be, trying to figure out where that project actually existed.

And then that will tell you certain things.

A lot of times, again, there's not a ton of information sometimes, but it will tell you the size of the program or it may give you a lead on...

on a contractor that worked on it, on an aspect of it, right?

Then you can go look at that and try to figure... So it's a process.

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