What's your favorite spy film? NPR staffers share their thoughts

Rob Schmitz is NPR's international correspondent based in Berlin, where he covers the human stories of a vast region reckoning with its past while it tries to guide the world toward a brighter future. From his base in the heart of Europe, Schmitz has explored Berlin’s techno scene, reported on the rise and fall of far-right rule in Poland, investigated Norway’s salmon farming industry, covered elections in the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Poland, the European Union and beyond, and patiently chronicled a 639-year organ performance in rural Germany.

Barrie Hardymon is the senior editor for NPR's Investigations team. In 2020 she was the editorial lead for election coverage and ran NPR's pop-up talk show during the early days of the coronavirus called The National Conversation from All Things Considered. Before that she was senior editor at NPR's Weekend Edition, and the lead editor for books. You can hear Hardymon on the radio talking about everything from Middlemarch to middle-grade novels, and she's also a frequent panelist on NPR's podcasts It's Been A Minute and Pop Culture Happy Hour. She went to Juilliard to study viola, ended up a cashier at the Strand and finally got a degree from Johns Hopkins' Writing Seminars, which qualified her solely for work in public radio. She lives and reads in Washington, D.C. [Copyright 2025 NPR]

Andrew Sussman is supervising editor for national security at NPR. Prior to joining the network in 2020, Sussman was executive producer for public radio's The World. He was a producer and reporter on the original team that launched the show in partnership with the BBC. Before that, Sussman oversaw a joint-venture newspaper collaboration with Komsomolskaya Pravda in Russia and then was an editor at The Moscow Times. He's also worked as a reporter with Radio France International in Paris. Sussman was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Originally from Colorado, Sussman also grew up in Montreal, which will forever be home. [Copyright 2026 NPR]