Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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you Should Read books dot com. Welcome to Stuff you
Should know a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
(01:10):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. We are comrades in arms here at s
Y s K step. You should not let me ask
you something. When you were researching this and thinking in
your brain about talking about it, did you get nervous? No? Okay,
(01:31):
I guess you did a little bit. What were you
nervous about talking about the freaking KGB? Yeah? I was like,
and how they just kill anyone that they don't like? Okay,
now you know I got the most nervous ever when
we we recorded I wrote on and we recorded on
Delta Force. Really, I was really nervous. Do you think
(01:53):
they're gonna come kill you? I don't know. I mean
they're supposedly, they're not supposed to exist, and we were
talking about how they do exist, so I was like,
surely not. But no, I know what you're talking about.
It didn't happen in this one. So maybe this is
the one that will get me because KGB, you know,
those are the and it even says in this article,
(02:13):
like when you think about the knock on your door
in the middle of the night, come with us. That's
KGB ops right there, right, But that was if you
were a Russian, a Soviet citizen, which is true. It's something.
It's weird because like you you know all about the
KGB just having been raised as a Cold War kid,
you know. Um, But I never really put two and
(02:35):
two together that it was a really all encompassing, um
secret police kind of thing that they had going on.
Because not only were they big on spying and getting
their hands on advanced weapon technology and running disinformation campaigns
around the world and trying to destabilize the United States
and it's it's reach around the world. Um, they also
(02:58):
were really focused internally and domestically as well, so that
they were a secret police force that would come and
get two centers and send them off to prison camps
in the middle of the night. They basically did it all,
and all of it was geared chuck toward keeping the
Soviet Communist Party in power, and they were successful for
(03:18):
several decades. Actually yeah, and um, I mean from reading
this research, it seems like, I mean, they did do
all the things, but their main charge was squashing from within.
It seems like squishing your head from within. So KGB
(03:38):
stands for I'm gonna try and read this and Russian,
Uh commentet that's easy with a k uh ghosts dars
veny be so pass nosty. It sounds like you just
raised like an Aramaic deemon and klatu varata, so that
(04:05):
means an English committee for State security. Uh. They were
headquartered and we're gonna say we're a lot because technically
the KGB itself is not around anymore. It's just been
renamed though, so same stuff going on. Same place they
were and are and are now headquartered under the FSB
(04:26):
at lub Janka Square in Moscow, which is where the
KGB was, right, Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's where
the headquarters was and still is. And it's this big,
you know, beautiful sort of intimidating building right there in
the square. And UM, I mean that's just par for
the course. The KGB has basically been this entity that's
(04:46):
changed names and official titles multiple times since the very
beginning of the U S. S r UM, but it's
still the same thing and it's there. It's actually really
instructive to UM to study it because it seems that
they are still very much up to the exact same
things that they've been doing for decades now. And everybody
(05:09):
very famously is well aware of UH the g r U,
which is military intelligence. But it seems that the g
r U, the FSB, UM and another group called the
UM s VR, the Foreign Intelligence Service are all basically
like the KGB. They're just it's just now been divided
into separate entities, but they're all working together. But after
(05:32):
the two thousand and sixteen election, everybody got a pretty
pretty obvious taste of what the KGB has long been
up to, which is trying to to meddle in American
politics and trying to sow discord among Americans and ourselves. UM.
And this is nothing new. Apparently they've been doing it
since the outset. Uh, well actually since after World War
(05:55):
Two at least. Yeah, I mean they've been doing this.
If you talk about sewing discord, UH, there was Operation
Pandora in the nineteen sixties, which was basically the Soviets
trying to start a race war within the US. UH
in filter trading groups like the Clan, the Jewish Defense League,
and the African American Militants posing is them making fake
(06:17):
pamphlets um from the different organizations and and blasting those
out to basically try and start a race war. It
didn't work, but it did create discord. Um. They've also
posed as uh, people from Antifa and Black Lives Matter,
and they're still doing the same thing today, Yeah, except
(06:38):
now they're doing it in this hyper accelerated manner because
things can spread so much more quickly on um on
social media, and you can turn so many people's opinions
on social media so much more quickly as well. So
there doesn't seem to be officially any any disagreement, uh
that that the Russians metal in American affairs. And I've
(07:03):
I have long been like, well, you know that it
doesn't excuse it, but you know, we can't ignore the
fact that America medals in other countries affairs too, and
has for a very long time too, And that is
definitely instructive also in something to pay attention to, but
first of all to what about is and but secondly,
from what I read, there's this UM scholar who wrote
(07:24):
this really really interesting article in the Brown Journal of
Public Affairs I believe is what it was called, Uh yeah,
Brown Journal of World Affairs. Guy named Calder Walton wrote this,
um this this article on the KGB and it's disinformation campaigns,
super readable, really exciting kind of UM. But he basically says, yes,
(07:46):
America has done some very very shady stuff in the
affairs of other countries and in its own affairs to like,
you know, the CIA dosing Americans with LSD to see
what happens kind of thing. Um, But the Americans and
the Brits operations just pale in scope and breadth compared
to what the KGB has done and what it seems
(08:08):
like the FSB is now still doing right now. Yeah.
Not not nice guys. So I just want to shout
out that, um that that article it's called Spies, election
meddling and disinformation Past and present. You should check it out. Yeah.
I mean, if you want to look into the KGB
and spying and espionage, there are so many great articles
(08:31):
and documentaries on YouTube that you can watch. UM, some
a little more fun than other, some very dry. The
BBC as a two parter on the KGB that's very
dry but very instructive. UM. So the KGB, if you
want to talk about that organization, you gotta go back
to pre KGB in December nineteen seventeen when Lennon created
(08:52):
a secret police agency called the check A c H
E k AH. They were the punishing sword of the revolutions.
They were known as and this was this was basically
the like you said, it's gone under many names. It
was the KGB before it was called the KGB. It
was there to keep leadership in power UM, imprisoning, killing
(09:14):
opponents both abroad and within the country, keeping people under surveillance,
censoring news UH, and basically starting the espionage program on
foreign soils UM. The Checker was followed by the O
g PU, then the KGB, then the FSB slash SVR.
(09:35):
But from that moment the CHECKO was formed till today
there has been a steady, continuous, basically unbroken security apparatus
that has been charged with domestic and external UM spying, surveillance, espionage,
all that jam UM from from the from the get go.
(09:57):
The today, they might still called themselves Checkists within the organization.
It's a it's a name, the Checker that that original
name is kind of stuck around if you're sort of
on the inside, UH, and they you know, there are
many ways that they can get what they want Uh,
this one was a pretty interesting example here. UM. At
(10:18):
one point there was a group early on in the
UH Soviet unions existence where they had some socialists, some
anti communists, um, that basically got together and they said,
we're an organization now called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia.
And what they didn't know is that the Monarchist Union
(10:40):
of Central Russia was actually infiltrated by so many moles.
It was a fake organization that real people joined that
were socialist and anti communist, but it was all a
big set up to get them all in one place
basically root out who they were. You know, you gotta
know your enemy, know who your resistance is. And they
(11:00):
found who they were and they killed them. Yeah, and
that nuts man. That Like, think about the effect that
it has, not just in in getting rid of your
opposition by forming a group where they all show themselves,
but also like that becomes legendary. Like that's one of
the first things that this this group, this security group did,
and like it basically sends a pretty clear message like
(11:24):
don't you can't even trust your own the people you
think that that are your allies, you know, just talk
about sewing discord among you know, opposition. That's just and
like that was a hundred years ago and it's still
like can give you chills just to think about that. Yeah,
I mean, you start a group that you think is
(11:44):
going to be battling your oppressor and it turns out
that group is so infiltrated that it's not even a
real group. Well I got the impression that it wasn't
even that they were infiltrated, but that the checker or
I should say that O g P. You actually started
that group to the detract people, you know what I mean. No,
that's what I'm saying. They infiltrated that that circle. Yeah,
we started this fake organization. Yeah, that's so nuts man.
(12:07):
So one thing that a lot of people forget, and
our younger listeners might not realize, is that back in
World War Two, the US and the USSR were allies.
We weren't like BFFs or anything like that, but we
were we had a common enemy in the Nazis, US,
the UK, the US, UM and the Soviets and UM.
(12:29):
I read that from this time of basically working with
the US and the UK, the USSR saw how good
we were at disinformation campaigns, and it had two effects.
It taught Soviets how to do these things. It basically said, hey,
this is a really good way to sew discord and
(12:50):
um to get information, fake information out um like with
your enemy. So it taught the Soviets how to do that.
But it also made the Soviets think that they just
presume that the US and the UK, we're creating the
same operations in the USSR too, So it really kind
of hardened the Soviets enemy ship of America. Like it
(13:13):
really kind of predisposed the uss are to be enemies
with the US and with the u K and with
the West in general. Um and it just kind of
took off from there. And just to be clear, I
saw a good distinction definition between misinformation and disinformation. Where
misinformation is clear where the source of the information is
(13:33):
coming from. It's just the information is faulty. So the government,
the US government is giving out like bad info about
coronavirus or something like that, that's misinformation. Disinformation is where
the information is faulty, but it's it's not clear where
this the information is coming from or where it came
from originally. It's just popped up as like a rumor
or something on social media. But the the information is
(13:56):
faulty either way. It's just whether the source is clear
who the sources are not. That's that's what disinformation is.
So the checker are operating in World War two. Uh,
they are spying on our Manhattan projects such that there's
one quote in here that said they knew more about
the creation of the atomic bomb than Truman did. Uh.
(14:18):
They've really infiltrated things. This gave them a huge leg
up in making their own bomb and their efforts to
um welcome themselves into the atomic age, like they would
have been way way behind had it not been for
their espionage efforts in there in America. Uh, there are
ways that they did this. There were spies who were
(14:39):
um sort of the tried and true ways to pose
as a diplomat um and actually get in an embassy
in a different country, but you're really a spy. UM.
You could also, if you've seen the movie The America
or the TV show The Americans, that's called an illegal
when you basically pass yourself off as someone of that
nation's origin. UM. After World War two, in Finland, they
(15:00):
would find records of infants who died at birth take
that identity and then basically become a finished persons called
a legend, and you are essentially living in that country
as an American or as a finished individual, but you
are really a secret agent for the Soviets, right, And
I mean like super duper deep cover UM, so much
(15:23):
so that you can expect to go live like a
pretty mundane everyday existence for years or decades as an
American or as a fin or something like that, whatever
your background wherever it says you're from UM, and then
you might be called on to assassinate somebody one day
UM or to start UM working sources. And it's not flagrant,
(15:47):
it's not obvious. The point is that they make kind
of UM contacts and friends with low level people at
the edges of powers, how I saw it described. But
I also saw that same person describe UM, who described
illegals like that as UM, saying that there's probably more
of them in the world today than there was even
during the Cold War. That's so scary, isn't it scary?
(16:10):
But here's the thing. This is one thing that I've
learned about studying the KGB. It's possible there are far
fewer illegals in the world today, maybe there's zero in
the US. But the fact is somebody said that, and
the KGBS track record is enough that it's possible that's
the case. And that's all it takes. Now all of
a sudden, people are paranoid and like, wait a minute, you,
(16:31):
Tulca Gabbard, are you actually a tool of the Kremlin?
Are you a plant by the KGB? Are you a
sleeper agent who's running for president? Like, people start to
get accusatory, and you can't trust anything anymore, and now
you're starting to see your enemies all over the place.
And all it took was a rumor that there's more
sleeper agents that are associated with the KGB today than
there were in the Cold War. And now everybody's paranoid
(16:54):
and the KGB's work is done for the day. And
that could simply be disinformation, exactly exactly. But because disinformation can,
it takes on a life of its own. That's the
point of disinformation that it makes people behave differently than
they would if they had not heard that rumor and
started to believe it. Because the other fact about disinformation
(17:14):
we should do an entire episode on it, I think,
is that it has to have a kernel of truth, Like,
like the Black Panthers have to suspect that the Jewish
Defense League is um there was prejudiced against them secretly,
and so like these documents that that were found or
sent to the Black Panther headquarters just proved this suspicion
(17:36):
that they already have or something like that, or vice versa. Um.
So it has to have like this kernel of truth
for somebody to be like, no, here's the proof, and
then it just takes off from there because people love
urban legends. I wonder if there's ever been an Army
colonel named Colonel Truth. No, No, all right, I think
(17:57):
we should take a break and ponder that. And uh well,
I'm back and talk about when the KGB was born.
Right after this stuff you should know, Nasham shuck stuff
you should know. So the KGB, I promised to tell you,
(18:30):
it's the when that little baby was born. That little
baby was born in ninety four, when the intelligence agency
that it, like I said, long been operating, was reorganized
officially finally as a KGB, with that same mission in hand.
They were known as this this time as the Sword
and the Shield of the Communist Party. And if you're
(18:51):
talking about the structure of the agency itself. It depends
on who. I mean, there's a lot that we don't know,
but um, it depends on who you're asking. I've seen
anywhere from a quarter of a million two seven hundred
thousand people on staff if you count the whole extended
network of like foreign border guards and stuff like that. Yeah,
(19:12):
I think seven hundred thousand's the most I've I've seen,
which is a huge, Yeah, huge, huge. Compared to any
kind of like CIA or any other countries intelligence organizations,
the KGB is just massive, right. Um. The other thing
that I saw about the KGB is that you can
make a pretty good assumption that, just especially during the
Cold War, UM, that every single one of those agents
(19:35):
were loyal to the Communist Party. And one way that
they made sure that every single agent was loyal the
Commist Party was to basically let them know that the
other part other members of the KGB were spying on them.
There was um entire sections that were dedicated to spying
just on the armed forces, just on the military alone. Um.
(19:55):
And that was one of I think twenty different directorate's
um little divisions that were responsible for different kinds of
tasks or different specializations. Yeah, the official like if you
want to look at the official sort of charge of
the KGB, um it is for areas and size. It
is the struggle or an organization, I guess, the struggle
(20:17):
against foreign spies and agents. Uh, the exposure and investigation
of political and economic crimes by citizens. That certainly comes
as a lot uh. Protection of state borders, That's what
I was talking about, like the border um guards and
stuff like that. And then this is the big one,
protection of state secrets, right and then so like those
(20:39):
are the big four, but there every like there was
another about sixteen of them dedicated everything like making sure
that the phone and radio systems were encrypted, um, to
making sure that transportation sector wasn't infiltrated. Like the KGB
had its fingers and absolutely everything. There was one directorate
that was specifically tasked with surveilling and monitoring foreigners and
(21:03):
people who the KGB suspected were um we're potentially dissidents
who were Soviet citizens. And they they mostly hung around
like Leningrad and Moscow because that's where most of the
tourists were. But that was like a whole KGB division.
That's how many people they had and how many resources
they threw at keeping tabs on the power structure and
(21:25):
making sure that any challenges to the power structure were
squashed in the cradle, not even strangled in the cradle,
squashed in the cradle. Yeah. And you know, they recruited
the best, the smartest people, the brightest people. Um. But
like you sort of mentioned, it's not like like the
KGB was something to be feared by every uh um
(21:48):
citizen of the Soviet Union, I think. But jo joining
the KGB to thwart that was not. It's not like
that got you out of any sort of surveillance or
and in fact, it may have even put you on
or a bigger microscope, who knows. Yeah, I mean they
they had every level of the military infiltrated with KGB agents,
like every platoon, every detachment. If you were in a
(22:11):
group with the military, with the military, somebody was a
KGB officer posing as a soldier. That's right in their
own military. It's amazing. Yeah. Uh. By the end, I
mean I think it started, like I said, by the
end of the nineteen sixties, it was firmly, firmly in
(22:32):
place as as the watchdog of everybody in the in
the Soviet Union. Um. And I mean again with the
like people tend to say, like, well, the the the
KGB was the counterpart of the CIA, but I mean
in the CIA side some shady stuff, including domestically, but
from from basically all sources. The main point of the
(22:56):
KGB was domestic surveillance and domestic control of domestic challenges
or dissent toward the Communist Party. That's right, um, spying
on people, tapping phone lines, harassing people, arresting people, exiling people. Um.
(23:17):
If you were a religious activist, good luck. If you
were a human rights advocate, good luck. Um. If you
were an intellectual, if you were just a you know,
part of the intellectual um sort of university system of
the Soviet Union, you better watch what you say because uh,
you are definitely being watched, and every word that comes
(23:39):
out of your mouth, even in a classroom, is being recorded. Yeah,
and I mean some if you were super high profile,
you might make it out with your life and your
family might get out alive, but you would be exiled
for criticizing the government. UM. A writer named Alexander soul
Ze soul zettiness and even practice that soul Zette souls
(24:02):
Zette Nissen. Yeah, I think that's kind of close. He Uh.
He was actually I think a science teacher who started
writing books about how bad things were in the Soviet
Union and uh eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature.
But um, he was eventually exiled. If you were um
less of a well known person and you were critical
(24:24):
of the government, you were more likely to find yourself
in the Goolag, which is a system of prison camps
that we referenced earlier, and um souls and souls En
it's in. I think I said it right that time.
I think that's right. He estimated that um about sixty
million people were sent to those camps over the course
(24:44):
of the twentieth century. Yeah, I mean it's it's impossible,
literally impossible to put a number on the amount of
human lives lost due to the KGB, but there are
people that have estimated, uh, like, perhaps tens of millions
of people taken out by the KGB over since its history.
(25:07):
It's which is Yeah, I mean, I'm no CIA apologist,
but I don't think the CIA has that, you know,
which again, I mean we we on the outside tend
to think of the KGB mostly as like the spy agency.
But yeah, they kept people in mind by killing them
or sending them to secret prisons and making them leave
(25:29):
in the middle of the night from their homes and
never be seen again. Um. It's just it's just completely nuts.
And the effects that that has on his societies. Just Clanton,
I can't imagine. I can, sadly, but I can't imagine.
I've never lived through anything like that. Yeah. And if
(25:50):
you know, um, if you run an organization or a
or a country or a nation from fear tactics from
the top down, that eventually is gonna bite you in
the behind. Because what that does is everyone's paranoid against
each other. Um, no one, Like in the case of Stalin,
(26:12):
Let's say, if Stalin didn't like what you told him,
he would literally shoot the messenger. Uh, he would execute
anyone who told him anything that didn't basically uh support
what he thought should be going on, Like it wasn't like, hey, Stalin, Um,
we found out some pretty bad stuff that's going on,
Like that's a good thing. That means we can root
(26:33):
these people out. He it got to a point where
they wouldn't want to go to Stalin with bad news
and that's that's not good either, No, and they had
to go to him with some news. So what they
would do it would just kind of naturally UH inclined
towards intelligence that supported their their view rather than um,
(26:55):
you know, something that said, hey, there's you're really unpopular
and there's there's an uprising potential really coming. They managed
to squash anything like that. But in the end, UM
this what's called sycophantic UM intelligence, where it's just basically
feeding you, telling you what you want to hear, that
that that eventually will run a foul of reality. And
that's what people credit UM with the KGB dropping the
(27:18):
ball on the fall of the Soviet Union back although
as we'll see, there's actually a lot of direct influence
that the KGB had on that. But there's this idea
that throughout its history there was Stalin kind of kicked
off that thing where just tell me what I want
to hear or else I'm literally going to kill you
(27:41):
um or two, and that that it was carried on
even long after Stalin was gone. That's sycophantic kind of intelligence,
which is really surprising because there was a really successful
organization externally. UM. It was that they think that potentially,
for as as good as they were espionage and stealing secrets, UM,
(28:04):
the Soviets were apparently not and I have to preface this,
let me just caveat us. This is reading American sources
about the KGB. The KGB was really good at keeping
a code of silence. There were especially towards the end
of the USSR, more and more KGB agents started to defect.
But even when they defected, we weren't sure if they
(28:25):
were plants, so there was still like what they said
was taken with a grain of salt. Um. But the
the idea that UM that the KGB was was very
successful in stealing secrets supports this idea now that the
Soviet Union would not have been a superpower um part
(28:48):
of this to two superpower polarity that ran the world
in the Cold War had it not been for stealing secrets,
which doesn't explicitly say it, but suggests that they were. Um,
they did not have the best and brightest as far
as technology and science is concerned, which is kind of
surprised to me because I've always heard that the Soviets
had really really smart scientists in their own programs too.
(29:11):
But this researching the KGB made it sound like they
wouldn't have been able to keep up had they not
stolen advanced weapon technology, um and built their own versions
of it. I'm I'm confused. I have no idea what's
true anymore. Yeah, welcome, It's definitely true that they're spying.
Efforts in the Cold War, especially when it comes to
(29:33):
nuclear armament, were very much ramped up because they were
spying with us. Yeah, but I think that they were saying, um,
they were saying, it wasn't just getting the atomic bomb,
but basically like all their advanced weapons technology was the
result of stealing it, and that the point is is
(29:54):
kind of a two handed compliment or backsided compliment, um
that they were really good it's stealing secrets, but that
they wouldn't have been able to be a nuclear superpower
without stealing secrets. I think that was That was what
I was, That's what I found. Well, and it also
could have been and I'm just speculating it could have
been a thing where that was such a part of
the system. Was that is, Hey, we don't need to
(30:17):
put resources for steps one through five because we can
steal that stuff exactly, and we can just start on
step number six or whatever once we have whatever intelligence
we need. But what do I know? I'm just a
dumb podcast. Do you want to take another break? Yeah,
let's do it. Okay, We're gonna take another break, everybody.
That's no secret. Stuff you should know, Gosh, stuff you
(30:48):
should know. Man, what is going on? That's wrong? I'm
making puns left and right. It's terrible. Can we talk
about spies? Sure? Yeah, let's do it. So Uh. I
(31:12):
think we did a we did an espionage podcast years
and years ago. I think, yes, spies, how spies working?
Was it just spies or was it espionage as well? Well?
They go so closely together the same thing. Yeah. Uh.
The Soviets were really good at well I don't know
about really good because who knows how many times it happened,
but they had some very effective moments of turning Americans
(31:37):
into double agents. UM. A few notable people over the years.
A man named Aldrich Ames Uh. He was a thirty
one year CIA officer and for about nine years was
feeding the Russians or I guess it was the Soviet
Union at that time. UM, highly classified information from the CIA.
(32:02):
His big thing, it seemed like, was outing uh, CIA
sources and and stuff like that, like turned KGB agents. Yeah, so,
I mean there's all kinds of ways. There are other
people that fed documents. We'll get to them in a minute.
But he was outing sources and I think his actions
directly led to at least that we know of ten
(32:23):
CIA sources being compromised and killed. And then you know,
in the hundreds of intelligence operations that he was he
was kind of dropping the dime on And that's I
mean in addition to the like the loss of life
as far as you're the intelligence community is concerned when
you when you kill somebody like that, you're killing like
(32:45):
decades worth of information that the person has walking around
in their head and contacts and just general knowledge of
how things work. Um, so it's a really big deal.
In addition to again killing somebody, you're wiping out like
the institutional memory that they carry with them too, that's
been helping out the other side. Yeah. He is in
(33:06):
a medium security prison in Indiana today serving a life sentence. Um,
as is Robert Hansen. Uh, he's one that is a
little more. I mean he worked up until the I
think two thousand one, and they said that his espionage
was possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history. He
made about one point four million dollars in cash and
(33:28):
diamonds over the years selling classified documents to the kgb
UM total double agent caught in two thousand one after
the FBI paid seven million bucks to a KGB agent
to out him as a mole Um. Very famous case. Yeah,
(33:49):
I remember that as well. I remember Aldred James too.
Made it really easy on people, like he was like
spending lavishly and was not that well off to begin with,
and it was just just being very flagrant about it.
I feel like Robert Hansen was a little smarter about it,
if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, who's the other guy? There
(34:10):
was one other guy that basically was spilling secrets about
her submarine program. I don't I don't know. There was
a There was a naval captain after World War Two.
Somebody St. John was that in the sixties that I
can't remember his first name, but someone St. John. He
was a naval naval captain. Yeah, there was a trove
(34:32):
of kgb UM files from an operation from the sixties
that basically confirmed he was indeed a Russian spy. Both
of the Rosenbergs were indeed Russian spies. Alder Hiss, who
I think went to his grave denying that he was
a spy, was in fact a spy for the for
the Soviets. So they did have a pretty good success
(34:53):
of turning Americans into informants. So did the CIA and
the KGB apparently. But um, this the stuff that they
got was was pretty useful. And again it was not
limited to advanced weapon designs but also industrial technology stuff
that we were saying, there's embargoes on this, you can't
(35:14):
export this. They still managed to get their hands on
this because of their contacts. Um that they turned in
the US. Um just just basically anything you would want
to keep your your economy humming along, just from from stealing.
That's how you could That's how you could do that. Yeah.
The Navy guy, his was He's the one that volunteered
(35:35):
himself basically by because he wanted money. It's like it
all came down to greed. He walked into Uh oh yeah, No,
I'm talking about John Anthony Walker Jr. That's who I'm
talking about. Two Okay, not St. John. Not St. John.
He was not a patron saint of hipsters. I don't
know Yeah. John Anthony Walker Jr. Is the one that
(35:55):
that wanted money and he volunteered by because it's not
like he was anti American who wanted to see the
Communist party thrive. He it was all motivated by greed.
And he walked into an embassy in the United States
with like a a code card or something and said, hey,
I'll sell you this for three thousand dollars and they
(36:17):
bought it, and he was like, and you know what,
that went well, so just put me on the payroll.
And he got his family involved. He had his uh
I think he tried to get his father involved, his daughter,
his son, his wife, his son's body. Well, at one
point the Russians basically knew where all of our submarines
(36:37):
were at all times because and his wife was apparently
a really bad alcoholic um probably you know, in no
small part due to this, and eventually outed him after.
I mean, he was way too uh lucy goosey with
who he tried to get involved, Like you can't try
and get your whole family involved and then have them
say no, I'm not into it and then to be like,
(36:59):
all right, well gonna keep doing it. What's for dinner? Yeah,
she read it him out though she um would call
a bunch of times apparently, and and either chicken out
or she was really blitzed and couldn't get across what
she wanted to say. But eventually she did to an
office in Boston, and they thought, well, this is just
some drunk wife trying to get her husband in trouble.
(37:21):
And then eventually though, they did look into it, and
they you know, they searched the guy as house and
they found like briefcases full of classified documents and it
was just I mean, this this went on for twentysomething years,
I think. I think from what I understand, the most
damning evidence was he had one of those Russian fur
(37:42):
hats with the ear flaps that didn't met so UM.
The as good as they were at turning people, at
creating illegals, the sleeper agents, which may or may not
be all over the world right now. UM. One of
the thing things that KGB has long been known for
disinformation campaigns, and from reading that, um that that guy's
(38:07):
h article spies election meddling and disinformation past and present.
Caller Walton's article basically every every conspiracy theory that I
believed as a teenager apparently was a KGB rumor disinformation campaign.
I could not believe this as I was reading. It
was like a trip through my my, you know, formative years. Basically,
(38:32):
the idea that the US government created aids to target
developing countries. The idea that um that American tourists used
to go down to South America and Central America and
adopt kids so that they could harvest their them for
body parts. KGB. Get this, chuck, there's a poll I
(38:53):
don't remember when it was conducted, but it was sometime
after the Kennedy assassination where more Americans believed that the
CIA killed JFK. Then what the Warrant Commission concluded, which
was that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. More Americans believed
what turned out to be a KGB disinformation campaign than
(39:14):
what the Warrant Commission came up with. That they came
up with the one that the CIA killed JFK. That
that was the KGB that did that. And you know
the friend of your friends, uh mom, who was on
the elevator with Eddie Murphy. KGB. That's right. Everything, I mean,
all that stuff flasher lights at somebody, and the gang
comes and kills you, k um, But it's just so
(39:38):
bizarre to think, like what, like no, I thought that
I talked to people about that, like late at night,
like we had conversations about this stuff. And when you
see that and when you read it and realize that
like this has been going on for years, it really
puts things into focus. Now. Um, like the two thousand
and sixteen election meddling um to the the idea that
(40:00):
there's like like g r U agents military intelligence agents
who are posing as members of Black Lives Matter or
who posed as like Tea Party members during the two
sixteen election, like that they um that they were actually
working for the for Russia. The idea that that that's
(40:21):
still going on just becomes all the all the more
clear when you look at some of their past campaigns.
Something I do occasionally, Uh, I don't know why I've
tortured myself, but sometimes I will read comments on a
Fox news dot com article, right, and someone will say something,
and then you can leave a comment about the comment,
and someone will comment like, Okay, thanks a lot, Dmitri.
(40:46):
That's funny. But you don't know, man. That's what they do.
They infiltrate message boards and they infiltrate social media and UM,
like you you never know, like, uh, yeah, it's it's
just it's really staggering that this kind of stuff still
goes on to this degree and there's nothing we can
do about it. Yeah, for real. So so let's um,
(41:09):
let's step back for a second, because we kind of
hopped ahead. But I want to go back into KGB history.
KGB was around from nine and we said earlier that
the UM the KGB had a direct role in the
fall of the USSR, and they did because there was
a KGB um head who was appointed by garbage Off
(41:32):
because he thought that he was an intelligent, moderate person
who was open to new ideas, and to turn out,
he was and he was part of that same old
KGB establishment um who wanted things to say the way
that they were. And Um, he actually led a coup
against gorbach Off I did. I was too young to
know what was going on, but there was a coup
against Corbach where he was under house arrest for a minute.
(41:55):
And Um the coup finally failed because it became clear
that the military he wasn't wasn't in on it or
wasn't going to take part in it. Um. But It
eventually led directly within months to the downfall of the USSR,
the breakup of the u s SR, because in the
meantime they had elected for the first time a democratically
elected president, and when Gorbachof saw that basically this coup
(42:19):
was a vote of no confidence in him, he stepped aside,
separated the Communist Party from the presidency, and all of
a sudden, the USSR wasn't there anymore. It was just
Russia because the satellite states started saying, um, hey, we're independent. Now,
we'll see you later. Soviet Union and the USSR fell apart,
kicked off by this coup that the KGB initiated. Yeah,
(42:42):
and I think yelston uh or yells excuse me, officially
split it up, right Yeah, yeah, he he said, KGB,
you're dissolved. We're gonna break you up into the FSB
and the UM do the same stuff, right exactly, but
just do it separately. I figure if I separate you
guys might be less evil. And apparently that was not
the case. Yeah. And apparently, uh, not apparently, but very
(43:06):
famously Putin came straight out of the KGB. Uh. He
was a KGB agent in the mid nineteen seventies. Uh,
supposedly because he saw a movie about Russian spies and
I guess thought it was awesome. Yeah, I said that
I want to do that. There's a picture of him
in one of these articles where he's in the seventies
(43:27):
wearing like this Newsy cap and just looking super seventies.
But he also looks like Putin man, just complete poker face.
He's staring off camera at something. Who knows what he's
taken in. It's it's it's a really cool picture. There's
another picture, too, supposedly of him posing as a tourist
standing next to Ronald Reagan. Oh my god, have you
(43:47):
ever seen that picture? Oh? It's nuts. It's just so great.
But then you're like, is that Putin? And I went
and looked, and it turned out that there is still
disagreement of whether it's him or not. But most people
say that that's not him, that he would have been
in uh Dresden at the time, he wouldn't have been
in the Soviet Union. I'm looking now, Oh my god,
(44:08):
that certainly looks like Putin, doesn't it. But the official
line is that is not Putin with this little camera
around his neck right and so Putin was not just
in the KGB. He became the head of the FSB.
And this is a real testimony to just how powerful
the KGB and the KGB's remnants or successors remain. He
(44:29):
went from head of the FSB to the President of Russia.
That was the step that he took. And he was
not the first person to do that. Other KGB heads
had worked their way up to become the head of
the Communist Party and the de facto head of the
Soviet Union at the time. So all of this kind
of goes to show you that that nothing, even the
fall of the USSR, really did anything to slow down
(44:50):
the KGB, and that the advent of technology helped kind
of actually speed things up quite a bit. Yeah, and
if you think those murders um or a thing in
the past, that is certainly not the case. I remember,
as I'm sure you do, in two thousand six Alexander
uh Littnovinko, Levinenko, Letvinenko, he was the one that was
(45:13):
killed by the radioactive uh polonium two tin that was
dropped in his beverage. And uh, they they have a
history of doing like that's a really awful way to die,
and they have a history of killing people in really
awful ways because it sends that message, um that you know,
(45:33):
not only can you die, but you're gonna die in
a really awful, awful way and everyone's gonna know. Um.
Dating back to Trotsky who went to Mexico City and
someone came up behind him, Ramon Mercader with a ice
axe and sunk it three inches into his brain. He said,
how do you like this projection? Oh my god, was
(46:01):
actually so bad. I think that was brilliant. Thank you.
I was hoping you come around that it was really good.
I got you mergator projection. That's lovely. Um. But yeah,
he killed him with an ice axe, but he lived
for a day. I thought I'd always heard the story
and I always thought that he just like planted him
in the brain and that was it. But Trotsky got
(46:21):
up and was like fighting him off, and people came
in and kicked this guy's butt and he survived in
the hospital for like a full day after this before
he died. Well, yeah, Livin Yanko, he survived long enough
that he helped solve his own murder. There's a really
great guardian art um on it called Alexander Livinnanko, the
man who solved his own murder, and h it's definitely
(46:42):
worth reading for sure. Yeah, I mean just a couple
of years ago. Uh, what was that guy's name, Screepall,
Sergey Screepall. He was he was the one with the
nerve poison. He wasn't killed. There was an attempt on
his life though, Yeah, but it was just just like
every time you think, man, this is cold war stuff,
it just pops up in the news again. You're like, man,
(47:04):
it's still happening. Yeah, And I mean we should say
both of those attacks were in London. Like this wasn't
in Russia or Moscow or anything like that. This was
in London. These guys lived in London in exile, and
they were still murdered in London through like radioactive material
and nerve gas that was smuggling in the country. And
that actually is as kind of goes to stand as
(47:26):
evidence that there still are these illegals, these um deep
cover sleeper agents that are working for what used to
be the KGB and is now the FSB. Yeah, and
that's why it's a really big deal, uh, that a
president of the United States would want to cozy up
to somebody like Putin, who uh is making great efforts
(47:46):
to put who he wants in office. Yeah, I mean
that's it's just pure and simple, like, that's unbelievable. Absolutely,
Chuck Well said, are you got anything else? I got
nothing else but rage. So if this floated your boat,
go check out spies, election meddling and disinformation passed in presents,
create article, check out Alexander let Vin Yanko, the spy
(48:09):
who solved his own murder, the man who'd solved his
own check out the Big Think. They had a good
one called the History of the KGB and its Legendary Methods.
So I think you'll like all three of those. And
since I said I think you'll like all three of those,
is time for listener mate. Uh, this is about the
heroine lozenges. Remember that when I wondered if they were
(48:30):
still around? So this is from Martin. Hey, guys, in
the Heroin episode, Chuck was wondering if there are only
still uh heroin lozenges lying around somewhere, and Jock Josh
quickly refuted, But Chuck, you have been vindicated. I work
in an unnamed museum and an unlamed unlamed location in Canada.
(48:51):
I'm not even gonna say where in Canada even though
he does. And we have four different packages for heroin
lossages from Bear. They're underwalking Key, of course. We received
them in a donation from a local pharmacy that closed
down in the thirties and they gave the museum a
wide array of drugs to add to the collection. Along
with the heroin, we also have a bottle of arsenic
(49:14):
and two packets of amphetamines. One package has two pills missing.
Oh man, I love the show you guys are keeping
me saying during quarantine, I steadily make my way through
your back catalog. That is from Martin Nice Martin, Um,
that was much appreciated. Thanks for shining some light on
that one. Uh And if you want to shine some
light forest, we love that kind of thing. You can
(49:36):
send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
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