May 1, 2025 • 49 mins
MI6 is The UK's version of the CIA. Except they came first and provided the model. But there's still a lot we don't know about this notoriously tight-lipped organization.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and there's Jerry, and this is stuff you should Know.
And I had to say we didn't have the most
auspicious start. Just now, Chuck, I stepped on you at
the countdown for us to sink that's not a good sign.
Don't you think that's not a good sign.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I think if you look at it another way, we
were in sync because we were both kind of trying
to say the same thing.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Wow, that was a silver lining.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
How's that?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
There's not been any better in sync since lant Spass
and justin Timberlake. We're running around together.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
We should preface this, by the way, we're doing an
episode today on six, the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Is that how you pronounce it?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Six? What do you say?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Mix? That's what I've been saying in my head at least.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Oh no, yeah, that is an inauspicious beginning then, for sure.
But you know, this is a little at risk being
a little disjointed, because if you kind of went down
every rabbit hole that we speak about here, we'd be
here for days.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Oh yeah, one of the things that lets us off
the hook though, that I found and I'm sure Kyle
who helped us with this. We had our man in
Britain to make him an agent in US officers, right,
because he was given US intel on six. If you
go and just start researching it, especially if you just
type in six, they've done a pretty good job of
(01:43):
keeping search results pretty sanitized. Yeah, Like I would say,
out of the top twenty results, two are not official
six pages, So it's kind of hard to research them,
especially considering they've only been publicly recoged nineties. Is actually
existing since the mid.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Nineties, Yeah, nineteen nineties. That is, they were the there
are the oldest operating continuously, that is, operating foreign intelligence
gathering organization anywhere in the world. And like I said,
they they're you know, if you're American, you can think
of I six as sort of their CIA. And in fact,
our own CIA was born out of not out of
(02:27):
I six, but they had a lot to do with
how we did things.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, we use them as a kind of a model.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Yeah, there you go. That's a very clean way to
say that.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
So there's two things that I six does and that
really does kind of get it across. They're like the
Britain's equivalent of the CIA, or better yet, the CIA
is America's equivalent of I six. So they gather intelligence,
and they gather internationally abroad. There's also MI I five,
which you could say is roughly equivalent in the US
to the FBI. They do domestic stuff, but I six
(02:59):
is concerned about everything else in the world. And by
gathering intelligence, they usually use two methods or they gather Yeah,
two methods. Once human intelligence, which is good old fashioned
spying using people who are secretly spying on their own
governments or whatever. And then the other signal intelligence, which
is intercepting communications. And I saw that another intelligence firm,
(03:24):
I guess in the UK, the Government Communications Headquarters GHQ.
They seem to do most of the signals intelligence, while
six still does most of the human intelligence. Yeah, but
I think like if they capture an email or something,
they don't just delete it because they don't do signals intelligence.
They're still going to use it.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Not my office delete right now, my job. We call
them six. The official name, like I said at the beginning,
is the Secret Intelligence Service or the SIS. That's what
they became in nineteen twenty, but we call it because
that was the call sign that they adopted in World
War Two, And you know, let's be honest people here
(04:08):
I six and they identify it with intelligence a lot
because of Ian Fleming and James Bond and lacarr and
Smiley a couple of you know, in James Bond's case,
maybe thinly veiled literary figures. I'm not sure about Smiley.
I don't know much about lacar Is Smiley based on
someone that you know of.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I don't know. My dad was big time into John leccaray,
but I never have been.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Is it Lacara? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
I've heard it. I think it's probably both ways. I mean,
unless you're his mom. I'm sure there's just one way
to say. If you're his mom, but you know he's dead,
he doesn't care.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
How about Lee Carrey? No perfect But I, like you
said earlier, you know, it's kind of challenging to gather
intelligence on I six as a podcaster because for the
longest time, they would just story any documents they had that,
you know, weren't still useful to them. They weren't like, hey,
(05:04):
let's keep this on file, because one day somebody might
ask for this and maybe want to see it. They'll
be like, no, we don't need that anymore, and we're
a secret organization, so let's just throw it in the
old burner. And in the nineteen sixties they started officially
keeping historical records, and then eventually in the two thousands,
for their one hundredth anniversary, they hired a guy named
(05:27):
Keith Jeffrey to write its history up to nineteen forty nine.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, and apparently even still today, that's where their official
history ends, nineteen forty nine. Anything after that, don't ask
Jack or else. They'll take you somewhere and render you. Yeah,
politely they will. So we should probably say that I
six started and I think when we did our Kim
Philby episode, yeah, I said that six stood for the
(05:54):
Ministry of Intelligence, but it actually is military intelligence, which
is I think, like you said, what it grew out
of originally. But the whole thing started there was a scare,
a German spy scare in Great Britain in the turn
of the last century. Germany was this imperial power that
was rising, so there was reason to be scared of them.
(06:16):
But really the whole reason came down to this guy
named William Lechwe. He was a totally made up adventurer
soldier of fortune who was just as patriotic as you
could get. He made up this huge backstory for himself
to give himself legitimacy, but really he was just weaving
(06:38):
these yarns saying essentially that Britain is sleeping right now
and it's loaded with German spies and if we don't
wake up, we're gonna get taken over by Germany. And
it just hit this perfect nerve in the British public,
so much so that it directly led to the formation
of what would become six and five.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, all in Unison they heard this and went, well,
we can't have that, so they got going the Secret
Service bureaus who originally housed both including I five, and
they were pretty important, you know, aka the Bureau known
as the Bureau because they had complete autonomy and they
(07:17):
also had plausible deniability, so they would sort of act
as a go between. If there was a government official
doing some you know, spy business, the Bureau could step
in and kind of provide cover as a screen for them.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah. Apparently, even though they are now publicly acknowledged by
the government as existing that hasn't changed very much still today,
Like they do not. You can't, as a government official
go to MI six and be like, I demand these
records of your torture program in the Iraq war, right,
They'll just say, we don't know what you're talking about. Yeah,
(07:54):
we're not even having this conversation. And that's what. They
don't have the kind of political and legal hamstringing that
the CIA has. It's much less of a bureaucracy, and
so they can do things that say, like the CIA
legally couldn't do it. They have a lot of legal
cover in Great Britain.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Yeah, I wonder what their version of FOYA is, like
a Freedom of Information Act request or even if they
even have that, or if they're just like, sorry, don't ask.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, they just call it fo right.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Oh boy, I wish that was a man. If we
had written that out as a comedy duo, it couldn't
have been more perfect.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Thanks. I think we did really good too.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah, So let's talk a little bit about their first chief,
Sir Mansfield. Coming. It was pretty much a one person
show at the beginning of the operation, and Coming was
that guy staffed fully, you know, with gentlemen, as they
called him. If you were a woman at the time,
you might get work as a typist or secretary. But
although that would change in not too long.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
After, maybe like fifty years.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Yeah exactly, I guess so. But he was sort of
a the kind of guy you would make a movie about.
He was a race car driver, he was a pilot,
He could drive a boat with a plum. He loved spycraft.
He got into it. He signed off his C for
his last name. He apparently he wrote in Green Inc.
Which his successors have continued doing today, writing in that
(09:23):
Green Inc.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And they're all called C too. It's the title for
the chief of I six.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah exactly. And they it was like like M and Q,
like all those things from James Bond, Like most of
those things are real. They use numbers and letters and
it's not just made up for fictional purposes. No.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
In Q, that was the scientist who would come up
with all these amazing devices and gadgets and everything. And
as we'll see, I six has gotten way more talkative publicly.
They're trying to like kind of recruit more and more people,
so they're giving, you know, interviews, even though their names
are anonymous and one of them said, like, we have
those gadgets, but they're even better than what James Bond has.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
No, It's like really, yeah, So this guy coming, he
had an incident in nineteen fourteen where he earned this
probably sounds like lore to me, but he had a
car crash in France in nineteen fourteen, very sadly, his
son was killed, and this is how he lost his
left foot. And the reason the lore was so important
was because the legend was the only way he escaped
(10:30):
was by amputating that foot himself. Sort of like who
was the guy in real life that they made the
Danny Boil It was stuck in the rock.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
I don't remember his name, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, but supposedly he you know, as the story goes,
he cut off his own foot with a pen knife
just to escape.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
I think just the fact that people that became a
legend around him says a lot about who he is.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Oh totally.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
If I were in a car wreck and I lost
my foot, no one made a legend that said I
cut my own foot off with a pen knife to escape,
Like it just he just wouldn't make that up, and
I would believe it. This guy at least it was believable.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, legend had has it. Josh wailed and cried for
hours until the ambulance finally arrived and they said, you know,
you could probably just have backed out of this thing
on your own, right.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
They're like, it's really just gonna bruise, is all right.
So there's one other thing. There's there's a lot to
talk about. Like you said, the guy could definitely deserve
his own movie if it hasn't been made multiple times already.
But one of the other legendary things associated with him
is like he was really into spycraft, Like he came
up with disguises. He would like disguise himself and go
(11:37):
walk around London and see if any of his people
would recognize him. And he was I don't want to
say obsessed, but he was really into the idea of
invisible ink, and he searched high and low to find
a good invisible ink that couldn't be detected through standard methods.
I don't know who came up with this idea, but
somehow it came around that seaman can be used very
(12:01):
effectively as an invisible ink. And I saw that somebody
put it. The supply is renewable.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah, so he must have just searched high and not low, right, yeah, renewable.
There's some I mean, it gets a little grosser. Shall
we even cover this in more detail?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Okay. Apparently he had a colleague that reported about the
man in. One of our men in Copenhagen stocked it
in a bottle for his letters, and it stanks so
bad that they had to tell him that a fresh
operation was necessary for each letter. Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yeah, we had to say that, and.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
He said, no problem.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, exactly, Wow, thank you exactly. So you want to
take a break, or you want to dive into World
War one era.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Let's take a break. That's a good little table setting.
So we'll come back and talk about talk about World
War one right after this.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
So, by the time World War one rolled around, what
was it, nineteen eleven? I think I'm sure I'm wrong,
and we're going to get a bunch of emails. But
let's just say for sake of argument, it was nineteen eleven.
This is just a couple of years after the Bureau
was formed and Circumbing was, you know, running around doing
his thing. But by this time, he yeah, writing letters
(13:46):
of invisible ink all over the place. By this time, though,
he cultivated some sources already in Germany. He had one
guy named B. He was seeing this first source, B,
who would report on you know, comings and goings on
the coast and the harbor and their ship sizes and
(14:07):
how many ships are in their fleet. And although they
totally dropped the ball on Germany invading neutral Belgium, which
was a big deal, Yeah, they still managed to give
them a lot of like really important intel that basically
proved the idea that Britain could really use MI six
or something like it.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean it seemed to be. The way I
read this was like these are just sort of the
baby steps. They didn't have like kind of the authority
they would have later on, and they were kind of
sessing out how valuable they might be. So they were
just sort of getting established. After World War One was
when they were fully established as the SIS, but they were,
(14:48):
you know, they were monitoring Russia, trying to keep them
in the war. They were like, what are the Americans
thinking right now, what's going on in the Oval Office,
because we'd like to bring them into the war, and
they were doing Yemen's work, you know, providing you know,
the kind of stuff you would see in like the
Great Escape, even though that was World War Two, Like
if you're a pow, you might get a map and
(15:10):
a compass smuggled into you, stuff like that, trying to
foil bombing plots and things like that. So they were like,
you know, what do you think of us? Now? How
are you doing? And apparently good enough to be official
after the war.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah. So by the time the Inner War period comes along,
the twenties thirties, they well, there are some more legendary people.
This is a time where it was just like the
Wild West in Great Britain as far as spycrafts and
intelligence goes. And there's this one guy who's definitely worth mentioning.
He was an early agent. And we should say most
(15:45):
people call anybody who would be working for six an
agent with the CIA. You'd be correct. With I six,
you'd be wrong. An agent, as far as I six
is concerned, is one of those sources who has turned
turncoat on their country, is supplying six with secrets.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Right, that's a double agent, yeah, or just.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
A plane old agent. A double agent would be somebody
who was actually spying for their country but posing as
a spy for MI six. This is just a plain
old agent. Officers are the people who are employees of
MI six that run and handle agents in the field.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Right, So that would make Cyril Bertram Mills an agent.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Correct, Yes, that's what I was getting to.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
All right, So before World War Two, this guy was
a circus director and he ended up working for six
for about four decades, known only to his family, you know,
for doing this work because as a circus director, he
could get in a little buy wing plane and he
could fly all over the place under cover of doing
(16:52):
circus business. I don't think he was like standing on
the plane and eating a banana, like on the wings
of the planary, like doing tricks. He had to get
around as a circus guy, and this was pretty good cover.
And he had some pretty dangerous missions with these flights
as well. Right.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, there's a couple where he was giving like six
like really valuable intelligence from flying over like aircraft factories
in Germany. Apparently there was one particular piece of information
or I guess a bunch of information that really formed
a good picture of the size of Germany's Luftwaffa, their
(17:31):
air force, and Winston Churchill apparently used that to decide
whether he was on the side of appeasing Hitler or
fighting Hitler. And I guess because of the build up
of this air force, he was like, we can't let
this guy keep continuing. So he was against appeasement, thanks
largely to Bertram Mills intel that he was directly giving him.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, and this was you know, this is dangerous work.
He wasn't just flying around. I think in nineteen thirty six,
which was the year he started the Naze courts executed
by decapitation, usually with an axe, six spies that were caught.
So he had a lot on the line as a
circus director, but he was doing it for I guess
love of country.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, and a circus director is understating it. He was
known as King of the Modern Circus, like he was
a really big deal outside of his spying activities. It
would have astounded anybody who had ever heard of him
that he was a spy.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah. I think circus director fit better on a card
than King of the Modern Circus, right, probably. And he
was an understated guy, you know, he didn't he wasn't
playing boyant.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
No there you ca Yeah. It would have been one
of those things where it starts out normal, but as
it gets closer to the edge of the card, they
start cramping letters together.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Like a poster made for elementary school.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Right for the science fair, exactly what happens with vinegar
and baking soda.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, I still do that sometimes when I have to.
I don't. I'm not great at spacing like that. It
has to do with your brain, I think specialwareness and stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah, I'm not that good at it either. Don't worry.
All right, good, So for a long time, not a
lot happened, and then World War two broke out, and
World War two. By this time, remember m I six
had proved its metal and worth in World War One.
You had a whole decade or two where it just
kept proving it's worth, and so by the time the
(19:21):
war broke out, you would think that they would be
totally ready for this. But I don't know if it
caught them off guard or they were just allowed to
kind of be pruned in peacetime. I don't know. But
it took them a minute to get their footing and
regenerate intelligent like human intelligence networks in Europe. But they
(19:44):
apparently got their footing fairly quickly and were very successful
and basically generating a lot of intelligence coming out of
different countries, including occupied countries in Europe during World War Two.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yeah, it seems like that was the slower part. Where
we know they did a lot better was at Bletchley
Park with their signals intelligence. You know, we talked about
the code breaking and Alan Turing and the what was
it a Enigma machine? Yes, that's right, some great episodes
from our distant past. But they were kind of crushing
(20:18):
it over there. They did, finally during this period, start
to have some women working there that were not just secretaries.
There was one overseen by a woman named Kathleen pettigrew
communications at least between home and field agents. She was
very proud of her work and said I was basically
Miss Moneypenny, but with more power. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
She was the chief at the time secretary and he
imbued her with enough power to run a program. So
a lot of people say she was probably the inspiration
for Ian Fleming's Miss Moneypenny, who James Bond used to
like to flirt with.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
I think a lot of people from this age were like,
basically or I'm Cue or I'm Miss money Penny.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Right. My dad used to go around telling people he
was Q.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Are you serious?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
No, that would have been so impairsed.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Well, see, that was a tough one. I'm giving myself
a break there because I believe in almost anything you
tell me about your dad.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Yeah, it's true, the herbal Elvis.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah. And speaking of Q, it turns out that so
they were. They did kind of develop devices, like you said,
figuring out ways to hide compasses and maps to get
to POW's in World War One. But the idea of
their research and development and technology branch that produced someone
like Q that we all who know that James Bond
movies are familiar with, that actually came from them absorbing
(21:40):
a rival agency that was developed in World War Two
that m I six did not like one bit at first,
the Special Operations Executive or the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Yeah, it seemed like and it may just be like
teenage boying this thing, but it seemed like they got
under I six's skin because they got to do more
fun stuff. Yeah, for sure, like kind of more dangerous
ops went to them, and six were like, you know,
we've been around a while, and these are I think
they thought in them the way Kyle put it as
(22:15):
dangerous amateurs, but then they started saying, but you got
to take us along at least.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Well, yeah, I mean they definitely did have their fun
stuff curtailed because I six had a department called D
section and D stood for destruction, like they were supposedly
perfectly capable of doing sabotage. I don't know enough about
World War two British military history to understand why they
felt a Special Operations Executive was needed, or if somebody
(22:43):
just managed to have enough power that they developed their
own thing and it just became so we I don't know,
but eventually m I six prevailed, especially after World War Two,
and they absorbed the Special Operations as Executive, including a
lot of their really interesting useful stuff, like their research
and development group that produced people like Q.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah. I got the feeling, and maybe we'll get a
real you know, British history buff that can let us know.
But it sounded to me like a Churchill directive kind
of like I know, we've got our Section D and
m I six, but we need a really super secret
special sabage our team, and like let's create.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
One, right. He was waiting for that last part.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, that's kind of what it sounded like. But back
to Q, that was based again on a real person,
and I think we said, but Q stands for quartermaster,
and this guy was Charles Fraser Smith, and he was
the one that made like literal miniature cameras inside cigarette
lighters and steal shoelaces to choke someone out with. Yeah,
(23:50):
a cigarette holder telescope. Kyle said that these weren't as
we're a little more hum drum. But I think a
bullet shaped device to stick up your butt that holds
vital information maybe humdrum, but it's pretty useful.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
I'll bet it doesn't feel hum drum going in.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, it depends on what kind of bullet too.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
For sure. Yeah. So I mean that there's a lot
of what we understand about I six and like the
movies and all that, it does apparently bear some resemblance
because I don't know if we said or not. Ian
Fleming worked for six during the during World War Two,
so he had firsthand knowledge about all this stuff, which
is why there are real life people who these characters
(24:34):
were based on. So our understanding of what I six
does and has, that it's disposal on the way it
runs is not that far off. But one of the
big differences I saw was the idea of a lone,
loose canon running his own operations out there is totally incorrect.
(24:55):
It's just backwards. I've seen current employees say, like that
guy wouldn't even make it through the door, Like he
would get voted out so quickly that he wouldn't even
have a chance. You need somebody who's not a loose cannon, yeah,
you rather than solo missions. Apparently, it's all teamwork. Yeah,
And it's not one person coming up with one giant
(25:17):
piece of information, like there's a super villain who's created
a layer at the bottom of the sea that he's
been shooting their missiles from. That usually doesn't come up
in one big package. It takes thousands of people to
work together to piece little pieces of information, and they
go back and double check and triple check with other
sources whether those pieces of information are correct, and then
(25:39):
eventually you create a whole picture and you hope, hope
that it's true and accurate.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah, and you hope there's a secret layer right with
like trained sharks in a mote.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
That you can get a membership to.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, exactly. So speeding along up to the Cold War.
We are now out of place where like the USA,
the Cold War was dominated in m I six by
the Soviets and communism, the spread of communism agents, double agents,
secret agents, triple agents. They were doing the same work
(26:15):
we were. They partnered up with the CIA in nineteen
forty eight, again which was modeled on I six, and
they were trying to sort of at this point balance
intelligence with covert actions because it wasn't like an active war,
so they had to approach it differently. And they said
that at the time there were a couple of different
types of I guess what officers working there, Almost an
(26:41):
agent but Moscow men who are apparently very careful and
you know, gathering that intelligence. And then camel drivers, who
were people they would send in to like on the
ground in the field at a local place to ally
themselves with locals to maybe mountain insurrection or something like that.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Yeah, And I'm guessing the camel drivers came from the
Special Operations executive heritage, because that's exactly the kind of
guerrilla warfare the so we engaged in World War Two.
So I'm guessing that's how that survived into the Cold War.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, and of course, because it's the Cold War, a
lot of the intelligence that these Moscow men were gathering
was like, hey, we're not at war, but in case
something happens, we know that they've got these airfields, they've
got this many tanks, this many soldiers on the ground
that could move here in this amount of time. So
you know, it was sort of a readiness operation at
that point.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, and not just like Okay, they have a huge
stockpile of these weapons. The opposite could be just as
valuable too, like, actually, they don't have that many missiles,
so all this bluster about them blowing the UK into
the ocean is actually full of hot air, so we
don't need to be quite as scared about it.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah, good point.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, and that's I mean, that's really important too. But
like you said, also, I mean they got caught maybe
a little off guard with World War Two. I get
the impression that they didn't let that happen during the
Cold War. They were still keeping up with Soviets like capabilities.
I think what else made it easy too, was you
had one nation really to spy on the Soviet Union
(28:19):
as a whole. It was massive and it was made
up of what are now a bunch of independent nations.
But at the time you had one big enemy, rather
than today where you have like terrorism, nonstate bad actors. Like,
it's just much more dilute, whereas before it was like
those guys, those are our enemy, that's who we need
to spy on.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, train all ears towards Moscow basically.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
So they were also still recruiting intelligence officers, you know,
to use on their side. And this is did I
read this right? The KGB their acronym MICE stood for money, ideology, coercion,
and ego. Were they identifying people within their own that
might be, you know, susceptible to being turned.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
I'm sure you could apply it to that, But the
impression I had is that was just how they decided
if somebody was worth approaching to recruit as a spy
for them, Oh okay, pay it would apply, yeah, for sure.
So if you're recruiting people, that's one way to do it.
You can flatter them, make them just be like, this
person clearly wants to feel like they're important or helping
(29:25):
their country or something like that. You can have stuff
that to blackmail them with. Apparently am I six is
more than willing to blackmail agents into working for them.
Bribery is another one too. It's how a lot of
very famous and prolific spies have been brought on to
being a spy is just getting paid. Although in the
(29:46):
end when you when they're being executed, you like, you
did all this for three hundred thousand dollars, really, yeah,
you know, it just never quite adds up, and it's
like and also it's like three hundred thousand dollars over
like twelve years or something like that. It just I
never quite get it. So maybe there's like they're really
in it for the thrill. The money was just the
extra bonus. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah, they'd be like, why don't you just try to
scratch off tickets, right if you want to make forty
grand a year for the next fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Right. And then another gambit is called the dangle. It's
not dirty, it's just this way of getting somebody as
spy for you, oh okay, Or actually it's a way
of creating a double agent, like you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
So that's when you recruit somebody but for the purposes
of exposing them. Right.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
So a dangle is where you say, like you have
somebody in Moscow that you've turned into an agent for you.
You try to make them attractive to say the kgb
AH to recruit them as a spy. So now you
have a double agent working inside Okay?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
And is that? Who is that? How they got Oleg Pinkowski?
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I don't know. He came to them, No, he came
to them. He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union and
he's like, I think I'm going to start helping the UK.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Oh Okay, because he worked with both six and CIA,
and again this is during the Cold War, so he
was one of the key players and sort of or
I guess, getting and giving information on Soviet missiles in
Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah, which is pretty useful as a matter of fact. Yeah,
he was hugely helpful, just over like eighteen months and
then he was caught and executed. But I think at
that time he gave up five thousand photos of Soviet
documents to six.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, and you know you mentioned the CIA earlier having
sort of more legal hands being tied than they do
apparently in the Cold War, and who knows, maybe this
still happens today. But if there was a CIA officer
that couldn't get something done on the down low that
(31:56):
was maybe untoured or violent or illegal. They could call
m I six and say, hey, we can't get this done,
could you?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
And they say yes, yes, Wait can you say I
can't do a very good British accent?
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Yes? That was Murray from New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Again almost always is. So I say we take a
break and we come back and talk about one of
the most thrilling moments in I six history.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Are you talking about Oleg Gordievski.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Yes, that's exactly who I'm talking about, a KGB colonel.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
That's right. Apparently this guy. And this is how you can,
you know, get someone on your side from the or
at least at the time from that side, is if
they really like Western.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Culture, yeah, the Cowabunga lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, they're like, I really like, I don't know, American
sports and music and fashion. Then that could be enough.
And apparently he was on assignment in Copenhagen and they
were like, this guy loves Western culture and he might
be worth you know, getting in touch with. And sure
enough it actually worked.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I don't know where they'd fall in the mice acronym money, ideology, coercion, ego.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Taty ideology and ego.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
I don't know, I'm not sure, but yes, he definitely turned,
but he was caught, he was found out, so he
was he became the station chief for working out of
the embassy as a KGB agent in London, so he
was able to actually kind of easily pass secrets to
the Brits because he was there already. He was found
(33:59):
out by Aldrich Ames, who was a famous American trader
who spied for the Soviets in I think the eighties
or maybe even into the nineties, and he told them
about Gordievsky spying for the Brits. Gordievsky was not immediately jailed,
which is weird. He was definitely taken back to Moscow
(34:22):
and held like basically under surveillance. But he was going
to be jailed. He was going to be executed. So
he started what had been planned seven years before and
named Operation Pimlico. And by standing in a Moscow bakery
or outside of a Moscow bakery holding a plastic Safeway bag,
(34:45):
he was signaling MI, I six, like, get me out
of here right now.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Yeah, and he said, how am I going to know?
If you've gotten the message. And they says, well, how
about this, a man's going to walk by you carrying
a Herod's bag And then he said that could be anybody, right,
And he said, all right, how about this carrying a
Herod's bag and eating a Mars candy bar, right, And
he said, I guess that narrows it down enough.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, which is really showing off because I think you
could trade a Mars bar for a car in Moscow
in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, well, yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Actually, at least that's what they told us in school.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Yeah, exactly. They don't have toilet paper either. So he
evaded surveillance was making a run for the Finished border
and am I six scrabbed him and put him in
a car trunk. But they have like, you know, sniffing
dogs inspecting cars and things, so they had the brilliant
idea to change a poopy diaper on the trunk of
(35:39):
the car that he was stuffed inside. And apparently it worked.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, those dogs were like, oh god and just went
back to their post.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
No, thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, isn't that amazing? So then they got him across
the Finish border. Finland is neutral and he was safe.
But I mean, like that is real deal spy stuff,
you know. Oh yeah, for sure, holding a Safeway bag.
That's awesome. The mars Bar I love every part of that.
So he actually he was actually tried in absentia and
(36:09):
sentenced to death by the Soviet Union, but he had
defected to the UK and they protected him and he
died an old man, I think age eighty six last
March at his home in Great Britain.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Incredible they never got a hold of him.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
No. But one thing that we really should say, and
I was kind of touching on it earlier, one of
the really valuable things he provided was he could understand
the state of mind of the Soviet government and Soviet military,
and he fed this information of the UK to six,
who turned around and said, Margaret thatcher Ronald Reagan, you
(36:45):
guys need to tone down this evil empire rhetoric, right
because you are scaring the Soviets so bad. They're plotting
a first strike because they think you're going to strike
out of nowhere, So you actually might trigger a first
strike from the Soviets if you keep talking like this.
And as a result, they really dialed it back quite
a bit.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, they said, he said, have you seen more games? Yeah,
He's like that could happen.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
In that sense, he kind of saved the world.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
I think that's great.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, I think saving the world is totally great.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
I'm all for it.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
If we're talking about modern times, and you mentioned the
nineties is when things sort of went official, and that
was nineteen ninety four. They officially went public due to
the nineteen ninety four Intelligence Services Act, And basically this
had happened to five in nineteen eighty nine, and it's
kind of seemed like they had to kind of bring
(37:42):
in some bureaucracy for legal reasons. Among others, they the
staff of I five and I guess later I six
wanted better legal basis for things like tapping phones. They
had to be a little little more on the up
and up. I think that it was the European Court
of Human Rights said that if you're an intelligence service,
(38:03):
you have to have legal footing and a complaints system,
so like you have to become official for all this
stuff to be official.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Right, there's so that law that essentially acknowledged that there
was such a thing as six back in nineteen ninety four.
It had a section called Section seven, and it basically
said if one of our agents is off running around
committing crimes in another country that they could be tried
(38:31):
for back in the UK, they cannot be held liable
for that. They'll never be tried for this. Yeah, And
some people have taken that as admission that there's such
a thing as a license to kill, and that makes sense.
I mean the apparently there is a new law that's
being talked about right now and is making its way
through the Supreme Court there that basically says yes, and
(38:52):
pretty much murder too, We're not going to try them
for murder. And it actually extends to agents too, So
if somebody murders somebody for mi I six and then
they defect to the UK, the UK is never going
to try them for that murder. So it's a lot
so people are like, that's a license to kill. And
I saw an agent say on I think a PBS
(39:13):
or BBC documentary a license to kill doesn't make any sense,
Like if you're in another country and you kill somebody there,
like when the cops come, you're not going to show
them your license to kill and they'll let you go,
Like this is not You're breaking that country's law. You've
murdered someone in that country, your toast if you get caught. Yeah,
So there is no license to kill, but symbolic these
(39:34):
laws essentially kind of potentially give something like a license
to kill.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, but you just don't whip out your double O card.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
No.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
No. The other things that happened in nineteen ninety four
as far as the organization goes is they were the
chief was all I was about to say, exposed technically,
that's right, but they voluntarily said, all right, we have
to be official. Now here's who our chief is. They
moved offices to some fancy headquarters on the Thames, designed
(40:06):
by Terry Ferrell. It's a very secure, sort of secretive building.
And you know it's while they did go public. You know,
technically it's still m I six and they still have
a culture of secrecy because of what they do. It's
not like, you know, they just sort of made some
things a little more public to make things official. I
(40:27):
guess right.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
That building too, It is secure, but it was blown up,
not once but twice. Well, not blown up. The first
time it was attacked by the IRA They shot an
anti tank rocket launcher at the building. On September twentieth,
two thousand, and that building just like shook it off
immediately did like it did almost no damage to it whatsoever,
(40:51):
and really kind of showed just how crazy reinforced that
building is. But it suffered a much different fate in
James on Skyfall where it blew up.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Oh was that what that building?
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Skyfall was good. It was as a matter of fact,
quite liked it. I'm curious what's gonna happen next with
that franchise?
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Did Yeah, they haven't named any James Bond yet.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I don't think so. And they sold you know, the
Broccoli family, I think sold sold everything. Oh really to god,
it may have been Amazon even I don't know. Wow,
not sure, but we'll see.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Well, if it's not Idris Elba, I'm going to be
really surprised.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
Yeah, they've been talking about him for years. That would
be too good to be true. There, no one's smart
enough to do that in movie making. Yeah, I don't
have great faith. We should talk a little bit about
the more modern day stuff because you know, starting in
the early two thousands, leading up to the Iraq War
in two thousand and three, obviously they were going to
(41:49):
be working with hunting down terrorists and maybe weapons of
mass destruction, and that was one of their big black eyes.
Actually was bogus information that got through apparently, you know,
it wasn't vetted like it should have been, and that
was one of the reasons that the US and the
rest of the world got and believed bad information about
(42:11):
weapons of mass destruction. Interract.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, it's said that that is the lowest moment in
sixth history since Kim Philby was discovered as a trader
and longtime spy, which is really saying something if you've
heard our episode on Kim Philby. But I would say
that this was even much much worse because of how
many people died in the Iraq War. Yeah, And the
(42:34):
reason why it was such a big deal, this bad
intelligence is because the US and the UK essentially made
a pact like we're going to invade a rock together
to topple this regime. We just want to get rid
of Saddam Hussein. That's not legal. If Saddam had weapons
of mass destruction. Now it's legal under basically international law.
(42:55):
So they really went to a lot of trouble to
try to find anything that suggested that and then the
and they just relied on these sources that just were
totally untrustworthy. And I don't remember where we talked about it,
but one of the sources that the US and the
UK relied on to invader Rock with said they have
weapons of mass destruction. They keep them in these glass
(43:15):
canisters and in these like little glass balls, and the
glass balls are green, and Nicholas Cage protects them with
Sean Connery.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Yeah, I mean learned people just really genuinely suspect that
that could have been misinformation based on the Rock.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yeah, and that the handful of British ministers and politicians
who saw this intel had not seen the Rock apparently,
and it just didn't ring any bells. If they had seen.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
It, well, they had better taste in that.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
I guess it wasn't that good. But you know, it's
not just like a you know, shoot them up bang
kind of thing, action movie. I guess, yeah, it's all right. Yeah.
So today, I six they're realizing openly in interviews and stuff,
that they really need to start keeping up with technology
(44:08):
because of like facial recognition and surveillance states like that
China has and the UK. It's basically impossible to create
an agent somewhere like human intelligence is really hard to
do now, especially yes, and apparently they're starting to use
AI to run scenarios and situations to predict how somebody
(44:28):
will behave in different situations. That's a new one they're
starting to do too. So I don't know how ahead
of the curve they are, and it sounds to me
a little bit like they're behind the curve. But at
least they're realizing they need to they need to wake
up and smell the hard drives. Sorry thought you're gonna
say English breakfast team. Oh that's even better, So we
(44:50):
just edit that in.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
But you say it Beijing, mister Hermann. So the you know,
the other obvious thing. As far as modern day recruit goes,
it's not like the old days where they would just
sort of source someone out and very you know, quietly,
have someone walk by and drop a note on their
dinner table that says, are you interested in a job?
(45:12):
You know, come by this office tomorrow alone, that kind
of thing. It's a modern organization now with you know,
job listings and things like that. Again, still very secretive
in a lot of ways, I'm sure in what they
do but they you know, starting in nineteen ninety four
is when they really were brought into the sort of
modern era. It's a little less James Bondy and just
(45:33):
a little more you know, fill out this application and
we'll do our background checks.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Right. It is still risky, though, is I can't remember
what year it was. In the twenty tens, I believe
there was a codebreaker for I six named Gareth Williams
who was found dead in his bathroom inside a tote
bag that was locked from the outside.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Yeah, that's hard to do on your own, but that
wouldn't that The excuse is like he did this himself.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Either that or that it it was like a sex
game gone wrong and the partner took off, freaked out
and took off. I think that's the official explanation. But
there was a former KGB agent who came forward in
twenty fifteen and said, no, that guy would they The
Russians tried to recruit him, and he said no, and
so they killed him.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
I wonder if it was a sex game gone wrong
and they just were extracting invisibly.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Oh my god. I think that's a pretty good way
to wrap up this episode. If not have wrapped it
up thirty seconds before you said that agreed. Well, since
we both agreed that this episode is wrapped up, then
that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah, this is a I got a couple of two
parteris on these next ones about disaster films, because boy,
we heard from a lot of people that really enjoyed
that one, and these two are from Maria and Kirk. Hey, guys,
love the disaster movie. But I'm surprised you to mention
the movie Testament. I have not heard of this, Maria,
but I'm gonna check it out. It's from nineteen eighty
three by Lynn Littmann, starring Jane Alexander, one of the
(47:02):
few with a female lead closest thing to a hero
in this post apocalyptic movie, and one of the few
directed by a woman. You were focusing more escapist action
disaster type things, but you did mention a few that
were a little author raider, so I thought I would
mention this one. And another one that you could have
mentioned that was a little off the radar was Melancholia,
(47:22):
a pre apocalyptic film. So have we not mentioned that,
I swear to god we did. I don't think we did.
In that episode, but we did talk about it recently,
because we've talked about it a few times for some reason.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
I think that qualifies.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
And then also from Kirk Hey from Beautiful Astoria, Oregon,
a longtime listener, and I love disaster films and you
guys did a great job. I'm surprised though, that you
didn't mention Jurassic Park because I believe that fits all
the criteria and pre dates Twister by three years, and
it also fits at your conversation on the early use
of CGI with some of the greatest special effects of
(47:57):
the time. I have a feeling it won't be the
only person mentioning this. Love the podcast, guys, And that
is from Kirk Klinger. Now, we had a few people
right in about Jurassic Park. But I don't know about
disaster movie. To me, that's maybe a subgenre of monster movie.
I don't know, what do you think.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
It did have a Hoffman in the form of Wayne Knight,
who played Newman. True he was even wearing a Hawaiian
shirt like he couldn't get more obviously Hoffman.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
So I don't I don't think it is a disaster
movie though, But that's just my opinion.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
Yeah, and we're not the I mean, what do we know.
If you think it's a disaster movie, then go with it.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
I did say some people agreed with me though, that
Godzilla minus one is definitely a disaster, so I was right.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
Well, the scale of destruction in Jurassic Park one was
limited to e is La, Newbar, so I don't know
though other things were localized too, So maybe I'm just
wrong about everything in life.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Yeah, like that that tunnel collapse was alone.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
That was Yeah, that's true. That's true.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Uh yeah, well, Kirk, thank you for starting this conversation.
It's a great one. Like I said, we love that
kind of thing. Send us an email. Send it off
to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and there's Jerry, and this is stuff you should Know.
And I had to say we didn't have the most
auspicious start. Just now, Chuck, I stepped on you at
the countdown for us to sink that's not a good sign.
Don't you think that's not a good sign.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I think if you look at it another way, we
were in sync because we were both kind of trying
to say the same thing.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Wow, that was a silver lining.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
How's that?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
There's not been any better in sync since lant Spass
and justin Timberlake. We're running around together.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
We should preface this, by the way, we're doing an
episode today on six, the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Is that how you pronounce it?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Six? What do you say?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Mix? That's what I've been saying in my head at least.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Oh no, yeah, that is an inauspicious beginning then, for sure.
But you know, this is a little at risk being
a little disjointed, because if you kind of went down
every rabbit hole that we speak about here, we'd be
here for days.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Oh yeah, one of the things that lets us off
the hook though, that I found and I'm sure Kyle
who helped us with this. We had our man in
Britain to make him an agent in US officers, right,
because he was given US intel on six. If you
go and just start researching it, especially if you just
type in six, they've done a pretty good job of
(01:43):
keeping search results pretty sanitized. Yeah, Like I would say,
out of the top twenty results, two are not official
six pages, So it's kind of hard to research them,
especially considering they've only been publicly recoged nineties. Is actually
existing since the mid.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Nineties, Yeah, nineteen nineties. That is, they were the there
are the oldest operating continuously, that is, operating foreign intelligence
gathering organization anywhere in the world. And like I said,
they they're you know, if you're American, you can think
of I six as sort of their CIA. And in fact,
our own CIA was born out of not out of
(02:27):
I six, but they had a lot to do with
how we did things.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, we use them as a kind of a model.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Yeah, there you go. That's a very clean way to
say that.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
So there's two things that I six does and that
really does kind of get it across. They're like the
Britain's equivalent of the CIA, or better yet, the CIA
is America's equivalent of I six. So they gather intelligence,
and they gather internationally abroad. There's also MI I five,
which you could say is roughly equivalent in the US
to the FBI. They do domestic stuff, but I six
(02:59):
is concerned about everything else in the world. And by
gathering intelligence, they usually use two methods or they gather Yeah,
two methods. Once human intelligence, which is good old fashioned
spying using people who are secretly spying on their own
governments or whatever. And then the other signal intelligence, which
is intercepting communications. And I saw that another intelligence firm,
(03:24):
I guess in the UK, the Government Communications Headquarters GHQ.
They seem to do most of the signals intelligence, while
six still does most of the human intelligence. Yeah, but
I think like if they capture an email or something,
they don't just delete it because they don't do signals intelligence.
They're still going to use it.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Not my office delete right now, my job. We call
them six. The official name, like I said at the beginning,
is the Secret Intelligence Service or the SIS. That's what
they became in nineteen twenty, but we call it because
that was the call sign that they adopted in World
War Two, And you know, let's be honest people here
(04:08):
I six and they identify it with intelligence a lot
because of Ian Fleming and James Bond and lacarr and
Smiley a couple of you know, in James Bond's case,
maybe thinly veiled literary figures. I'm not sure about Smiley.
I don't know much about lacar Is Smiley based on
someone that you know of.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
I don't know. My dad was big time into John leccaray,
but I never have been.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Is it Lacara? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
I've heard it. I think it's probably both ways. I mean,
unless you're his mom. I'm sure there's just one way
to say. If you're his mom, but you know he's dead,
he doesn't care.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
How about Lee Carrey? No perfect But I, like you
said earlier, you know, it's kind of challenging to gather
intelligence on I six as a podcaster because for the
longest time, they would just story any documents they had that,
you know, weren't still useful to them. They weren't like, hey,
(05:04):
let's keep this on file, because one day somebody might
ask for this and maybe want to see it. They'll
be like, no, we don't need that anymore, and we're
a secret organization, so let's just throw it in the
old burner. And in the nineteen sixties they started officially
keeping historical records, and then eventually in the two thousands,
for their one hundredth anniversary, they hired a guy named
(05:27):
Keith Jeffrey to write its history up to nineteen forty nine.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, and apparently even still today, that's where their official
history ends, nineteen forty nine. Anything after that, don't ask
Jack or else. They'll take you somewhere and render you. Yeah,
politely they will. So we should probably say that I
six started and I think when we did our Kim
Philby episode, yeah, I said that six stood for the
(05:54):
Ministry of Intelligence, but it actually is military intelligence, which
is I think, like you said, what it grew out
of originally. But the whole thing started there was a scare,
a German spy scare in Great Britain in the turn
of the last century. Germany was this imperial power that
was rising, so there was reason to be scared of them.
(06:16):
But really the whole reason came down to this guy
named William Lechwe. He was a totally made up adventurer
soldier of fortune who was just as patriotic as you
could get. He made up this huge backstory for himself
to give himself legitimacy, but really he was just weaving
(06:38):
these yarns saying essentially that Britain is sleeping right now
and it's loaded with German spies and if we don't
wake up, we're gonna get taken over by Germany. And
it just hit this perfect nerve in the British public,
so much so that it directly led to the formation
of what would become six and five.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, all in Unison they heard this and went, well,
we can't have that, so they got going the Secret
Service bureaus who originally housed both including I five, and
they were pretty important, you know, aka the Bureau known
as the Bureau because they had complete autonomy and they
(07:17):
also had plausible deniability, so they would sort of act
as a go between. If there was a government official
doing some you know, spy business, the Bureau could step
in and kind of provide cover as a screen for them.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Yeah. Apparently, even though they are now publicly acknowledged by
the government as existing that hasn't changed very much still today,
Like they do not. You can't, as a government official
go to MI six and be like, I demand these
records of your torture program in the Iraq war, right,
They'll just say, we don't know what you're talking about. Yeah,
(07:54):
we're not even having this conversation. And that's what. They
don't have the kind of political and legal hamstringing that
the CIA has. It's much less of a bureaucracy, and
so they can do things that say, like the CIA
legally couldn't do it. They have a lot of legal
cover in Great Britain.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Yeah, I wonder what their version of FOYA is, like
a Freedom of Information Act request or even if they
even have that, or if they're just like, sorry, don't ask.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, they just call it fo right.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Oh boy, I wish that was a man. If we
had written that out as a comedy duo, it couldn't
have been more perfect.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Thanks. I think we did really good too.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Yeah, So let's talk a little bit about their first chief,
Sir Mansfield. Coming. It was pretty much a one person
show at the beginning of the operation, and Coming was
that guy staffed fully, you know, with gentlemen, as they
called him. If you were a woman at the time,
you might get work as a typist or secretary. But
although that would change in not too long.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
After, maybe like fifty years.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Yeah exactly, I guess so. But he was sort of
a the kind of guy you would make a movie about.
He was a race car driver, he was a pilot,
He could drive a boat with a plum. He loved spycraft.
He got into it. He signed off his C for
his last name. He apparently he wrote in Green Inc.
Which his successors have continued doing today, writing in that
(09:23):
Green Inc.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
And they're all called C too. It's the title for
the chief of I six.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah exactly. And they it was like like M and Q,
like all those things from James Bond, Like most of
those things are real. They use numbers and letters and
it's not just made up for fictional purposes. No.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
In Q, that was the scientist who would come up
with all these amazing devices and gadgets and everything. And
as we'll see, I six has gotten way more talkative publicly.
They're trying to like kind of recruit more and more people,
so they're giving, you know, interviews, even though their names
are anonymous and one of them said, like, we have
those gadgets, but they're even better than what James Bond has.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
No, It's like really, yeah, So this guy coming, he
had an incident in nineteen fourteen where he earned this
probably sounds like lore to me, but he had a
car crash in France in nineteen fourteen, very sadly, his
son was killed, and this is how he lost his
left foot. And the reason the lore was so important
was because the legend was the only way he escaped
(10:30):
was by amputating that foot himself. Sort of like who
was the guy in real life that they made the
Danny Boil It was stuck in the rock.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
I don't remember his name, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, but supposedly he you know, as the story goes,
he cut off his own foot with a pen knife
just to escape.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
I think just the fact that people that became a
legend around him says a lot about who he is.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Oh totally.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
If I were in a car wreck and I lost
my foot, no one made a legend that said I
cut my own foot off with a pen knife to escape,
Like it just he just wouldn't make that up, and
I would believe it. This guy at least it was believable.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Yeah, legend had has it. Josh wailed and cried for
hours until the ambulance finally arrived and they said, you know,
you could probably just have backed out of this thing
on your own, right.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
They're like, it's really just gonna bruise, is all right.
So there's one other thing. There's there's a lot to
talk about. Like you said, the guy could definitely deserve
his own movie if it hasn't been made multiple times already.
But one of the other legendary things associated with him
is like he was really into spycraft, Like he came
up with disguises. He would like disguise himself and go
(11:37):
walk around London and see if any of his people
would recognize him. And he was I don't want to
say obsessed, but he was really into the idea of
invisible ink, and he searched high and low to find
a good invisible ink that couldn't be detected through standard methods.
I don't know who came up with this idea, but
somehow it came around that seaman can be used very
(12:01):
effectively as an invisible ink. And I saw that somebody
put it. The supply is renewable.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah, so he must have just searched high and not low, right, yeah, renewable.
There's some I mean, it gets a little grosser. Shall
we even cover this in more detail?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Okay. Apparently he had a colleague that reported about the
man in. One of our men in Copenhagen stocked it
in a bottle for his letters, and it stanks so
bad that they had to tell him that a fresh
operation was necessary for each letter. Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Yeah, we had to say that, and.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
He said, no problem.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, exactly, Wow, thank you exactly. So you want to
take a break, or you want to dive into World
War one era.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Let's take a break. That's a good little table setting.
So we'll come back and talk about talk about World
War one right after this.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
So, by the time World War one rolled around, what
was it, nineteen eleven? I think I'm sure I'm wrong,
and we're going to get a bunch of emails. But
let's just say for sake of argument, it was nineteen eleven.
This is just a couple of years after the Bureau
was formed and Circumbing was, you know, running around doing
his thing. But by this time, he yeah, writing letters
(13:46):
of invisible ink all over the place. By this time, though,
he cultivated some sources already in Germany. He had one
guy named B. He was seeing this first source, B,
who would report on you know, comings and goings on
the coast and the harbor and their ship sizes and
(14:07):
how many ships are in their fleet. And although they
totally dropped the ball on Germany invading neutral Belgium, which
was a big deal, Yeah, they still managed to give
them a lot of like really important intel that basically
proved the idea that Britain could really use MI six
or something like it.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean it seemed to be. The way I
read this was like these are just sort of the
baby steps. They didn't have like kind of the authority
they would have later on, and they were kind of
sessing out how valuable they might be. So they were
just sort of getting established. After World War One was
when they were fully established as the SIS, but they were,
(14:48):
you know, they were monitoring Russia, trying to keep them
in the war. They were like, what are the Americans
thinking right now, what's going on in the Oval Office,
because we'd like to bring them into the war, and
they were doing Yemen's work, you know, providing you know,
the kind of stuff you would see in like the
Great Escape, even though that was World War Two, Like
if you're a pow, you might get a map and
(15:10):
a compass smuggled into you, stuff like that, trying to
foil bombing plots and things like that. So they were like,
you know, what do you think of us? Now? How
are you doing? And apparently good enough to be official
after the war.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah. So by the time the Inner War period comes along,
the twenties thirties, they well, there are some more legendary people.
This is a time where it was just like the
Wild West in Great Britain as far as spycrafts and
intelligence goes. And there's this one guy who's definitely worth mentioning.
He was an early agent. And we should say most
(15:45):
people call anybody who would be working for six an
agent with the CIA. You'd be correct. With I six,
you'd be wrong. An agent, as far as I six
is concerned, is one of those sources who has turned
turncoat on their country, is supplying six with secrets.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
Right, that's a double agent, yeah, or just.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
A plane old agent. A double agent would be somebody
who was actually spying for their country but posing as
a spy for MI six. This is just a plain
old agent. Officers are the people who are employees of
MI six that run and handle agents in the field.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Right, So that would make Cyril Bertram Mills an agent.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Correct, Yes, that's what I was getting to.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
All right, So before World War Two, this guy was
a circus director and he ended up working for six
for about four decades, known only to his family, you know,
for doing this work because as a circus director, he
could get in a little buy wing plane and he
could fly all over the place under cover of doing
(16:52):
circus business. I don't think he was like standing on
the plane and eating a banana, like on the wings
of the planary, like doing tricks. He had to get
around as a circus guy, and this was pretty good cover.
And he had some pretty dangerous missions with these flights
as well. Right.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, there's a couple where he was giving like six
like really valuable intelligence from flying over like aircraft factories
in Germany. Apparently there was one particular piece of information
or I guess a bunch of information that really formed
a good picture of the size of Germany's Luftwaffa, their
(17:31):
air force, and Winston Churchill apparently used that to decide
whether he was on the side of appeasing Hitler or
fighting Hitler. And I guess because of the build up
of this air force, he was like, we can't let
this guy keep continuing. So he was against appeasement, thanks
largely to Bertram Mills intel that he was directly giving him.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, and this was you know, this is dangerous work.
He wasn't just flying around. I think in nineteen thirty six,
which was the year he started the Naze courts executed
by decapitation, usually with an axe, six spies that were caught.
So he had a lot on the line as a
circus director, but he was doing it for I guess
love of country.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, and a circus director is understating it. He was
known as King of the Modern Circus, like he was
a really big deal outside of his spying activities. It
would have astounded anybody who had ever heard of him
that he was a spy.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah. I think circus director fit better on a card
than King of the Modern Circus, right, probably. And he
was an understated guy, you know, he didn't he wasn't
playing boyant.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
No there you ca Yeah. It would have been one
of those things where it starts out normal, but as
it gets closer to the edge of the card, they
start cramping letters together.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Like a poster made for elementary school.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Right for the science fair, exactly what happens with vinegar
and baking soda.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, I still do that sometimes when I have to.
I don't. I'm not great at spacing like that. It
has to do with your brain, I think specialwareness and stuff.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Yeah, I'm not that good at it either. Don't worry.
All right, good, So for a long time, not a
lot happened, and then World War two broke out, and
World War two. By this time, remember m I six
had proved its metal and worth in World War One.
You had a whole decade or two where it just
kept proving it's worth, and so by the time the
(19:21):
war broke out, you would think that they would be
totally ready for this. But I don't know if it
caught them off guard or they were just allowed to
kind of be pruned in peacetime. I don't know. But
it took them a minute to get their footing and
regenerate intelligent like human intelligence networks in Europe. But they
(19:44):
apparently got their footing fairly quickly and were very successful
and basically generating a lot of intelligence coming out of
different countries, including occupied countries in Europe during World War Two.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yeah, it seems like that was the slower part. Where
we know they did a lot better was at Bletchley
Park with their signals intelligence. You know, we talked about
the code breaking and Alan Turing and the what was
it a Enigma machine? Yes, that's right, some great episodes
from our distant past. But they were kind of crushing
(20:18):
it over there. They did, finally during this period, start
to have some women working there that were not just secretaries.
There was one overseen by a woman named Kathleen pettigrew
communications at least between home and field agents. She was
very proud of her work and said I was basically
Miss Moneypenny, but with more power. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
She was the chief at the time secretary and he
imbued her with enough power to run a program. So
a lot of people say she was probably the inspiration
for Ian Fleming's Miss Moneypenny, who James Bond used to
like to flirt with.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
I think a lot of people from this age were like,
basically or I'm Cue or I'm Miss money Penny.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Right. My dad used to go around telling people he
was Q.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Are you serious?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
No, that would have been so impairsed.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Well, see, that was a tough one. I'm giving myself
a break there because I believe in almost anything you
tell me about your dad.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Yeah, it's true, the herbal Elvis.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah. And speaking of Q, it turns out that so
they were. They did kind of develop devices, like you said,
figuring out ways to hide compasses and maps to get
to POW's in World War One. But the idea of
their research and development and technology branch that produced someone
like Q that we all who know that James Bond
movies are familiar with, that actually came from them absorbing
(21:40):
a rival agency that was developed in World War Two
that m I six did not like one bit at first,
the Special Operations Executive or the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Yeah, it seemed like and it may just be like
teenage boying this thing, but it seemed like they got
under I six's skin because they got to do more
fun stuff. Yeah, for sure, like kind of more dangerous
ops went to them, and six were like, you know,
we've been around a while, and these are I think
they thought in them the way Kyle put it as
(22:15):
dangerous amateurs, but then they started saying, but you got
to take us along at least.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Well, yeah, I mean they definitely did have their fun
stuff curtailed because I six had a department called D
section and D stood for destruction, like they were supposedly
perfectly capable of doing sabotage. I don't know enough about
World War two British military history to understand why they
felt a Special Operations Executive was needed, or if somebody
(22:43):
just managed to have enough power that they developed their
own thing and it just became so we I don't know,
but eventually m I six prevailed, especially after World War Two,
and they absorbed the Special Operations as Executive, including a
lot of their really interesting useful stuff, like their research
and development group that produced people like Q.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah. I got the feeling, and maybe we'll get a
real you know, British history buff that can let us know.
But it sounded to me like a Churchill directive kind
of like I know, we've got our Section D and
m I six, but we need a really super secret
special sabage our team, and like let's create.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
One, right. He was waiting for that last part.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, that's kind of what it sounded like. But back
to Q, that was based again on a real person,
and I think we said, but Q stands for quartermaster,
and this guy was Charles Fraser Smith, and he was
the one that made like literal miniature cameras inside cigarette
lighters and steal shoelaces to choke someone out with. Yeah,
(23:50):
a cigarette holder telescope. Kyle said that these weren't as
we're a little more hum drum. But I think a
bullet shaped device to stick up your butt that holds
vital information maybe humdrum, but it's pretty useful.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
I'll bet it doesn't feel hum drum going in.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, it depends on what kind of bullet too.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
For sure. Yeah. So I mean that there's a lot
of what we understand about I six and like the
movies and all that, it does apparently bear some resemblance
because I don't know if we said or not. Ian
Fleming worked for six during the during World War Two,
so he had firsthand knowledge about all this stuff, which
is why there are real life people who these characters
(24:34):
were based on. So our understanding of what I six
does and has, that it's disposal on the way it
runs is not that far off. But one of the
big differences I saw was the idea of a lone,
loose canon running his own operations out there is totally incorrect.
(24:55):
It's just backwards. I've seen current employees say, like that
guy wouldn't even make it through the door, Like he
would get voted out so quickly that he wouldn't even
have a chance. You need somebody who's not a loose cannon, yeah,
you rather than solo missions. Apparently, it's all teamwork. Yeah,
And it's not one person coming up with one giant
(25:17):
piece of information, like there's a super villain who's created
a layer at the bottom of the sea that he's
been shooting their missiles from. That usually doesn't come up
in one big package. It takes thousands of people to
work together to piece little pieces of information, and they
go back and double check and triple check with other
sources whether those pieces of information are correct, and then
(25:39):
eventually you create a whole picture and you hope, hope
that it's true and accurate.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah, and you hope there's a secret layer right with
like trained sharks in a mote.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
That you can get a membership to.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, exactly. So speeding along up to the Cold War.
We are now out of place where like the USA,
the Cold War was dominated in m I six by
the Soviets and communism, the spread of communism agents, double agents,
secret agents, triple agents. They were doing the same work
(26:15):
we were. They partnered up with the CIA in nineteen
forty eight, again which was modeled on I six, and
they were trying to sort of at this point balance
intelligence with covert actions because it wasn't like an active war,
so they had to approach it differently. And they said
that at the time there were a couple of different
types of I guess what officers working there, Almost an
(26:41):
agent but Moscow men who are apparently very careful and
you know, gathering that intelligence. And then camel drivers, who
were people they would send in to like on the
ground in the field at a local place to ally
themselves with locals to maybe mountain insurrection or something like that.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Yeah, And I'm guessing the camel drivers came from the
Special Operations executive heritage, because that's exactly the kind of
guerrilla warfare the so we engaged in World War Two.
So I'm guessing that's how that survived into the Cold War.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, and of course, because it's the Cold War, a
lot of the intelligence that these Moscow men were gathering
was like, hey, we're not at war, but in case
something happens, we know that they've got these airfields, they've
got this many tanks, this many soldiers on the ground
that could move here in this amount of time. So
you know, it was sort of a readiness operation at
that point.
Speaker 2 (27:36):
Yeah, and not just like Okay, they have a huge
stockpile of these weapons. The opposite could be just as
valuable too, like, actually, they don't have that many missiles,
so all this bluster about them blowing the UK into
the ocean is actually full of hot air, so we
don't need to be quite as scared about it.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
Yeah, good point.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Yeah, and that's I mean, that's really important too. But
like you said, also, I mean they got caught maybe
a little off guard with World War Two. I get
the impression that they didn't let that happen during the
Cold War. They were still keeping up with Soviets like capabilities.
I think what else made it easy too, was you
had one nation really to spy on the Soviet Union
(28:19):
as a whole. It was massive and it was made
up of what are now a bunch of independent nations.
But at the time you had one big enemy, rather
than today where you have like terrorism, nonstate bad actors. Like,
it's just much more dilute, whereas before it was like
those guys, those are our enemy, that's who we need
to spy on.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, train all ears towards Moscow basically.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
So they were also still recruiting intelligence officers, you know,
to use on their side. And this is did I
read this right? The KGB their acronym MICE stood for money, ideology, coercion,
and ego. Were they identifying people within their own that
might be, you know, susceptible to being turned.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
I'm sure you could apply it to that, But the
impression I had is that was just how they decided
if somebody was worth approaching to recruit as a spy
for them, Oh okay, pay it would apply, yeah, for sure.
So if you're recruiting people, that's one way to do it.
You can flatter them, make them just be like, this
person clearly wants to feel like they're important or helping
(29:25):
their country or something like that. You can have stuff
that to blackmail them with. Apparently am I six is
more than willing to blackmail agents into working for them.
Bribery is another one too. It's how a lot of
very famous and prolific spies have been brought on to
being a spy is just getting paid. Although in the
(29:46):
end when you when they're being executed, you like, you
did all this for three hundred thousand dollars, really, yeah,
you know, it just never quite adds up, and it's
like and also it's like three hundred thousand dollars over
like twelve years or something like that. It just I
never quite get it. So maybe there's like they're really
in it for the thrill. The money was just the
extra bonus. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah, they'd be like, why don't you just try to
scratch off tickets, right if you want to make forty
grand a year for the next fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Right. And then another gambit is called the dangle. It's
not dirty, it's just this way of getting somebody as
spy for you, oh okay, Or actually it's a way
of creating a double agent, like you were talking about.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
So that's when you recruit somebody but for the purposes
of exposing them. Right.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
So a dangle is where you say, like you have
somebody in Moscow that you've turned into an agent for you.
You try to make them attractive to say the kgb
AH to recruit them as a spy. So now you
have a double agent working inside Okay?
Speaker 1 (30:50):
And is that? Who is that? How they got Oleg Pinkowski?
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I don't know. He came to them, No, he came
to them. He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union and
he's like, I think I'm going to start helping the UK.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Oh Okay, because he worked with both six and CIA,
and again this is during the Cold War, so he
was one of the key players and sort of or
I guess, getting and giving information on Soviet missiles in
Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah, which is pretty useful as a matter of fact. Yeah,
he was hugely helpful, just over like eighteen months and
then he was caught and executed. But I think at
that time he gave up five thousand photos of Soviet
documents to six.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, and you know you mentioned the CIA earlier having
sort of more legal hands being tied than they do
apparently in the Cold War, and who knows, maybe this
still happens today. But if there was a CIA officer
that couldn't get something done on the down low that
(31:56):
was maybe untoured or violent or illegal. They could call
m I six and say, hey, we can't get this done,
could you?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
And they say yes, yes, Wait can you say I
can't do a very good British accent?
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Yes? That was Murray from New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Again almost always is. So I say we take a
break and we come back and talk about one of
the most thrilling moments in I six history.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Are you talking about Oleg Gordievski.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Yes, that's exactly who I'm talking about, a KGB colonel.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
That's right. Apparently this guy. And this is how you can,
you know, get someone on your side from the or
at least at the time from that side, is if
they really like Western.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Culture, yeah, the Cowabunga lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Yeah, they're like, I really like, I don't know, American
sports and music and fashion. Then that could be enough.
And apparently he was on assignment in Copenhagen and they
were like, this guy loves Western culture and he might
be worth you know, getting in touch with. And sure
enough it actually worked.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I don't know where they'd fall in the mice acronym money, ideology, coercion, ego.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
Taty ideology and ego.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
I don't know, I'm not sure, but yes, he definitely turned,
but he was caught, he was found out, so he
was he became the station chief for working out of
the embassy as a KGB agent in London, so he
was able to actually kind of easily pass secrets to
the Brits because he was there already. He was found
(33:59):
out by Aldrich Ames, who was a famous American trader
who spied for the Soviets in I think the eighties
or maybe even into the nineties, and he told them
about Gordievsky spying for the Brits. Gordievsky was not immediately jailed,
which is weird. He was definitely taken back to Moscow
(34:22):
and held like basically under surveillance. But he was going
to be jailed. He was going to be executed. So
he started what had been planned seven years before and
named Operation Pimlico. And by standing in a Moscow bakery
or outside of a Moscow bakery holding a plastic Safeway bag,
(34:45):
he was signaling MI, I six, like, get me out
of here right now.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Yeah, and he said, how am I going to know?
If you've gotten the message. And they says, well, how
about this, a man's going to walk by you carrying
a Herod's bag And then he said that could be anybody, right,
And he said, all right, how about this carrying a
Herod's bag and eating a Mars candy bar, right, And
he said, I guess that narrows it down enough.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, which is really showing off because I think you
could trade a Mars bar for a car in Moscow
in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, well, yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Actually, at least that's what they told us in school.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Yeah, exactly. They don't have toilet paper either. So he
evaded surveillance was making a run for the Finished border
and am I six scrabbed him and put him in
a car trunk. But they have like, you know, sniffing
dogs inspecting cars and things, so they had the brilliant
idea to change a poopy diaper on the trunk of
(35:39):
the car that he was stuffed inside. And apparently it worked.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, those dogs were like, oh god and just went
back to their post.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
No, thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, isn't that amazing? So then they got him across
the Finish border. Finland is neutral and he was safe.
But I mean, like that is real deal spy stuff,
you know. Oh yeah, for sure, holding a Safeway bag.
That's awesome. The mars Bar I love every part of that.
So he actually he was actually tried in absentia and
(36:09):
sentenced to death by the Soviet Union, but he had
defected to the UK and they protected him and he
died an old man, I think age eighty six last
March at his home in Great Britain.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
Incredible they never got a hold of him.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
No. But one thing that we really should say, and
I was kind of touching on it earlier, one of
the really valuable things he provided was he could understand
the state of mind of the Soviet government and Soviet military,
and he fed this information of the UK to six,
who turned around and said, Margaret thatcher Ronald Reagan, you
(36:45):
guys need to tone down this evil empire rhetoric, right
because you are scaring the Soviets so bad. They're plotting
a first strike because they think you're going to strike
out of nowhere, So you actually might trigger a first
strike from the Soviets if you keep talking like this.
And as a result, they really dialed it back quite
a bit.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, they said, he said, have you seen more games? Yeah,
He's like that could happen.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
In that sense, he kind of saved the world.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
I think that's great.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, I think saving the world is totally great.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
I'm all for it.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
If we're talking about modern times, and you mentioned the
nineties is when things sort of went official, and that
was nineteen ninety four. They officially went public due to
the nineteen ninety four Intelligence Services Act, And basically this
had happened to five in nineteen eighty nine, and it's
kind of seemed like they had to kind of bring
(37:42):
in some bureaucracy for legal reasons. Among others, they the
staff of I five and I guess later I six
wanted better legal basis for things like tapping phones. They
had to be a little little more on the up
and up. I think that it was the European Court
of Human Rights said that if you're an intelligence service,
(38:03):
you have to have legal footing and a complaints system,
so like you have to become official for all this
stuff to be official.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
Right, there's so that law that essentially acknowledged that there
was such a thing as six back in nineteen ninety four.
It had a section called Section seven, and it basically
said if one of our agents is off running around
committing crimes in another country that they could be tried
(38:31):
for back in the UK, they cannot be held liable
for that. They'll never be tried for this. Yeah, And
some people have taken that as admission that there's such
a thing as a license to kill, and that makes sense.
I mean the apparently there is a new law that's
being talked about right now and is making its way
through the Supreme Court there that basically says yes, and
(38:52):
pretty much murder too, We're not going to try them
for murder. And it actually extends to agents too, So
if somebody murders somebody for mi I six and then
they defect to the UK, the UK is never going
to try them for that murder. So it's a lot
so people are like, that's a license to kill. And
I saw an agent say on I think a PBS
(39:13):
or BBC documentary a license to kill doesn't make any sense,
Like if you're in another country and you kill somebody there,
like when the cops come, you're not going to show
them your license to kill and they'll let you go,
Like this is not You're breaking that country's law. You've
murdered someone in that country, your toast if you get caught. Yeah,
So there is no license to kill, but symbolic these
(39:34):
laws essentially kind of potentially give something like a license
to kill.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Yeah, but you just don't whip out your double O card.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
No.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
No. The other things that happened in nineteen ninety four
as far as the organization goes is they were the
chief was all I was about to say, exposed technically,
that's right, but they voluntarily said, all right, we have
to be official. Now here's who our chief is. They
moved offices to some fancy headquarters on the Thames, designed
(40:06):
by Terry Ferrell. It's a very secure, sort of secretive building.
And you know it's while they did go public. You know,
technically it's still m I six and they still have
a culture of secrecy because of what they do. It's
not like, you know, they just sort of made some
things a little more public to make things official. I
(40:27):
guess right.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
That building too, It is secure, but it was blown up,
not once but twice. Well, not blown up. The first
time it was attacked by the IRA They shot an
anti tank rocket launcher at the building. On September twentieth,
two thousand, and that building just like shook it off
immediately did like it did almost no damage to it whatsoever,
(40:51):
and really kind of showed just how crazy reinforced that
building is. But it suffered a much different fate in
James on Skyfall where it blew up.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Oh was that what that building?
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Skyfall was good. It was as a matter of fact,
quite liked it. I'm curious what's gonna happen next with
that franchise?
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Did Yeah, they haven't named any James Bond yet.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I don't think so. And they sold you know, the
Broccoli family, I think sold sold everything. Oh really to god,
it may have been Amazon even I don't know. Wow,
not sure, but we'll see.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Well, if it's not Idris Elba, I'm going to be
really surprised.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
Yeah, they've been talking about him for years. That would
be too good to be true. There, no one's smart
enough to do that in movie making. Yeah, I don't
have great faith. We should talk a little bit about
the more modern day stuff because you know, starting in
the early two thousands, leading up to the Iraq War
in two thousand and three, obviously they were going to
(41:49):
be working with hunting down terrorists and maybe weapons of
mass destruction, and that was one of their big black eyes.
Actually was bogus information that got through apparently, you know,
it wasn't vetted like it should have been, and that
was one of the reasons that the US and the
rest of the world got and believed bad information about
(42:11):
weapons of mass destruction. Interract.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, it's said that that is the lowest moment in
sixth history since Kim Philby was discovered as a trader
and longtime spy, which is really saying something if you've
heard our episode on Kim Philby. But I would say
that this was even much much worse because of how
many people died in the Iraq War. Yeah, And the
(42:34):
reason why it was such a big deal, this bad
intelligence is because the US and the UK essentially made
a pact like we're going to invade a rock together
to topple this regime. We just want to get rid
of Saddam Hussein. That's not legal. If Saddam had weapons
of mass destruction. Now it's legal under basically international law.
(42:55):
So they really went to a lot of trouble to
try to find anything that suggested that and then the
and they just relied on these sources that just were
totally untrustworthy. And I don't remember where we talked about it,
but one of the sources that the US and the
UK relied on to invader Rock with said they have
weapons of mass destruction. They keep them in these glass
(43:15):
canisters and in these like little glass balls, and the
glass balls are green, and Nicholas Cage protects them with
Sean Connery.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
Yeah, I mean learned people just really genuinely suspect that
that could have been misinformation based on the Rock.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yeah, and that the handful of British ministers and politicians
who saw this intel had not seen the Rock apparently,
and it just didn't ring any bells. If they had seen.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
It, well, they had better taste in that.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
I guess it wasn't that good. But you know, it's
not just like a you know, shoot them up bang
kind of thing, action movie. I guess, yeah, it's all right. Yeah.
So today, I six they're realizing openly in interviews and stuff,
that they really need to start keeping up with technology
(44:08):
because of like facial recognition and surveillance states like that
China has and the UK. It's basically impossible to create
an agent somewhere like human intelligence is really hard to
do now, especially yes, and apparently they're starting to use
AI to run scenarios and situations to predict how somebody
(44:28):
will behave in different situations. That's a new one they're
starting to do too. So I don't know how ahead
of the curve they are, and it sounds to me
a little bit like they're behind the curve. But at
least they're realizing they need to they need to wake
up and smell the hard drives. Sorry thought you're gonna
say English breakfast team. Oh that's even better, So we
(44:50):
just edit that in.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
But you say it Beijing, mister Hermann. So the you know,
the other obvious thing. As far as modern day recruit goes,
it's not like the old days where they would just
sort of source someone out and very you know, quietly,
have someone walk by and drop a note on their
dinner table that says, are you interested in a job?
(45:12):
You know, come by this office tomorrow alone, that kind
of thing. It's a modern organization now with you know,
job listings and things like that. Again, still very secretive
in a lot of ways, I'm sure in what they
do but they you know, starting in nineteen ninety four
is when they really were brought into the sort of
modern era. It's a little less James Bondy and just
(45:33):
a little more you know, fill out this application and
we'll do our background checks.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Right. It is still risky, though, is I can't remember
what year it was. In the twenty tens, I believe
there was a codebreaker for I six named Gareth Williams
who was found dead in his bathroom inside a tote
bag that was locked from the outside.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Yeah, that's hard to do on your own, but that
wouldn't that The excuse is like he did this himself.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Either that or that it it was like a sex
game gone wrong and the partner took off, freaked out
and took off. I think that's the official explanation. But
there was a former KGB agent who came forward in
twenty fifteen and said, no, that guy would they The
Russians tried to recruit him, and he said no, and
so they killed him.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
I wonder if it was a sex game gone wrong
and they just were extracting invisibly.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Oh my god. I think that's a pretty good way
to wrap up this episode. If not have wrapped it
up thirty seconds before you said that agreed. Well, since
we both agreed that this episode is wrapped up, then
that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah, this is a I got a couple of two
parteris on these next ones about disaster films, because boy,
we heard from a lot of people that really enjoyed
that one, and these two are from Maria and Kirk. Hey, guys,
love the disaster movie. But I'm surprised you to mention
the movie Testament. I have not heard of this, Maria,
but I'm gonna check it out. It's from nineteen eighty
three by Lynn Littmann, starring Jane Alexander, one of the
(47:02):
few with a female lead closest thing to a hero
in this post apocalyptic movie, and one of the few
directed by a woman. You were focusing more escapist action
disaster type things, but you did mention a few that
were a little author raider, so I thought I would
mention this one. And another one that you could have
mentioned that was a little off the radar was Melancholia,
(47:22):
a pre apocalyptic film. So have we not mentioned that,
I swear to god we did. I don't think we did.
In that episode, but we did talk about it recently,
because we've talked about it a few times for some reason.
Speaker 2 (47:33):
I think that qualifies.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
And then also from Kirk Hey from Beautiful Astoria, Oregon,
a longtime listener, and I love disaster films and you
guys did a great job. I'm surprised though, that you
didn't mention Jurassic Park because I believe that fits all
the criteria and pre dates Twister by three years, and
it also fits at your conversation on the early use
of CGI with some of the greatest special effects of
(47:57):
the time. I have a feeling it won't be the
only person mentioning this. Love the podcast, guys, And that
is from Kirk Klinger. Now, we had a few people
right in about Jurassic Park. But I don't know about
disaster movie. To me, that's maybe a subgenre of monster movie.
I don't know, what do you think.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
It did have a Hoffman in the form of Wayne Knight,
who played Newman. True he was even wearing a Hawaiian
shirt like he couldn't get more obviously Hoffman.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
So I don't I don't think it is a disaster
movie though, But that's just my opinion.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
Yeah, and we're not the I mean, what do we know.
If you think it's a disaster movie, then go with it.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
I did say some people agreed with me though, that
Godzilla minus one is definitely a disaster, so I was right.
Speaker 1 (48:46):
Well, the scale of destruction in Jurassic Park one was
limited to e is La, Newbar, so I don't know
though other things were localized too, So maybe I'm just
wrong about everything in life.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Yeah, like that that tunnel collapse was alone.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
That was Yeah, that's true. That's true.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Uh yeah, well, Kirk, thank you for starting this conversation.
It's a great one. Like I said, we love that
kind of thing. Send us an email. Send it off
to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:14):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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