S1E3: Two Spies Living Lies

And I already have one cut in sight, which I got as a suspicious This.

Is Olegg Gordievsky, a Soviet spy.

There's a blue.

I'm not very good at some models, but I sees a shape and this is a color, and it is behind us.

Again.

It's nineteen ninety. He's filming a British TV show called World in Action, where he's demonstrating how the KGB trained him how to tell if he was being followed.

The philosophy is not to shake off the surveillance. Maybe curtius to the surveillance, don't irritate them.

In this video clip, he's wearing a faux goo tea and a wig as a disguise his short athletic build. His sport coat and pants are slightly oversized. In other words, he looks like every other middle aged man in the nineteen nineties. He blends in like a spy should.

Now I do absolutely unexpected. I turned right to stay with me. They have to make the choke, and they are making the joke. I set a trap for them.

I bet you were expecting something a little more dramatic, James Bond style car chase that turns into a motorcycle chase that turns into a fistfight on a blimp or something. But no, this is what International Super spiderm really looks like. An average looking man in a wig and a fake go te, hands placed at ten and two, driving just under the speed limit.

You know, a bunch of ex operations, admitting that the agents will not take place, but tomorrow we will try again.

But the movies do get one thing right. Spies like Oleg Gordievski, sometimes the fate of the world does depend on them. There's one more thing I should tell you about him. He's one of the two spies who would be forced to intervene during an international nuclear crisis in nineteen eighty three. Listeners, pour yourself up vodka martini, shaken, not stirred, because today it's all about the spies situation. Norman Fucko. I'm at Helms and this is Snafu, a

The West were wicked. The capitalists were unreliable. They would trick into sie View as soon as they would look you in the eye. You know, this was an evil sort of Western system that these paranoid KGB officials saw in the West.

This is Taylor Downing. He's an historian and a documentarian, and boy does he have the voice for it. He says that a drop Off didn't believe Thatagan's antics were standard political performance. He thought Reagan was building up to something far more sinister.

The fear was that the Americans had some sort of secret, cunning plan to launch a preemptive strike. Obviously, in the nuclear era, a surprise attack could be completely overwhelming.

Overwhelming is putting it lightly. With the new euro missiles in play, the Soviet Union would need to detect an attack, get word to the leaders, notify the public, scurry into bunkers, and launch a retaliation, all within seven minutes. And drop Off was like seventy years old. You're not exactly sprinting to bunkers at that age. I mean, your knees are just not what they once were.

They were determined that they must not ful prey to a surprise attack from the West.

And drop Off realized the only chance for Soviet survival was to see an attack coming before it even happened.

So Andrewpov had started this KGB program for its international residences called Operation Rhyan.

So Rhon is an acronym, and it actually is spelled like the name Ryan. You're gonna hear a variety of pronunciations for this acronym. I'm just gonna go with Ryan. So what this acronym means is nuclear missile attack. It was and Dropoff's crystal ball his chance at seeing the incoming missiles before a button was ever pushed. Nope, and drop Off could not see the future. This isn't that kind of show. But what he lacked in psychic ability he made up for in espionage.

So Operation Rhiann was telling its agents abroad to look for signs of the preparation for a nuclear attack.

And this is where spies like ol Ed Gordievski come in. Under Operation Ryan, a global network of Soviet spies began to search for clue that might indicate that an attack from the West was eminent.

Many of these signs were very sensible. You know, our hospitals being emptied in anticipation of mass casualties.

Were the missiles getting moved around, were blood banks increasing their supplies. You get the idea. Signs that could rationally point to the fact that the enemy is preparing for war. But agents were told to look for other signs as well, signs that were not so sensible.

We're go and count the number of lights on in the Pentagon at night or in the Ministry of Defense in London at night, because if you knew that regularly there were had one hundred lights on and suddenly there are two hundred lights on. My god, they must be planning for a war. So the whole operation that got crazier and crazier as the leadership became more and more anxious.

Every two weeks, spies would report back to KGB headquarters with a list of all the different indicators they saw. Officials would accumulate a tally, and that taally would be used to calculate when the attack was coming.

I was told that there was this extraordinary perspect screen in the KGB sentern that dul Bianca.

According to Taylor, the KGB analysts had a giant screen with a grid on which they would put x's for each indicator.

The KGB leaders could judge the overall leftl of tension simply by looking at the number of crosses on the big board in the main room.

Once the board was full of axes, that meant the West was going to attack naturally, then the Soviets could prepare accordingly, sound the alarms, or worse, they could strike first. It was like a tic tac toe game of death.

I mean, this is just so utterly crazy. Stanley Kubrick could not invent this elderly savie gentlemen, you know, looking at a big board with crosses on it, and it's from this that decisions to launch nuclear weapons might be based. Seems the craziest of satires that you could ever imagine, But I was certainly told that that's what happened.

Kind of sounds like the world's most fucked up game show. Okay, you're for the center square. How many lights are on? It's the pentagon right now? Oh, I'm sorry, it's two hundred. That puts an X in the center square.

And you know what that means.

That's right, Well, that's our game. I'd say, join us tomorrow night, But by then all of human civilization will be buried under a ton of radioactive ash. Good night, folks. Now, even after a lot of digging, we can't verify exactly what Ryan actually looked like a Tic Tacto board of death, or more likely, an algorithm in a supercomputer in a basement somewhere. After all, the Soviets did have a habit

Here, completely mad, completely bizarre, completely crazy.

Thank you Taylor. That about sums it up crazy or not. Operation Ryan would put spies at center stage in our little Cold War story, more specifically two spies from different lands who would be put on a crash course with able archer a where they would be forced to act to save us all.

Gordievsky was born in the late nineteen thirties.

This is Michael Goodman. He's the head of the War Studies department at King's College, London. He's talking about Oleg Gordievsky, our fake goateed spy driving instructor.

He had been the son of an officer of one of the KGB's precursors. Something called the NKVD, but fundamentally it was the same thing. But in other words, he was born into the sort of world of secret policing. I suppose you know, espionage or something which came in the blood.

You could argue Oleg Gordievski's brother was also a KGB agent, so for him, becoming a spy was just like joining the family business. Come on down to Gordievski and brothers, your friendly neighborhood spies.

Yeah.

Now, to be honest, his career in the KGB might have been pretty straightforward if it wasn't.

For this.

B Diomaggio Ripartash Katoribus jell and Zajind's mercy Stay.

It's nineteen fifty three, ole At Gordievski is fifteen, the perfect age to get into a little geopolitical tomfoolery. He had learned that he could pick up several transmissions from west of the Iron Curtain. The KGB, of course, monitored the radio waves closely, and if they caught a transmission from the west, they jammed the signal jab seneskot iq roling by nation Viktata, making the contraband broadcasts barely intelligible.

Them on abrakis busham.

But on this day, with his ear hovering next to his short wave Baltika radio, the KGB's jamming signal wasn't strong enough. This mole would go unwhacked. Gordievski was able to make out a life changing broadcast from Radio Liberty out of.

Munich boch krofiat krovi.

We're Sardetsky.

I'll translate for you. He was the worst tyrant in the history of mankind, the greatest criminal and executioner of the world has ever known. His victims numbered millions. It's March fifth, nineteen fifty three, the day that Stalin died. I mean, how's that for a eulogy. In his memoir, only Gordievski recalls listening completely spellbound. He had never heard the Soviet Union disparaged before. At some level, hearing those words,

It was exciting, it was thrilling, it was romantic.

Though I didn't expect it would be as exciting in my case as it jugged out to be.

That's because all like Gordievski would become a double agent. Kordievski was twenty eight when he got his first KGB assignment abroad in Copenhagen.

Kordievsky would have traveled under some form of cover. He would not have been declared KGB officer.

As he passed through customs, he told the agent he was a Russian diplomat. Of course he was not. That was only his cover. In reality, he was a Russian Internet national superspy. Of course, Danish intelligence was always suspicious of a new Russian diplomat.

Is he what he says he is or is he something else?

So the Danish intelligence service would scrutinize his backstory, looking for anything that seemed inconsistent. Anything that may reveal Oleg Gordievski was actually a spy.

You know where had this Russian served before? They were a cultural latasha in Mexico and then they suddenly appeared in How Sinki is a trade atasha?

You know?

Does that seem a bit old that you'd go from one to the other.

But Olegg Gordievsky's story was air tight. He was safe for now. He hadn't been there but a few months when he and his wife were invited out to dinner by a local police officer. Hey, that's great for them. It's always so hard to make friends in a new place. But Olegg must have also gotten some spy tingles. Something was up. As he left the flat, he placed a small dab of glue between one of the bedroom doors and the doorframe. When they came back from dinner, the

It was the check invasion that was the big turning points.

In July of nineteen sixty eight, Soviet tanks lined up along the border of Czechoslovakia. The Czech leader had been talking about a freer Czechoslovakia, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, but the Soviets couldn't have their allies being too free. Soviet tanks closed in iron fist, hovering. Honestly, kind of an evil empiry move Gordievski watched the news coverage with a knot in his stomach. He debated with his colleagues at the Russian embassy. Half of them were Stalinists, hardliners.

Once again, the Soviet Union, demonstrating a colossal contempt for the opinion of mankind, has resorted to brute force to keep a satellite nation under control Russian tanks and infantry.

It was worse than Gordievski could have ever imagined.

Tonight was one of terrors of the patient who expire the cars, motorcycles, every moving object without warning.

Because he was based in a foreign country, he was able to see not just how the Russians portrayed this, for how the West portray this. And I think this was really a huge cristical moment in his conversion, if you like.

For the first time he saw the Soviet Union for what it was, unobscured by state propaganda. It confirmed what deep down he had already known.

It was moments like that that he really began to think, I need to do something about this. I need to target the Soviet system, undermine it somehow, and try and damage it somehow.

At that moment, Gordievsky made a faithful decision. It would put his life at risk, his family's lives at risk. He went to the phone in the embassy and immediately called his wife Yolena at home. He sobbed into the phone. He told her they've actually invaded Czechoslovakia. How could they do this? It's unbelievable. I don't know what to do now. He knew his home line was bugged by Danish intelligence. By making this call, he was sending a deliberate Gordievsky

I would just have got feeling this all this society was rotten.

Meet rhiner Rup. This audio is from an interview he gave in two thousand and eight for the documentary nineteen eighty three The Brink of Apocalypse. Like Gordievski, rhiner Rup would also become a spy, betray his homeland, and end up in the middle of a nuclear crisis. Guys, y'all have so much in common, you should totally be friends. Only rhiner Rupp's betrayal would happen in the opposite direction. That's right. He was born in West Germany and soon he would be working for the East.

The society didn't suit me in nineties. The more I learned about it, the more I rejected.

Rhiner. Rupp is a burly sort. He just seems like the kind of guy who could wrestle a bear into submission. But maybe I'm just saying that because of his very impressive beard. He wears those classic Aviator style eyeglasses, and he fits a lot of German stereotypes, meaning let's just say he's not very silly. Rupp was sixteen when the Berlin Wall went up, creating an overnight barrier between two

Nazis were still sitting in positions of power, and all that reminded us too much of what happened not so long ago in Germany.

He and his pals were activists. They would famously be called the sixty eight Ers, a group of students who were trying to throw the remaining Nazis out of West Germany in nineteen sixty eight. Not a super controversial take in my humble opinion, but apparently the larger West German population found these young students to be a nuisance, even dangerous. They were anti establishment, and that made them attempting target for Communist spy recruiters.

I wasn't a Marxist at the time, so I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't met by Sheia Chance, one of the recruiters.

One of the recruiters for the Stasi, East Germany's spy organization, very much in cahoots with the KGB. By the way, I'm sorry, Ryaner, but I have a feeling that it was not at all by chance. One misty spring afternoon in nineteen six and the other sixty eight ers found themselves marching the streets of Mines, a humble little town in the Rhineland that still bore the scars of World War two bombing raids.

The crow Bible was was hungry. We were thirsty from shouting, and so we went to a pup.

They ordered a round of beers and bowls of gulash.

When we paid, we wanted to pay to be literally a tin tin Finnick, which is nowadays Tincent. I mean nothing, just didn't have it anymore in our pockets.

So to the waitress reps like, look, we don't have money for all these beers and poles of gulage. But let me back there in the kitchen. I'll do some washing and work off the debt.

That's how this nice chap order man could have been my father. Two tables further away, said oh, waitress, I'll pick up those and bring those young men and another round of beers. So he was very welcome in our circle.

Apparently the cost of buying a spy is roughly the price of gulash. When it came time to leave, the old man reveals that he, by complete chance lived right next to Rup. What a small world.

And so we walked back up up the hill to the rose garden where I lived and talked more.

They're talking politics, the state of Germany, and they discovered, to the complete surprise of only one person in that conversation, that they're totally ideologically aligned. What a kuaki dink, right.

I old god, it's the first time in my experience this is an older man could be my father order generation, and he has same kind of feelings, the same kind of views like me, so I wanted to know him again.

Hook Line and Singer, the nice old Gulash buying Chap played the long game. It was an entire year before he came back to Rupp and said, Hey, I know you think the East is bad. You think it's an evil dictatorship where life is dreary and monotonous, but you're actually just brainwashed by the West.

So he said, come and have a fabu look for yourself.

So he did. Rupp visited East Germany and let's just say he wasn't turned off by it, so he agreed to help them out a little. At first, Rupp was tasked with documenting Nazi activities within the West German government. Truly, and I think we can all agree on this, fighting the good fight. But slowly Rhiner Rupp began to see the West in a very dark light, as greedy, exploiting the working class and on a quest for world domination.

Ito was my enemy and I went in to destroy it.

Well, that got intense very fast. Now Rup needed an in. But you can't just waltz into the NATO office and apply for a job. What do you think is this jam bajuice? And what's he going to say in the interview? Hi, I'm Rhyner Rupp. I want to destroy you from within. I mean, you don't hire that guy. So he started by enrolling at a local university. He hatched a plan he could make contacts and eventually infiltrate the enemy. But then he met and Christine.

And Christine Bowen and I met in nineteen seventeen.

This is Floria and Schimakowski. He's head of collections at the German Spy Museum in Berlin.

And she was actually totally unpolitical and he was very political at that time, and she took over his opinions bit by bit.

And Christine Bowen was British. She was a student alongside Rhiner Rubb at the university. She was also a secretary at NATO. You might know where this is going. The spy who wants to get into NATO, conveniently meets a young woman who works at NATO.

I don't know if you're familiar with the term Romeo agent. It's what the English call it honeypot, honeytrap, because they frequently sent out good looking man to get in contact with secretaries of governmental institutions in order to spy on those people and to get these secretaries to spy for them.

But rub swears he has always sworn this is not that he loved Anne Christine. They ended up getting married. In fact, they're still married. No honeypot, no manipulation. This relationship is the real deal. And maybe to prove his affection, or maybe because he's a reckless romantic, he does exactly what he's not supposed to do. He tells her, hey, by the way, darling, mine shots, I'm a spy.

And the Starzi was shocked, as you can imagine.

They were quite kind of angry with him, so to speak, because they really really said, you shouldn't have done that.

What do we do?

We don't know anything about that woman, for.

God's sake, she's English. We don't know where her loyalties lie. She calls fries chips and chips crisps. They're like, what are we going to do with you?

Now?

Fire you? So Rup is pretty scared from getting his ass handed to him by his Starzi handlers. And he goes back to an Christine and he says, can I trust you?

And she assured him she's not gonna tell anyone.

Not only is Anne Christine not going to tell anyone, she's so smitten with Rupp that she even agrees to help him.

So he actually convinced her. You're a secretary at NATO headquarters. That means you've got position to documents and you can do something good costs. So she starts at smuggling out documents in a handback.

Come on, that is so romantic. If only Hallmark made cards for spy lovers. You smuggled my heart out. There are so many treasons why I love you. I got a million of these, Hallmark, give me a call for the Stazzi. Having an agent inside NATO was a gold mine. It was a clear look inside the minds of the West. If NATO attacks, and they were convinced NATO would attack this Dozzi would see it coming from a mile away.

Here the Danish bookstore story about Gordievski.

A boy do I Jeffrey, and it's a doozy. One day, shortly after his arrival in Copenhagen, oled Gordievski was drolling through the red light district, as one does when you're getting to know your new home.

And Gordievski, who is just a weird dude, walks by a gay bookstore, or maybe it was just a pornographic bookstore. It was a sex shop, and he just can't believe that the West is so open and free that such a thing can exist. So he goes in and he buys two pornographic magazines that are gay themed, right, and take some home to show his wife to be like, can you believe how free this country is? Here's some

Sixties, a gay KGB agent that was definitely something to exploit.

And they see this as like a way that they could recruit him, right, they could blackmail him and recruit him. And so they try to set up a honeypot where they get, you know, an attractive young man to kind of flirt with him at a cocktail party. But Gordievski, being straight, doesn't realize that that's what's happening at all, and it doesn't work.

Ohlegg probably went home and told his wife all about that nice guy he met at the party and how people in the West are so interested in his stamp collection.

But like, that's Olegg Gordievski for you, right, like the kind of guy who would do something like that.

In the end, Treason finally found Gordievski on the badminton court, as it's found so many of us. It was nineteen seventy three. A tall English diplomat walked onto the court, interrupting what I can only imagine was a riveting match. Gordievski was, in all likelihood donned in sweatbands, short shorts and tube socks. The Englishman invited him to lunch. He

It's kind of for chewed says, and it was also source of.

Calculated Gordievsky was now a double agent for six, which is basically the CIA of the United Kingdom. Now. I six wanted to help Gordievsky climb the ranks and the KGB. The higher up he was on the Soviet side, the better intelligence he'd be able to feed them, and they wanted him close where they could be in touch with him more freely. So I six set a plan in

I six, as we now know, helped ensure that someone in the embassy was sent back to Moscow to record sort of slightly in disgrace, and so that an opening came up.

All of a sudden, The Soviets had a diplomatic opening to fill in London. Back here, BACKO, you're going to London Town.

And it was at that point that really he began to provide the best sort of intelligence.

There was just a recap. Gordievski was in London on official business as a Russian diplomat, but he was sent by the KGB as an undercover agent. But he was actually set up by six to be placed there by the KGB to pose as a diplomat. Are you following me? Because I'm barely hanging on and I'm like the host here. Listen. The point is, being a double agent is a dangerous

Even had Gordievski known something, he couldn't necessarily pass it across straight away. Of course, even if he could pass across intelligence straight away, how the West dealt with it had to also be very cleverly and carefully handled, because if you all suddenly told something which you have no other means of knowing, and you somehow revealed that then, of course, to the other side. It will then post questions,

You know that the KGB kept detailed records of which agents knew which pieces of information, so when secrets inevitably leaked to the other side, they could trace the breadcrumbs of treachery back to the source. And once they did, can you guess what happened? Execution? But that wasn't the only danger in Gordievsky's capacity as a double agent. He may also feed completely false information back to the KGB, and if they found out he was lying, he could

They started to panic, and they developed a concept of how the Americans will prepare to a sudden nuclear attack.

This is Kordievsky again from an interview he gave in two thousand and eight. He's talking about Operation Ryan.

They needed to know the time of the preparation to the attack in order probably to carry out a preventive attack, so we will remain, the Winders will prevail.

The beginnings of Operation Ryan date back to nineteen eighty one, but according to Kordievsky, things got a bit more urgent in nineteen eighty three. That's when it became clear that the euro missiles were in fact going to be deployed in Europe. Oh yeah, and it's also when Ronald Reagan publicly called the Soviet Union the source of all evil

What should we do to write? There was no signs. You will get such a blow? Do you heather you write such thing?

The message was clear, don't come back empty handed, find some signs, and if they're not there, find them anyway.

No agent is going to stand up and say, well, look, I'm in London or I'm in Washington, there's absolutely no sign here for preparations for a nuclear war.

Your daft.

Don't be silly. You know that way would lie the end of a career. The way to advance your career was to find signs and send them into the center. It became totally self fulfilling. A series of paranoid leaders ask agents around the world to report if they see anything suspicious happening. As soon as they reported it, makes the kg BE centered even more paranoid, even more anxious, even more nervous about what's going on.

If you look up lose Lose in the dictionary, there should be a really big picture of Operation Ryan right next to it. If the Soviet agents reported what they saw, which was nothing, they could be risking their lives, and if they reported back fake intel, they could effectively accelerate a nuclear war, leaving us all dead. See Lose Lose.

My boss was head of the station. It was a beak fat, pompous and also stupid man.

Damn, Gordy, tell us how you really feel.

But still he was not stupid enough to understand that this requirement was just not But he was a boss, so he pretended that it was serious. America. He's preparing a sudden new class talk.

And while Gordievsky's boss may have been stupid, he wasn't stupid enough to defy the KGB.

And we that he didn't believe it. Nobody believed it.

Like ts Eliot said, this is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with the Soviet middle manager brow beating his department to reach its monthly quota and then pure with a bang after that and if any was left then a whimper.

Were you surprised when you were told to look out for the NATO plans for a surprise attack?

Yes? And no, this is Ryan a rup again.

I mean, I can't understand why they were scared, because from the outside it really must have looked bad.

Last we saw Rupp, he had just accepted a job at NATO. He would now have access to NATO's precious war plans. He was a major asset for the Stasi and by extension, the KGB, and so of course he'd get a dope code name. He'd be called Agent Topaz.

Does the word Topaz mean anything to you?

What is Topaz?

The story of espionage in high Places?

Now turns out there's a nineteen sixty nine Hitchcock film by the same name. In the movie, there's a NATO official who is working for the East. And believe me when I tell you that, I have no idea if ryner Up aka Agent Topaz picked his code name based on that movie. But let's just say the similarities are a little uncanny. Apparently the Topaz film was an utter failure. Critics were like, Hitchcock, time to retire Buddy kind of harsh.

Was it all open, pretty bold, and I was sitting not then at my desk, but I had an additional work disc in a corner, and I was sitting there over the documents, and I was taking the pictures.

With the door slightly ajar and a file cupboard rolled just in front of it, so when a colleague walked in, the door would hit the file cabinet.

And if the bang came, I'll just put the camera down here.

Well, sorry about that, francois what can.

I do for you?

So that happened quite occasionally.

So Rupp was now one of the most valuable agents the East had. He was in the NATO inner Sanctum photographing classified documents for the Stazi, who would then pass them on to the KGB. Meanwhile, Gordievski is passing Soviet intel to the West. Both sides are using this intelligence to gain the upper hand in an arms race that is spiraling out of control? What could go wrong next time?

On STAFFO, one story dominates the free world news media tonights the killing of two hundred and sixty nine innocent people I board a Koreem jumbo jip that drifted into Soviet territory.

The United States reacts with revulsion to this attack. Loss of life appears to be heavy. We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act, Sylvia.

Saying now they were only trying to help the plane out of their airspace. Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, Associate producer Tory Smith. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo,