Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
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.
Wow, that was a silver lining.
How's that?
There's not been any better in sync since lant Spass and justin Timberlake. We're running around together.
We should preface this, by the way, we're doing an episode today on six, the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service.
Is that how you pronounce it?
Six? What do you say?
Mix? That's what I've been saying in my head at least.
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.
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
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.
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 I six, but they had a lot to do with how we did things.
Yeah, we use them as a kind of a model.
Yeah, there you go. That's a very clean way to say that.
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
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, 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.
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 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.
I don't know. My dad was big time into John leccaray, but I never have been.
Is it Lacara? I don't know.
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.
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, 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 Keith Jeffrey to write its history up to nineteen forty nine.
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 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. 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 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.
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 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.
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, 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.
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.
Yeah, they just call it fo right.
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.
Thanks. I think we did really good too.
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.
After, maybe like fifty years.
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 Green Inc.
And they're all called C too. It's the title for the chief of I six.
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.
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.
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 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.
I don't remember his name, but yeah.
Yeah, but supposedly he you know, as the story goes, he cut off his own foot with a pen knife just to escape.
I think just the fact that people that became a legend around him says a lot about who he is.
Oh totally.
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.
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.
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 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 effectively as an invisible ink. And I saw that somebody put it. The supply is renewable.
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?
Yes?
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.
Yeah, we had to say that, and.
He said, no problem.
Yeah, exactly, Wow, thank you exactly. So you want to take a break, or you want to dive into World War one era.
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.
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 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
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.
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, 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 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.
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 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.
Right, that's a double agent, yeah, or just.
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.
Right, So that would make Cyril Bertram Mills an agent.
Correct, Yes, that's what I was getting to.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like a poster made for elementary school.
Right for the science fair, exactly what happens with vinegar and baking soda.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
I think a lot of people from this age were like, basically or I'm Cue or I'm Miss money Penny.
Right. My dad used to go around telling people he was Q.
Are you serious?
No, that would have been so impairsed.
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.
Yeah, it's true, the herbal Elvis.
Yeah.
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 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.
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 dangerous amateurs, but then they started saying, but you got to take us along at least.
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 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.
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.
One, right. He was waiting for that last part.
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, 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.
I'll bet it doesn't feel hum drum going in.
Yeah, it depends on what kind of bullet too.
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 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. 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 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 eventually you create a whole picture and you hope, hope that it's true and accurate.
Yeah, and you hope there's a secret layer right with like trained sharks in a mote.
That you can get a membership to.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, good point.
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 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.
Yeah, train all ears towards Moscow basically.
Yeah.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
So that's when you recruit somebody but for the purposes of exposing them. Right.
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?
And is that? Who is that? How they got Oleg Pinkowski?
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.
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.
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.
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 was maybe untoured or violent or illegal. They could call m I six and say, hey, we can't get this done, could you?
And they say yes, yes, Wait can you say I can't do a very good British accent?
Yes? That was Murray from New Zealand.
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.
Are you talking about Oleg Gordievski.
Yes, that's exactly who I'm talking about, a KGB colonel.
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.
Culture, yeah, the Cowabunga lifestyle.
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.
I don't know where they'd fall in the mice acronym money, ideology, coercion, ego.
Taty ideology and ego.
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 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 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, he was signaling MI, I six, like, get me out of here right now.
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.
Yeah, which is really showing off because I think you could trade a Mars bar for a car in Moscow in nineteen eighty five.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's a good point.
Actually, at least that's what they told us in school.
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 the car that he was stuffed inside. And apparently it worked.
Yeah, those dogs were like, oh god and just went back to their post.
No, thank you.
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 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.
Incredible they never got a hold of him.
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 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.
Yeah, they said, he said, have you seen more games? Yeah, He's like that could happen.
In that sense, he kind of saved the world.
Yeah.
I think that's great.
Yeah, I think saving the world is totally great.
I'm all for it.
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 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, you have to have legal footing and a complaints system, so like you have to become official for all this stuff to be official.
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 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 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 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 laws essentially kind of potentially give something like a license to kill.
Yeah, but you just don't whip out your double O card.
No.
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 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 guess right.
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, 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.
Oh was that what that building?
Mm hmm.
Skyfall was good. It was as a matter of fact, quite liked it. I'm curious what's gonna happen next with that franchise?
Did Yeah, they haven't named any James Bond yet.
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.
Well, if it's not Idris Elba, I'm going to be really surprised.
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 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 weapons of mass destruction. Interract.
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 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. 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 canisters and in these like little glass balls, and the glass balls are green, and Nicholas Cage protects them with Sean Connery.
Yeah, I mean learned people just really genuinely suspect that that could have been misinformation based on the Rock.
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.
It, well, they had better taste in that.
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 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 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 just edit that in.
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? 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 a little more you know, fill out this application and we'll do our background checks.
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.
Yeah, that's hard to do on your own, but that wouldn't that The excuse is like he did this himself.
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.
I wonder if it was a sex game gone wrong and they just were extracting invisibly.
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.
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 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,
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.
I think that qualifies.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, that's a good point.
So I don't I don't think it is a disaster movie though, But that's just my opinion.
Yeah, and we're not the I mean, what do we know. If you think it's a disaster movie, then go with it.
I did say some people agreed with me though, that Godzilla minus one is definitely a disaster, so I was right.
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.
Yeah, like that that tunnel collapse was alone.
That was Yeah, that's true. That's true.
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.
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.