Dan Snow's History Hit - The Spy Behind the Iron Curtain

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

This episode contains high-speed chases, modified cars and a mission to uncover secret enemy technology. It's everything you'd find in a James Bond movie, but also on a Cold War BRIXMIS mission- one that today's guest Dave Butler was part of, gathering intelligence on Soviet firepower as Britain prepared for World War Three.During their time in East Germany, Dave and his fellow officers were given the opportunity to legally break the speed limits and laws and ignore the police; it was dangerous work and the trick was to avoid being caught by the enemy cars chasing them. For the 70th anniversary of Ian Fleming's first Bond book 'Casino Royale' Dan finds out if life as a spy is really anything like the Bond stories.Produced by Mariana Des Forges, edited and mixed by Dougal Patmore.Clips courtesy ofCasino Royale (2006) / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Releasing/ Martin CampbellCasino Royale (1967) / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / John HustonThe Graham Norton Show/ BBCGoldfinger / United Artists/ Guy HamiltonIf you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you! 

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's the 70th anniversary of the publication of the first James Bond book.

Bond, an intelligence officer in the secret intelligence service MI6. Bond, known by his code number 007. He was also, of course, Commander Bond. He was in the Royal Navy Reserve. He was created by the British journalist, novelist, and wartime intelligence officer Ian Fleming in 1953. And he became a massive global franchise. I'm Lieutenant Mathis of the special police. Peter Sellers is James Bond. I'm so thrilled that you're all here we're doing a Bond special. Bond. I just announced the 24th James Bond movie.

James Bond has come to symbolise intelligence agents, intelligence gathering. One of the great questions that people always ask themselves is who inspired Bond? I think the answer is that Bond was a composite character. He was based on a number of people who Fleming knew during his service in naval intelligence during the Second World War, particularly a number of commandos. There was Tom Winter, tall, dark and handsome commando during the Second World War that Ian Fleming would have met. He carried out several raids with the small-scale raiding force. There's Conrad O'Brien French, a skiing spy who Fleming had met in

Kitzbühel in the 1930s. There's Bill Biffy Dowerdale. He was station head of MI6 in Paris. He wore handmade suits, very dapper. He was chauffeured around Paris in a Rolls Royce. Fleming's first novel was Casino Royale. It was made into a movie at the time. It was then made into another movie with Daniel Craig, kind of relaunching the Bond franchise in the 21st century. And one of the things people love about the movies are the gadgets, the cars, and people have come to associate those with spying. Throughout the James Bond series of novels and films, Q Branch gave Bond a variety of vehicles with which to escape and evade his enemies. M's orders 007. You'll be using this Aston Martin DB5 modifications, windscreen bulletproof. Now lots of spies tell you there's nothing very much James Bond-like about their work.

But in this episode, I'm going to talk to somebody who, well, I think does bear a pretty good resemblance to the kind of stuff James Bond was getting up to. We would be shot at, we'd be rammed. Two military mission guys were killed in that manner. My guest today on this here podcast is a man who's driven a specially modified car whilst working for Her Majesty's Secret Service. He was basically a spy, an intelligence gathering agent, working behind enemy lines in East Germany during the Cold War. He was basically a spy, an intelligence gathering agent working behind enemy lines in East Germany during the Cold War. He collected information about Soviet tanks, vehicles, firepower in anticipation of the Third World War. And as you'll hear,

his car is rather crucial to his spying. It was like a mini embassy on wheels. They weren't allowed to touch you. However, of course, one of their tactics was to cause a road accident or ram the vehicle off the road, turn it over. And then, of course, under the auspices of saving the crew, they would get in the vehicle and they would ransack it and pull all of our specialist equipment out and lay it out and then photograph it. That, my friends, is Dave Butler. Dave's here to talk to me about the years he spent behind the Iron Curtain, a place, well, that's now pretty difficult to imagine. And it was a place where he was given licence to break laws,

ignore speed limits, escape from the police and other authorities, because he was on the trail of vital intelligence. Enjoy. Dave, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. No problem. It's my pleasure. It's very cool sounding thing. What is Bricksmiths? my pleasure. It's very cool saying things. What is Bricksmiths? So Bricksmiths was the British commander-in-chief's military mission to the group of Soviet forces in Germany from about 1946 until 1990. And the reason for the mission was ostensibly liaison between the commander-in-chiefs of the group of Soviet forces in Germany at that time, in the divided Germany, and the British commander-in-chief. And so that's

what it was set up for. The Americans and the French also had liaison missions set up in a very similar fashion. The only difference being between the three of us was that the British military mission had more people. For some reason, we were given some 31 passes to roam freely in the group of Soviet forces, Germany area, and the other missions had slightly less passes. And we never found out why, but for obvious reasons, we didn't make any waves about that to the Soviets. But Dave, that's bonkers. So it dates back to the Second World War when obviously we were allies, you had liaison officers in each other's camps. Then the Cold War, we were seconds away from fighting a third world war

against each other. What were you guys just wandering around looking at Soviet encampments? I mean, physically, where were you and what were you doing all day? On first sight or sound, it doesn't sound like it makes any sense. However, the other job, of course, of the liaison missions was to basically keep an eye on each other. And remember that Soviets had exactly the same military mission in the western half of Germany. So that was the overt side. We were the liaison. But of course, it quickly dawned on everybody, us in particular, that there was a covert side that we could gather intelligence on what was potentially our enemy should a third world war break out. And so we had a mission house in Potsdam, which was procured for us. And so we would cross the Gleenica Bridge. We were the only military mission allowed

the Allied missions to cross the Gleenica Bridge. Everybody else had to go in and out of East Germany through Checkpoint Charlie, but we had a specific permission to do that. And so we would go to our mission house in Potsdam, and then we would deploy from there into the whole of East Germany. But over and above that, we could just roam freely from north to south, east to west, right up to the borders of other countries. You must have been followed though, when you went on your little tour around East Germany. Well, like any communist state, there were the Ministry of State Security, the MFS, or the NARCs, as we called them. These were the East German secret police. And they worked hand in glove with the KGB in order to track us, follow us, to see whether we were just carrying out liaison or whether we were up

to no good. If they found out you're up to no good, what, meeting dissidents or gathering intelligence, would they chuck you out? We never had agents or anything like that in East Germany, unlike the Soxmiths people, which we understood had agents that they would meet in the West. Ours was purely military intelligence gathering at the time. And when we wanted to lose the NARCs, we would just bear in mind, we were deploying in Opel Senators, Range Rovers, and then finally in Mercedes Glendobargens, the G-Wagen as we used to call them. So given that, that the NARCs had Lada Revers, was their 4x4 equivalent, it was very easy to lose them across country if we needed to.

So when you crossed that bridge and you entered East Berlin on the way to Potsdam, which is sort of part of East Berlin really, was there an immediate difference? Do you remember the difference between East and West Berlin? Yes, my overall impression was like turning the clock back 70 years to the Second World War, because I understood that part of the Soviet retribution on the Germans for the amount of people that were killed, trying to take, for instance, Berlin and Germany. They did nothing to renovate East Germany from the end of the Second World War until 1990 when reunification happened. So as soon as you crossed over the Glienicke Bridge, you were like going back 70 years. I mean, still bombed out ruins. And, you know, I wouldn't say poverty,

because obviously the communist way was that everybody had a job. Everybody had a car, albeit a Trabant, which they had to wait 15 years for to buy. But it was as you would have expected in the aftermath of the Second World War. The shops and all the rest of it. There was definitely high-end shops and then shops for the rest of them. And as with all communist states, they're all supposed to be equal, but it was obvious to us that some were more equal than others.

So you get in your cool vehicle, you go across the bridge, and you're rampaging around East Germany. What are you looking for? We were given operations twofold, really. One was specific operations to carry out on behalf of Western intelligence. So we would get a shopping list of targets that they might want to look at, things that they'd seen by satellite and they wanted confirming from a ground perspective. And then the other one was the opportunity.

So as we went around, I mean, again, there were like 386,000 Russian troops or Soviet troops. They were then deployed in East Germany and 240,000 East German troops. So with over half a million, almost every corner you turned, you bumped into some form of military doing something or other. And so there was a massive amount of opportunities to gather intelligence as we went about driving around East Germany. And the driving's the key, right? Because the Soviets weren't allowed to lay a finger on you if you're in the car. It was like a mini embassy on wheels, in essence. They weren't allowed to necessarily touch you. However, of course, one of their tactics was to cause a road accident

or ram the vehicle off the road and turn it over. And then, of course, under the auspices of saving the crew, they would get in the vehicle and they would ransack it and pull all of our specialist equipment out and lay it out and then photograph it. And then our chief of mission would be hauled in front of the Soviet External Relations Branch, or Serb as they were called, who were responsible for the military missions. And we would be accused of spying. And our brigadier would sit there straight-faced. And, for instance, all the camera equipment, the Soviets would say,

see, it's your spying equipment. And he would say, no, no, no, no. We're very keen ornithologists, and therefore all our crews are doing is using their camera equipments to photograph flora and fauna when they're out. And he would sit there straight-faced. all our crews are doing is using their camera equipments to photograph flora and fauna when they're out. And he would sit there straight faced. And I mean, they knew what we were doing and we knew they knew what we were doing, but it was just a question of that was part of the game that we were playing. So they would ram into you and try and tell us more of the game. That's

pretty dangerous, Dave. Yeah, it wasn't without risk. And in fact, two military mission guys were killed in that manner. One was Major Arthur Nicholson from the US military mission. He was shot off of an installation wall and the Soviets let him bleed to death in front of the vehicle. They wouldn't let the driver out. And so he bled to death in front of the vehicle and the other one was from the french mission a warrant officer mariotti who a vehicle rushed out of a barracks as they were passing and ran straight over the top of the vehicle and killed him outright we would be shot at on a number of occasions we'd be rammed and all that's it but for us, they didn't actually kill one of us. They did shoot one of our mission guys, and he spent a few weeks in an East German hospital,

but recovered. It's a shooting war. I mean, this is very real, isn't it? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was real. From the minute you left Potsdam and drove out the gate, you had to be on your wits. And we would go out from anything from two to five days completely self-sufficient in the vehicle three-man crew with the tour officer the tour nco which is what i was

and the tour driver and we'd be completely self-sufficient apart from getting fuel other than that we had everything on board that we needed, our food and sleeping stuff and all the rest of it. You listen to Dan Snow's history, I'm talking about intelligence gathering behind the Iron Curtain. More coming up. I'm a spy doing whatever spies do. But what am I going to whip out of my pocket next? Careful. In this special month of Patented, we're celebrating the 70th anniversary of James Bond by having a look at some of the inventions that have changed espionage. From gadgets and their creators to the cars and cocktails that make Bond look oh so effortlessly cool. Join me, Campbell, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a history of inventions,

where I will have my can on a string up against the walls of some of the best historians in this field. Look forward to your company. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Now tell me about the particularly dangerous mission you did in February 1987. Now tell me about the particularly dangerous mission you did in February 1987. Yeah, 1987 was a particularly busy year for all of us and me in particular. But the one that you're referring to is, so we had a task to look for a particular Soviet vehicle. We called it I-Probe Riverbeds, IPR. That wasn't its official name. But the idea of this vehicle was that it came to a river bank, or say the Rhine or something like that, and it would go into the river and travel along the bottom of the river. And it would survey it to make sure that it was

stable enough so that the Soviet tanks, all of which could snorkel, could then follow up and just drive straight into the river, go along the riverbed and up the other side. So this vehicle was a reconnaissance vehicle. And so we were deployed. We had an idea on a training area where it was actually driving around doing driver training. So myself and the tour officer got out of the vehicle. We parked it up in the woods. And then we walked about 100 meters away from the vehicle and got out of the vehicle. We parked it up in the woods and then we walked about a hundred meters away from the vehicle and got down on the corner of a bend where we knew this vehicle was going around driver training. And we had camera equipment and I had my dictaphone to make notes on as we, and this was November, it was really cold. And so we sat there and then the

vehicle came round and we got some really good photography of it etc etc however and i don't know what makes people do this but the vehicle commander just happened to look in our direction as we were behind the bushes he didn't see us but what he did see was our vehicle and so there was a massive amount of shouting. The vehicle came to a halt and we sat, froze in the bushes. The next thing, a Soviet vehicle, one of their, called a Waz 469, a Jeep, came hurtling around the corner, past us and up the track towards our vehicle. Our driver, we already had a contingency plan. He did a high reverse out and a J turn at the end of the woods and drove off and basically took them away from us out into the local village. So we sat there, we heard some gun

shots, about an hour went past, nothing happened. We were expecting any minute to see Soviet troops coming through the woods looking for us, but that never happened. So we sat there until after dark. We had an emergency RV already planned. So we walked to that and the driver had gone. Unbeknown to us, he'd been escorted out of the woods. He'd been stopped. He got a blown tire as he was hurtling out of the woods. And so he was stopped by the Soviets, questioned by them. And eventually he got out, changed the wheel on the G-Wagon, got back in and then drove back to Potsdam. And so we were then left on our feet behind the lines as it were. So myself and the tour officer walked about three or four kilometers to a village. This was in the dark about nine o'clock at night, got there.

And of course in East Germany, everything went to bed at nine o'clock at night. And we saw a gestatter or a pub knocked on the door. And it was one of those little, you know, have a look at us, let us in. And they were having a lock-in actually, all the locals. So we spoke to the landlord, told him that we were two allied military mission guys could we use his phone so he let us use his phone and we rang the british embassy in berlin told him to call our potsdam house and say that we were okay and that could our driver come back and pick us up where he left us we thought that that the pub lander would get into trouble if we stayed in the pub. So we came out and went and hid in a bus shelter at the end of the village on the road

where we knew our driver would come back down. But within about 30 minutes, the whole of the village was swarming with secret police, the narcs. So clearly that told us that the British embassy in Berlin's phones were all tapped by the East Germans so we spent about 12 hours behind the lines dodging vehicles and hiding in various places and then eventually our driver came back and of course it was very easy to recognize their the headlights of a g-wagon when you know your average vehicle in East Germany was a little Trabant. So we did stand out quite a bit. They came back and picked us up. And the result was the Soviets never knew that we were ever parted from the vehicle.

And it was astonishing how they didn't, when they stopped our driver, how they didn't put two and two together. If they'd found you outside the vehicle, would have lost your status in some way would you would you be in trouble well yeah we'd have been arrested and held and then the local commandant would have come down the soviet one because obviously we didn't recognize east germans and so we would tell them that we didn't recognize them and they had to get a soviet officer to come and see us and so the tour officer who could speak fluent russian and i could speak

german so between the two of us we could talk to anybody we would then be held and but what he would have made coming and finding two guys on their feet instead of in a vehicle we're not sure what they would have done about that but of course we had our camera equipment on us so when we knew that we might be taken we buried the camera equipment in the snow and made a note of where we buried it and put the film because it was in those days it was all the 35 millimeter strips of film we put them in our underpants just because obviously the film was the important thing and we used to use all Nikon camera equipment I went back three months later and of course the snow had all melted and there was my camera sitting in the middle of a wood.

So I immediately thought that it might have been found by the Stasi and booby trapped. So I put my 50 metres of parachute cord, gently tied it around the camera, took it off around a tree and then went 50 metres back and gave it a good yank. That was a standard procedure for checking for booby traps. And nothing went off. So I went back and picked the camera up, took it back to Berlin.

And our special section, who dealt with all the camera equipment, just cleaned it off, started it up, and it worked perfectly. So I spent three months out in the snow. So a good advert for Nikon cameras. Dave, this is an audio podcast, so people won't be able to see that you've got a bit of a smile on your face when telling me these stories. I mean, it sounds incredibly dangerous, but something you look back on with pride and even some excitement. Exactly. I mean, there's not many chances

when you're in the army to get up close and personal with your potential enemy. Not only that, but gather intelligence that you know will be hugely wanted by Western intelligence and also could give us the edge should we have ever gone to war. And so it was very satisfying to know that you were putting it to the enemy and getting away with it. So yeah, it was good times. Good times. There must have been moments though when you're behind the lines thinking, what the hell am I doing here?

I could be an older shot playing rugby. Yeah, but who would want an uninteresting life like that? We were all volunteers. And so I sort of knew what I was getting into. I'd heard about Bricksmith before I volunteered for it. And we all went and did a special duties course at the School of Intelligence, which was in Ashford then in Kent, where we learned particular skills and drills, mainly photography, recognition. I mean, we had to learn about 5,000 different pieces of Soviet equipment and you had to

be able to recognize it whilst you were driving at high speed, whilst you were in the dark, while you only saw the front left-hand glacier plate and the front road wheel. You had to be able to recognize what the kit was and report it. And we also learned counter-surveillance techniques was another thing that we learned so that we could de-NARC. All of this just led you to think, well, this is a pretty good job. And as it turned out, it was. Dave, were you a bit sad when the Berlin Wall came down? Yeah, I guess I shouldn't have been. But yes, we were all very sad. Because up till that point,

I think everybody knew where they were. We knew where they were and they knew where we were. And there was that massive dividing line down Europe, whereas, of course, once reunification came along and if you look up to the current date to date, nobody's really sure where the front line is anymore and it can be anywhere now. You know, it's very much asymmetric warfare, whereas at least during the Cold War, we knew where the enemy was and they knew where we were.

And I think things were a lot more stable then than they are now. How did you get your thrills after that particular job? Well, I was always very interested in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear matters, or CBRN, as it's called. nuclear matters or CBRN as it's called. And so when I finally left the military, I worked for a company that did hazard prediction so we could predict where these hazards went. And I developed a risk management side of the company and started a thing, VIP protection. So we would actually go into the field and guard people's bodies against CBRN hazards, as opposed to conventional security hazards. So bombs, bullets, and being taken hostage was somebody else's responsibility. But I would be looking after the customers or the clients' CBRN health and safety. Dave, do you feel like you're as close as you get in real life to being a James Bond movie or book? I've been asked this in the past about comparisons with James Bond. There were certainly no glamorous

women trying to chat us up. And one of the operations we did, Operation Tomahawk, where we were systematically scavenging rubbish dumps behind Soviet installations in the dead of night. So getting down and dirty, looking for bits of information that the Soviets had thrown out of their barracks was nothing like I'm sure James Bond never got into anything like that. and so the only slight comparison I might draw is whereby on our vehicles we could actually make the vehicles look different in the dark so we had a lighting array in the vehicles so we could for instance isolate the brake lights we could put our two little lights on and make it look like a trabant if it was going towards somebody we could make it look like a motorcycle just having one light on i guess that would be the only slight comparison that we might be able to get between a james bond type vehicle and some of the vehicles we operated in i don't know dave high speed car

chases people shooting at you there's a little bit more bond than you're giving yourself credit for i think well yeah it had its moments. Well, thank you very much indeed, Dave. Thanks for sharing your extraordinary Cold War adventures with us. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.