Dan Snow's History Hit - The Ultimate Cold War Spy Story

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

A Soviet double agent at the top of his game, a deadly game of cat and mouse with the KGB and one of the most daring escapes of the Cold War from the very heart of Moscow. In this archive episode, Dan talks to author Ben Macintyre about the life of Oleg Gordievsky and what might be the ultimate Cold War Spy story. Appalled by the brutality of the Soviet regime Gordievsky was recruited by MI6 whilst stationed in Copenhagen during the 1970s. For more than ten years he fed precious secrets to western intelligence agencies whilst rising up the ranks of the KGB eventually become the London station chief. Having been suddenly recalled to Moscow and following his drugging and interrogation it was time for Gordievsky to escape and so operation Operation Pimlico was launched.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We have got an episode from the Archive for you today. It's one of the classics, one of the classic episodes in the Archive. We've got Ben McIntyre, he's one of the biggest best-selling writers of history anywhere in the world. He came on the podcast to talk about Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky. He got to know Oleg, he researched and wrote his story, he became a best-seller. Absolutely extraordinary. His extraction from the Soviet Union to the West is James Bond stuff. That's all I'm saying. It's better than James Bond. Unbelievable. You're going to absolutely love it. This is a Cold War story like no other. Great to have Ben McIntyre on the pod. He's been on several times. He's a great

friend to everything we're doing over here. So hope you enjoy this rerun of the podcast. Hope you're also subscribing to historyhit.tv. It's our new digital history channel. It is the place to listen to all these podcasts without any ads, which is good. And also watch loads of history documentaries, which is really fun as well. So thank you. It's growing all the time. So head over to historyhit.tv as soon as you finish this. But in the meantime, enjoy Ben McIntyre talking about Gordievsky. this but in the meantime enjoy ben mcintyre talking about gordieschi ben i'm feeling old this is the this you're coming back on the podcast we're getting all the authors now second third time around we've been around for a while fantastic it's a sign

of enormous success dan you should not feel bad about it at all i'm thrilled to be back well i'm thrilled to have you because this is one of the most excited and anticipated books of the year. First of all, why do you keep getting all this amazing access? I think without false modesty, it's just luck, really. I mean, these stories, many of them have been around for a long time and people think they know them. But the truth is, they don't really know them because they know the sort of the original sort of news breaking story. So you can go back to some of these Cold War stories and actually tell them with real hope, granular detail. You can go right deep into it. And that's, I hope, what I've done with this one. How did you get onto this one? How did this one climb to the top of your wish list?

to the top of your your wish list i've always known about the ole gordievsky story ever since uh his exfiltration from moscow in 1985 gordievsky's been around in the story he became a sort of spokesman uh for the cold war but i knew that the real story had never properly been told partly because you couldn't at the time i mean it was such an incendiary event in the history of the Cold War that really going into detail into it would have been both dangerous for Gordievsky himself, but also would have kind of inflamed an already very tricky situation. So for about 20 years, the story was kept pretty quiet. But you obviously, there was something about it that you thought now's the time well without blowing the trumpet too hard ole gordievsky was the most important intelligence asset for the west in the latter part of the cold war i mean he really did most spies don't amount

in truth to a hill of beans because you know we have our people in their camp they have their people in our camp it all in the end cancels out theoretically it doesn't quite there are moments in history when spies make an enormous difference the enigma code i mean and lots of those deceptions operations during the second world war that i've written about but but ole gaudieschi is different i mean his the material he was producing for the West was going straight into the central cortex of British and Western intelligence. And it was actually fundamentally altering political policy. Not only that, it actually helped to avert what came very, very close to being a full-on nuclear confrontation. No one's ever really written about it.

But Gordievsky was in a unique position, and I'm happy to talk about it, because he was so good. He was so in the know inside the KGB. He rose to become head of the KGB in Britain, which meant that he had access to the safe. what the Kremlin was doing. He was able to tell the West what the Kremlin was thinking and what the Kremlin was thinking of doing. So he was two steps ahead. And I mean, we're getting ahead of the story here, but when Gorbachev first visited the UK, before he became the head of the communist leadership in the Soviet Union, Oleg Gordievsky was briefing him as the senior member of the KGB on what to say when he arrived. But what Gorbachev didn't know was that that briefing from Oleg Gordievsky was coming from MI6. So in fact, what was happening was Oleg Gordievsky was briefing both sides. So one of the reasons why that very, very important juncture in the Cold War was so successful, why Margaret Thatcher emerged saying, I can do business with this man, was because the business was being rigged by Oleg Gordievsky. He was scripting both sides, and that's never happened in history before. Why did Oleg Gordievsky become a traitor to the Soviet Union?

Did Oleg Gordievsky become a traitor to the Soviet Union? That's the central question of the whole book. Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB. His father was a KGB officer. His elder brother was a KGB officer. He was brought up in a special set of flats in Moscow that belonged to the KGB. He ate KGB food. He went to a KGB school.

He never really considered doing anything else. And you would have thought that that would have made him a perfectly obedient sort of servant of the KGB state. Actually, the reverse happened. I mean, he was trained at a KGB spy school, believe it or not, called School 101 in the Moscow countryside, a completely unconscious echo of the George Orwell Room 101, where he was trained in surveillance, in espionage techniques, in dead drops. I mean, he was a highly trained spy. But even before that point, he had begun to show a certain dissidence because he did a special course when he was at university in Moscow.

He had had access to Western newspapers. He was, and still is, a brilliant linguist, Oleg. And he spoke German. He read German very clearly. He was, and it still is, a brilliant linguist, Oleg, and he spoke German, he read German very clearly, and he was reading West German papers. He was one of the, you know, because they were in a special situation, he was able to have access to Western media. He'd already begun to kind of question the system that he was in. He happened also to be in East Berlin on a training course, sort of before he joined the KGB, but he knew he was going to join the KGB, and witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall

and was so stunned by this apparition, by this physical representation of what was effectively a kind of prison wall to keep these Germans in. It was a sort of, if you want, a sort of cathartic moment for him, I think. He saw this clear evidence of the brutality and hypocrisy of the Soviet state. And he began to think in a different way. Mind you, he didn't begin to leave the KGB for a good, I mean, to sort of distance himself for a good long time because he went through all the training courses. He was then deployed to Denmark in the in the actually in the late 60s

early 70s so he spent about three years there and he was a kgb officer undercover he was what they call a legal which meant that he was under diplomatic cover so technically he was part of the the soviet embassy in reality he was a kgb officer running illegals who are undercover spies of which there were very many in Denmark. And he was very good at it. A lot of it involved creating false identities and running these people undercover and using them to gather information. But while he was there, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia was crushed. The tanks, the Soviet tanks, in to destroy effectively a kind of liberalizing reform movement. And again, he was deeply, deeply shocked by this.

And in fact, he was so angry about it that he deliberately went to a telephone inside the Soviet embassy that he knew was bugged by Danish intelligence. intelligence and he rang his then wife and delivered a kind of rant about the crushing of the prague spring knowing or believing that it would be picked up by danish intelligence of course it wasn't they missed it they managed not to pick it up but what oleg didn't know was that he was already on the western intelligence radar because he had been spotted believe it or not going into a gay porn shop in Copenhagen and buying two magazines. Now, he was not gay, you know, but he was just interested. I mean, you know, he only took them home to show his wife. I mean, it wasn't, you know, but he was clocked.

He was clocked by Danish intelligence as a, you know, because a gay, secretly gay Russian KGB officer, they'd already clocked him as KGB, they knew he was KGB, is potentially blackmailable. So what's kind of interesting about this story is that Oleg was sending a sort of subtle signal to the West that he was available, which they didn't pick up. They believed that they were sending a subtle signal to him that they were ready to, because they tried a honey trap on him. sent a gay young danish guy very drunk at a party to kind of try and pick him up which didn't work for the simple reason that oleg wasn't gay and didn't notice

um but so you've got this moment when the two sides cross each other by mistake and they don't pick each other up only was then sent back to moscow um not not sent back was redeployed back to moscow still i mean he's a rising star in the KGB. But the dissident aspect of him is growing. He spent a few years in Moscow, nothing very much happened. He was then sent back to Denmark. Now, by this point, a friend of his, a student friend of his, a Czech called Stanislav Kaplan, had defected to the West.

He was a Czech intelligence officer. And one of the things that a defector does is he produces a long list of everybody he ever knew for Western intelligence. And one of those was Oleg Gordievsky. And on this list, he said Oleg was kind of dissident. He wasn't a fully paid up sort of Homo Sovieticus, if you like. So this piece of information cross-reffed with the stuff from the Danish intelligence and his name was flagged up on a file. So they prepared a sort of reception committee for him when he came back to Denmark and they began to actively see if they could recruit him. And what began then was a long and very complicated courtship in which a rather wonderful MI6 officer slowly began to try and peel Oleg off

and I won't give the game away but it's a it's a very in times very amusing game of cat and mouse as they try to reel Oleg in and eventually sure enough he he agrees to begin spying for the west and it's a combination of reasons really it's it's ideology there's a lot of pure ideology he was so alienated from the Soviet regime, he couldn't believe what he regarded as the sort of philistinism of the Soviet world, where he wasn't even allowed to listen to the classical music that he loved. So in a way, it was a kind of cultural rebellion as well.

But it contained also his rebellion and an awful lot of other things, which spying often does. I think he loved the adventure. He loved the romance. He loved the romance. He loved the secrecy. He loved the kind of double life. He was paid, not very much, but he was paid a small amount into a British bank account. And I think he also just loved the subterfuge. Every week he would go to a safe house in a suburb in northern Copenhagen, often carrying microfilm that he was bringing out of the embassy

at enormous personal risk to himself and downloading this stuff. And it was all being recorded and then sent back to Britain. But, of course, there's a problem if you're getting really good information, which is that if it's that good, you can't use it. Because if you start to use it... So, for example, Oleg was identifying Soviet assets in the West, i.e. spies that had been recruited by the West

who were operating in Western countries. Now, if you suddenly start picking all those up, if you suddenly start arresting them, that gives away your source. So MI6 began to gather this enormous amount of material that it couldn't use yet, because you've got to kind of sit on it until such a moment as you really can use it. But they also began to drip feed it to the CIA. And we'll maybe come back to this later in the story. But this was critical because bits of it were going to America, but it was always going in disguise.

MI6 would never say where it was coming from, and this actually sowed the seeds of Oleg's destruction. That sounds incredibly exciting. So we're dealing with 1968, we're in the 1970s now, are we? We're sort of in the mid-70s now, and Oleg is rising up the pole very quickly. But he knows... Are they helping him to rise? Is it like a Le Carre novel?

MI6 helping him to climb the greasy pole? Not yet, but they will. Yeah, I mean, there comes a moment in this story when MI6 starts to put the burners under it. But they know he's going to be summoned back to Moscow, because like all diplomats, they're on a sort of cycle. But they know he's going to be summoned back to Moscow because, like all diplomats, they're on a sort of cycle. And sure enough, Oleg goes back from his second posting in Denmark. But before he goes, he says to MI6, I need an escape plan.

I need to know that if I get caught or if I think I'm about to be caught, that I can get out. And so they began to frame up an escape plan. And this really is straight out of John le Carré because they really used their imaginations. A wonderful woman called Veronica Price began to frame up a way of getting him out. Now it was incredibly difficult to

get anyone out of the Soviet Union. MI6 had never exfiltrated a spy before. They'd never even tried. But they worked out there was one conceivable way of doing it which is that if they could get under under diplomatic convention diplomatic cars are not searched at the border it's a convention it's not a law and the soviet border guards would immediately search any car that they thought was was suspect that said theoretically diplomatic cars could drive through borders without being searched. wrap him in a special infrared blanket that would not pick up the infrared cameras as they went through the border,

and then they might get through the border into Finland. On the other hand, even if they did get through to Finland, the Finns were quite likely to arrest them and send him back again. So it was, you know, it was a really dangerous plan. The bit I love about it is the way they were going to set this signal off. If Oleg needed to be exfiltrated, he had to be seen on the corner of a particular street in Moscow, Kutuzovsky Prospect, at 7.30 on a Tuesday, and he had to be holding a Safeway bag, one of those plastic bags with a big red S on it. If MI6, and they policed this signal site for a decade,

every single Tuesday night somebody was watching that spot, whether he was in town or not, whether he was in Moscow or not, because it couldn't be out of sync. They couldn't be watching it, obviously, when he was in Moscow and then not when he wasn't, because that would create a pattern that KGB would follow. And, of course, the MI6 guys were followed the whole time. Now, if they saw this signal,

the way they showed Oleg that it had been accepted was they had to walk past him, make brief eye contact and eat a Mars bar or Kit Kat. Any English chocolate would do, but it had to be foreign chocolate and they had to wear a pair of grey trousers. So that was the signal that the escape was on. It sounds utterly pantomime and totally fantastic, but as you'll discover shortly, it was very important. I love it. Let me interrupt this now and just say, you spent time with him, didn't you? I spent a lot of time with Oleg. Yeah, a lot of time. I was counting them up the other day. I think I did something like 140 hours of interviews with him. And he had a most wonderful

recollection. He had the most incredible recall of and he still does really, of what went on in his life. And he'd never really told it before. He still lives in the safe house in Britain where he's been now for nearly 30 years. He's under very very very tight security needless to say has the security tightened up since relations with russia got a little frosty or has it been the same ever since he came across it's always been pretty tight i mean oleg was a prime target from the moment that he set foot in britain uh uh you know there um

yeah but that said it has got tighter since i mean nobody's taking any chances he's an elderly man now i don't think he's really a target but they're not taking any chances and what's his quality of life like i mean is he locked in his own house or does he potter about and do things he potters about he doesn't live under his own name obviously um he has great friends he's he does get out he's visited often by members of of of the service retired who regard him as a as a great mascot and hero amazing very cool somewhere in the uk he's there um i won't even ask about how whether you were wrapped up in infrared blanket to go and visit him but i'm not sure it was quite complicated yeah that infrared stuff can be very hot when you're right so he's in the 1970s they've got the escape plan worked out he's back in moscow what's going on next well one of the fascinating things about his return to moscow

was that they decided not to use him when he was in moscow they realized that it was just going to be too dangerous to try to make contact with him so so it was up to Oleg. If he wanted to make contact, he could. But there was no way for MI6 to contact him, even though he was very senior within MI6, within the KGB. So this is a kind of fallow period, really. And they're watching the escape for the escape signal, just in case he gets into trouble. Oleg, meanwhile, is learning English. Since he's being run by MI6, he's worked out that actually he could probably get a posting to England and I have to probably explain the reason why he's run by MI6 is because the PET which is the Danish intelligence service and MI6 have a very had and still have a very close relationship and it was thought that actually MI6 was just would be just better at running this they did it it jointly with the Danes, but really MI6 was kind of running the whole thing. And so Ole got himself posted to London. I mean, it was an extraordinary coup.

When the visa application landed on the case officer's desk in MI6, they couldn't believe that he'd managed to get himself appointed to London. So he arrived. He activated his – he had a get himself appointed to London. So he arrived, he activated his, he had a special telephone number to ring, he activated it. With incredible joy, he was greeted by his case officer and then began the most fertile period of all because Oleg was now in the political section

inside the KGB station, inside the Soviet embassy in London. And he was producing material of incredible value. I mean, really, there's never been anybody who was able to bring the material straight out. And every week he would meet at the safe house in Bayswater. They would lay on a sort of lunch of smoked salmon and granite bread and a bit of beer. And Oleg would just download everything he'd got. But more than that, he brought with him from Moscow, as it were, a kind of dowry. He had been through the archives of the KGB in Moscow, specifically looking for

British assets. Who had the KGB been recruiting? Who were they after? Who was active in London? Who were they trying to get? And the contents of those archives, he brought back from memory and downloaded them to London. And they contained some pretty astonishing names. For example, Jack Jones, a very famous, highly thought of TUC leader. Actually, I think he was a trade union leader, was described actually by Gordon Brown as being, you know, one of the greatest trade union leaders Britain has ever produced. But he was also a KGB agent. For many, many years, he had been run by the KGB and was producing some quite good information. By 1968, by 1970, he'd gone into kind of dormancy, really.

But one of the things that that early brought back was kind of evidence of just how useful he'd been another one was bob edwards a very um left-wing labor mp who had done such a lot for the kgb that he'd been awarded a special soviet medal um that was another one but the most important name of all i mean the one that really rocked MI6 and MI5 when he brought it back was a file codenamed Boot, Agent Boot. And it was a thick file. And Agent Boot was Michael Foote, the now former late leader of the Labour Party, who for many, many years had been in close contact with the KGB. But perhaps more important than that, he had been paid. He'd been paid quite a lot of money over the years. And this was all detailed, listed, sort of

meeting by meeting in the file, in the boot file. Now, one has to be very careful with Michael Foot because he's not a spy. I mean, spy is an overused word. He had nothing in the time when he was in contact with the KGB. He was producing information that was really just useful to the KGB. But it wasn't it wasn't secret. He had no access to nuclear secrets or things that were going to, you know, military secrets are going to change the course of the war. So he was he was. But he was considered he was he was termed an agent by the KGB, which means that they at least thought that he consciously knew what he was doing. And at the end of these meetings, money would be put into his pockets, into his overcoat, and he would shuffle off. Now, what he did with that money is kind of open to question. We don't really know.

he may have just used it and probably did use it to prop up Tribune which was the newspaper that he had edited and that was always in financial trouble and needed money but nobody really knows what the money was but went to but it was there was quite a lot of it and in the end it amounted to the equivalent of about 30 to 35,000 pounds was passed over to him. Now he eventually was downgraded in KGB nomenclature to a confidential contact which is kind of another grade down below agent and he did in the end sever contact with the KGB after 1968 after the Prague Spring. He really didn't have much else to do with it but he was still on the books And one of Ehrlich's jobs when he went to London, he was instructed to re-establish contact with Michael Foot. Now, of course, at this point, when this piece of information lands on MI6 and MI5, Michael Foot is leader of the Labour Party.

I mean, he's about to go into battle in a general election with Margaret Thatcher. It's possible, it seems unlikely to us now with historical hindsight, but at the time it was by no means certain that he was going to lose that election. There was a possibility that the future Prime Minister of Britain was going to be a former KGB agent. Now, you can imagine what effect this had within the corridors of secret power in Whitehall.

There was a crisis here about what to do with this piece of information. And in the end, what they did was passed it over to MI5, the security service, which passed it over to Robert Armstrong, the cabinet secretary, who had the decision about what to do with it. Now, of course, they couldn't really tell Margaret Thatcher. They couldn't tell the prime minister because this is such an important piece of political information. If that had got out, it would have destroyed Michael Foote's career in an instant. You know, it would have absolutely destroyed his electoral charges.

So it was kind of, in a way, it was too, again, too important a piece of information to pass to the people in power. So what Armstrong did was he sat on it. He didn't tell anybody. This is the man who, of course, coined the term economical with the use of the truth. During the spycatcher trial, he was pretty economical with this piece of information. And they just, you know, essentially they gambled on the expectation that Foote would lose the election, which, of course, he duly did. expectation that Foote would lose the election, which of course he duly did. It's interesting, all of this stuff, because it's evidence in a funny way that the reputation of the case,

I mean, Foote was an important person, but he was kind of the most important, you know, figure to emerge from this thing. In a way, what Oleg brought was evidence of what was not going on, i.e. the British establishment was not riddled with spies. I mean, everyone was terrified there was going to be another Philby, McLean, Burgess moment, that there were going to be lots of people that the KGB had picked up. What Oleg did was to produce evidence that, in fact, the KGB was quite weak in Britain. In fact, it was quite weak globally. It didn't have that much stuff. weak globally. It didn't have that much stuff. But one of the other things that Oleg did was he bought and then described an operation that the KGB had launched called Rian, Operation Rian, which was the belief inside the Kremlin that the West was planning a first strike. Now,

a first strike. Now, Operation Rian was an order that went out to all KGB stations to find evidence of an impending first nuclear strike by the West. The Kremlin genuinely, genuinely believed that actually, and it was a combination of Reaganite rhetoric and various other factors, Andropov believed genuinely that the West was ready to do this. Now, if you ask spies to look for something, on the whole, that's what they'll find you. I mean, it's the first rule of intelligence that you don't set the parameters before you set the task. Well, that was classically broken. And so, of course, the KGB began to produce this information, began to produce. I mean, some of it was frankly bizarre.

I mean, stuff like the fact that the lights might be left on in the defence ministry at night, the fact that, you know, they were even asked, I mean, one of the most bizarre things, they were told to keep an eye on bishops and bankers in case they were moving out of London, you know, in case there was going to be a retaliatory strike. But, I mean, joking apart, actually what this did, Operation Riam, was it convinced the West that actually this wasn't just, this wasn't, it was paranoia on the part of the Kremlin, but it wasn't unreal. There was a genuine fear. And it was one of the things that actually began to ratchet down the Cold War. When this stuff landed on Reagan's desk, he began to think, and we have strong evidence for this, that actually they were going too far. They were pushing somebody who, because of course, if the Soviet Union did believe there was going to be an impending first strike,

genuinely thought the button was about to be pushed, they would push the button first. And so it did lead to a kind of, as it were, to a kind of thawing of the Cold War. It was quite interesting. And Gordievsky was directly responsible for that. And in particular, there was an exercise called Able Archer, which was a sort of test, you know, deployment of Western troops. And it became very clear that actually in Moscow, this was interpreted not as a plan, not as a kind of rehearsal, but as the real thing. And in the end, it was a sort of Mexican standoff that pulled apart.

But again, Gordievsky's material was so good, was so accurate that actually Reagan began to kind of pull back. But as I said at the beginning, there's a problem here because all the material that was being sent, and increasingly this material was being sent in larger and larger volume to the Americans, but it was disguised. MI6 would never tell the CIA where it was coming from. It was always hidden behind lots and lots of smoke and mirrors because it's an axiom of intelligence that if you have a great source, you don't even share it with your best friends now the cia doesn't really like that it likes to know where everything is coming from because it's a kind of global intelligence agency and so the cia set up secretly a special task force effectively to spy on the

british to try to find out who the british were running that is absolutely brilliant i love that's the special relationship for you right there absolutely they worked it out it took them about a year and they spent a lot of money on it they spent a lot of resources on it they triangulated away and they worked out where the and this is how you do it you work out where the information is coming from who was there at that point, which potential KGB opposite, it kind of worked out pretty early on that it must be KTV. What they didn't know, however, the CIA was that their head of counterintelligence was about to go over to the KGB as a spy. This was a man called Aldrich Ames, who is now well known, this was a man called Aldrich Ames, who is now well known,

but at the beginning of 1985, he was pretty drunk, he was very disillusioned, he was extremely greedy, he had a very expensive new fiancée, he wanted money, and he was just about to start selling secrets to the Soviet Union. So what you've got is a perfect espionage circle here. You've got the KGB spying on the CIA, spying on MI6, spying on the KGB. This is the Danso's History. We're talking to Ben McIntyre about Soviet spies. More after this. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Come on then, what happened? Well, at this point, Oleg is rising up the pole in the KGB

in London. And you asked earlier whether the Brits helped him. Well, of course they did. They began to declare persona non grata, his immediate bosses. So they first of all threw out a man called Titov, who was his boss in the political section. So Oleg moved up into that section. They then brilliantly worked out a way of getting rid of a wonderful character

straight out of central casting called Arkady Guk, who was the head of the KGB in London. It's a big, bloated, brutal kind of drunken slob, really. But he was quite clever, too. He was very cunning. But they managed to get him ousted, too. So Oleg then moved up, and he became appointed the head of the KGB in London. So, effectively, by removing the people around him and above him, MI6 and MI5 managed to clear the path for him to go up.

It sounds very simple. It sounds rather obvious, too. I mean, if you were clever, and we'll come to this, and you noticed that Oleg's bosses were disappearing one by one, you might begin to put two and two together. He was appointed head of the KGB. It has to be said here he had not told anybody he did he he'd married for a second time early he didn't tell his wife what he was doing he had two young children he was he was operating alone and it's a very lonely business this but he

was at the in may 1985 a telegram arrived at the kgGB headquarters summoning Oleg back to Moscow to be anointed. He'd been appointed, but he hadn't been actually formally given the job of head of the KGB. Resident is the title. And the telegram said, come back to Moscow. We need to kind of – there has to be a formal laying on of hands, as it were. Moscow, we need to kind of, there has to be a formal laying on of hands, as it were. And I looked at this and thought,

and there was a high level discussion in MI6. I mean, everybody gathered, his case officers, you know, to discuss whether or not this was the moment to pull the plug on the case. Should they pull Gordievsky out?

Give him a new identity? Because he'd done noble work by this point. And it was an intense discussion. And in the end, it was really left to Gordievsky himself to make the choice. It's one of those interesting moments where two people can hear the same words and hear something completely different. the same words and hear something completely different. MI6, I think, thought they were genuinely saying to Oleg, you've done enough, you can quit, you can stay.

If you want to pull out, we'll understand. Of course, we'll be sad, we'll be regretful because we're about to hit the jackpot, but we will understand that. That's one side of what they said, but Oleg thought he heard something else. He thought he heard himself being

ordered really to go back to Moscow being told that it was his duty and somewhere the truth lies in between those two things but it's a pivotal moment and with incredible bravery and one can't overestimate this Gordievsky said I will go go back. I will go back. So he flew back to Moscow. By the time he landed, he began to think something was awry. I mean, he thought he could see more surveillance in the airport in Moscow than usual. The person who was supposed to send to pick him up had not arrived. He went to his apartment and he opened the top lock and he opened the second lock, but he couldn't open the door. And he couldn't work out but he couldn't open the door and he couldn't work out why the why he couldn't open the door well the third lock had been locked but he didn't have the key to the third lock he'd never used the third lock which

meant the kgb had been inside his his room inside his house because of course they're the only people who could have got in and out so it was a big mistake on their part to lock the third lock, and it gave it away. So from that moment, he knew he was a marked man. He knew he was in real trouble. And sure enough, he was under intense surveillance because the KGB had been told. They had been told they'd been tipped off. Now, it's long been a source of controversy about how the KGB learned this. It's pretty clear to me that Aldrich Ames was the source.

Aldrich Ames himself has tried to muddy the waters since and claimed that he didn't do it then, that he only produced the name later on. Aldrich Ames, by the way, is serving a very long sentence in Arizona. He ain't going to be coming out soon. But it's in his interest to muddy the water. It's almost certain that Ames is the source. He certainly did produce Gordievsky's name later on. He may simply have said, we know there's somebody spying within the KGB. When he met up with his KGB contacts in Washington, he may just have said to them, look, we know there's someone.

He may even have said, we know there's someone in the KGB station in London. But anyway, he said enough to set the KGB on Oleg's tail. What then started was this extraordinary game of cat and mouse in Moscow, where Oleg is kept and knew he was being kept under surveillance, watched really closely because the KGB wanted to catch him with MI6. They wanted a big spy scandal. They wanted to be able to expose everybody. And so they watched him. And they did more than watch him. They summoned him at one point to a meeting in a sort of special sort of dacha where he was drugged, where he was interrogated. He was given a sort of truth serum that was supposed to induce amnesia

afterwards. So he was not able to remember anyway. Amazingly, he managed to get through that without giving himself away. But it's an extraordinary moment. But he knew he was in deep, deep trouble. And he knew he was in even deeper trouble when his wife and daughters were flown back from London, because effectively, that was a a message you're all hostages now and so it's a funny moment when when funny it's a terrible terrifying moment when oleg knows he's under surveillance and the kgb knows he knows and they're they're playing this game to try and trap him and at this point he realized he had to get out. He had to escape. And this was a terrible moment for him, really,

because he had to decide whether or not to take his wife and children. And unbeknownst, I mean, obviously his wife, Leila, had no idea that he was a double agent. She knew he was a KGB officer. She had no idea that he was spying for MI6. And MI6 had made provision for all of them to get out. They were going to take two cars up to the border. The little girls would be injected with a soporific drug. They'd be wrapped in, I mean, it was an incredibly dangerous project.

They were going to be wrapped in special infrared blankets. There would be a child and an adult in the boot of two cars, and then they would try and drive them through the border. So Oleg spent a terrible, long, agonising night of the soul trying to work out whether or not he could take his family. And he decided in the end he could not. And it's the sort of emotional... It's really the... I mean, it's the most difficult and painful moment of Oleg's life, I think. And one, in truth, that I think he himself would admit that he's never really recovered from.

But... on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week On July 15th, 1985, a man was standing with a Safeways bag on the corner of Kutuzovsky Prospect in front of the bread shop and he was spotted by MI6.

And they walked past him holding a Mars bar which they ate and so the whole thing was rolling God I'm breathless here and so how long did he have to wait? Well his job was now

to throw off surveillance, I mean he was being followed the whole time, he'd managed to throw them off long enough to get to the signal site they picked him up again the next hour when he went to go and see his father and all. So his job was to take a train, throw off surveillance, take a train up to the Finland

from the Finland station and get to this lay-by about 30 miles south of the Finnish border. At the same time, two MI6 officers had to perform what was in effect an amateur dramatics performance for the listening KGB bugs, because all of their apartments were bugged and they knew it. So they had to come up with a story for the KGB that would look plausible. So the wife of one

of the MI6 officers pretended to have a bad back and performed the role of sort of invalid for the listening bugs of the KGB inside their apartment, because that was their excuse for having to get to Helsinki. So she said, oh, my back is really, really sore and I think I need to go to Helsinki. And her friend, the next door neighbour, said, oh, well, I think I'd better come with you. So this was an elaborate way of convincing the KGB that they genuinely had to go and see a doctor in Helsinki and the husbands would have to come along too. It was all cover. And somewhere in the KGB archives is an enormous transcript of what was essentially a kind of amateur dramatics performance by MI6.

And it's actually, we discovered afterwards, it's one of the things that most infuriated the KGB was that the wives of these officers had sort of been complicit in this plan. So the timing was down to seconds. I mean, down to seconds. They had to. So what you've got is you've got two prongs of this going on at the same time, the two MI6 cars, which are being followed by KGB cars, have to somehow throw off the KGB cars for long enough to scoot into this lay-by, pull Oleg out of the underbrush, wrap him up, give him some tranquilizers, and then keep going fast enough that the KGB won't necessarily realize what's happened. fast enough that the KGB won't necessarily realise what's happened.

And I won't give it away by saying what happens, but it is down to seconds. Oleg is living, he won't give anything away, so he's living in Britain now, you've already said that. Of all the people involved in this drama, how many were you able

to talk to? Well, that was one of the incredible breaks here, was that through Oleg I managed to get access to every single case officer that had worked on the case. So I was able to kind of really drill down into the kind of not just the hour by hour, but the minute by minute moments of the story, which has been an incredible privilege. And I've been so lucky and so fortunate they've been so lucky and so fortunate that they've been so generous with their memories. Of course, their identities are all disguised in the book. I'm not able to reveal who they are. But that was really the sort of gold dust of this

story, was being able to talk to everybody. And if you have that many memories, if you have that many recollections, you can end up with a with a really i hope with a really rich patina of what actually happened and then when you combine it with oleg's own prodigious memory you have a pretty amazing storehouse of material what happened to his wife and daughters that's one of the tragic aspects of this story is that Leila Gordievsky, who was staggered by this. I mean, she was on holiday with her family in the Caspian. She had no idea. She knew Oleg had been recalled from

Moscow, but she also was a, she herself was KGB in the sense that both of her parents had been KGB officers. She too had been brought up in the KGB. So she was, you know, she was part of the system. And she knew he was a KGB officer. She had no idea that he'd been spying for Britain for as long as he had or at all. And so it came as an appalling shock to her.

And she was multiply interrogated when Oleg escaped. She was effectively kept under house arrest for six years, never really knowing what had happened. I mean, she refused for the longest time to believe that he could actually have been a, you know, could actually have betrayed the KGB. I mean, one of the reasons that Oleg didn't take her, he says, is that he couldn't quite trust her. He believed he couldn't quite, he didn't quite know whether she might not tell the KGB. She says she wouldn't have done, that she would have given him time to escape. She doesn't necessarily say she would have gone with him,

but that's an impossible question to ask. I mean, I've met and interviewed Leila. It's an impossible question to ask someone because, as she rightly says, how can you answer that until you're in that situation? But eventually the truth did dawn. I mean, she realised that he had done this. and a long campaign meanwhile was being launched by Britain to try and persuade the Soviet Union to allow this family to be reunited and to Thatcher's immense credit

every time she met Gorbachev she would bring up this subject she would say what about the family they need to be reunited but the KGB was furious. I mean, absolutely livid about what had happened and effectively kept a look. to happen and they were reunited in in london the girls were were flown back at the same time but the marriage was effectively destroyed i mean the level of you know it's it's almost impossible to put oneself into this situation you know and betrayal is is sometimes the story of marriage but this is betrayal on a on a on a complicated complicated and altogether different level.

And the marriage didn't survive. And that, I think, you know, is one of the tragedies of this story. I mean, spying, outside of fiction, spying doesn't produce happy endings, usually. It's a complicated, messy, complex, confusing, contradictory business. And so, I mean, Oleg is a very interesting and complicated man himself. I think he would admit as much. He is, you know, he can be very difficult sometimes. He can be complicated.

He's had a very complicated life. I think he's one of the loneliest people I think I've ever met, but he's also one of the bravest. And in fact, I think he is the bravest person I've ever met. For a decade, he knew that a tap on the shoulder, one slip, and he was going to be arrested, tortured, and then executed. I mean, the stakes were incredibly high. So there is a kind of raw, extraordinary courage to Erleg and his story that is in my experience unique in

espionage. Does he regret anything? Was he proud of what he did? He's an intensely proud man. I think he, I know he feels that what he did actually changed the course of history. And he's right.

I mean, it is an astonishing achievement. It came at a very, very heavy price. And he knows that. But I think he also feels that it was probably in the end a price worth paying. Well, this is incredibly exciting. The book is called? It's called The Spy and the Traitor. Amazing. Can't wait. Thanks so much for coming on the spy and the traitor amazing can't wait thanks so much for coming on the podcast and telling us all about it a huge pleasure thank you Dan okay folks this week I'm delighted to be partnering with a new film called Vakuria for this section of the podcast you know me I love historical drama and this is one of the best one of the most important periods in our history it's pretty important because the period in which humanity managed

to almost destroy itself in a thermonuclear war so it's exciting this film is a true life spy thriller the story of an unassuming british businessman greville wynn i mean coolest british name of all time played by the exceptional bened Benedict Cumberbatch obviously always the mark of quality for any movie he's recruited into one of the greatest international conflicts in history and it releases only in cinemas from the 13th of August so it's actually a crazy story this at the behest of the UK's MI6 and a CIA operative who for the purposes of this movie is played by the marvellous Mrs Maisel's Rachel Brosnan. He forms a covert, dangerous partnership with the Soviet officer Oleg Pengovsky. This is true, he did actually in real life. Played by Merab Nedidze. In an effort to

provide crucial intelligence, need to prevent a nuclear confrontation and defuse the Cuban missile crisis. What I like about the film is that the actors the filmmakers have very cleverly captured the look and feel the cold war and you do get a sense of the very real threat of a nuclear war and that's super important because if you talk to people who are alive at the time who were involved in the negotiations the discussion at the time the crisis at the time they were very aware that this could easily lead to nuclear war. If, like me, you're fascinated by this era of history, you must see this incredible untold, based on a true story, of Wynne the unsuspecting salesman who becomes a spy during the Cold War. I think it's important to remember that the world

in the mid-20th century was divided. There were two giant alternatives how to organise our society, capitalist and socialist or communist models. And that wasn't just how to organise government, how you appoint, elect governments. It was down to your everyday behaviour, what you earned, what you could eat, what you could buy, what you should think. It's difficult to understand this now, but there were these two competing ideologies. And at the time, in the mid-century, it was not at all clear which one was going to win. In a way, there's nothing new about superpower rivalries, although this was a truly global one for the to win. In a way there's nothing new about superpower rivalries although this was a truly global one for the global era and of course new technology had given this rivalry

a very different aspect a terrible aspect you know compared to you know Athens and Sparta or Britain and Russia in the 19th century or Britain and France in the 18th century. This is a superpower rivalry in which either side had the ability to unleash weapons of mass destruction unlike any in history. Atomic weapons like the one used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and hydrogen weapons are an entirely different league to any weapon that's ever been wielded by humans before. What was at stake really was, if not the end of life on the planet, certainly the end of life as we know it on planet Earth. There was no way of stopping nuclear missiles

in previous wars previous rivalries you can plan to intercept a french invasion fleet in the channel and indeed that's what happened on several occasions you'll know listen to me bang on about on this podcast there's no way to be sure you can shoot down every single nuclear arms bomber in the enemy's fleet so the only way of protecting yourself is to build a big nuclear arsenal yourself and threaten the other side with annihilation. You will annihilate us, but we will destroy you. Hence the expression mutually assured destruction. MAD, the useful acronym MAD for short. The Soviets by October 1962 had a few dozen intercontinental ballistic missiles. So missiles that was impossible to shoot

down. They were primitive, they might not have worked very well, but clearly capable of inflicting enormous casualties on the US and our allies in Western Europe. The USA, on the other hand, had 170 of these missiles. It's very, very quickly building more. They had eight ballistic submarines, a separate arsenal. Those are each capable of launching 16 nuclear missiles. They can go up to nearly 3,000 miles. So you can park a submarine in the North Sea and strike Moscow, for example, very easily with those. And there was this huge rivalry in the 1960s as to who could build more weapons. JFK, we think of JFK as a kind of great peacemaker and some progressive president. Now we forget he actually won the election in 1960 in

large part because he terrified the Americansicans to believing there was a missile gap the soviet union was actually ahead of the us and the republicans were not taking national security seriously enough if you can believe that so this was a hot topic it was hugely important the soviet union also had something like 700 medium-range ballistic missiles, so places like Britain would have been easy prey for the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war. The island of ours would have been completely destroyed. All in all, nuclear warheads, including ones carried by submarines, ballistic missiles, but also mainly carried by aircraft at that point, there were 27,000 US nuclear warheads at that point, and about 3,000 or 4,000 US nuclear warheads at that point and about three or four thousand Soviet ones

so plenty to cause unimaginable damage. This technology on both sides created paranoia. There were some generals, military thinkers, who thought the only way to truly protect yourself was to launch such a massive pre-emptive strike on the enemy that you try and knock out their entire nuclear arsenal before they have a chance to deploy it. The problem is there was no 100% guarantee and once you launch your strike even if a few nuclear missiles got away, slipped out from under your attack, it could cause catastrophic damage to example the eastern seaboard of the USA. But it was all part of this idea of deterrence and one way in which the Soviets believed that they could fast-track deterrence in the early 1960s was to take advantage of Cuba,

to put some of these medium range ballistic missiles in Cuba. A little island just 100 miles or so off the coast of Florida. The USA after all had ballistic missiles in Turkey so it didn't seem like a huge leap that the Soviet Union should base them in Cuba. Both sides in this period got vast intelligence agencies, had huge resources to try and work out what the other was thinking, what was going on. And this is where Wynne comes in. November 1960, the British Security Services recruits a businessman who frequently visited Eastern Europe.

He was called Greville Wynne. And they wanted him to act as a spy, really a courier, to be honest, to deliver messages and receive answers from a Soviet agent, Oleg Penkovsky. He'd made contact with the West, and he was keen to send messages about the size and scale of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. He did send the West the first information about Soviet plans in Cuba which in turn allowed the Americans to send observation aircraft over missile sites before those sites were fully operational. So he gave the Americans decisive

advantage in the upcoming Cuban Missile Crisis. He was then arrested. He was questioned. We can only imagine what that involved. And he was executed. In real life, President Kennedy may have benefited enormously from his intelligence in the crisis that shortly followed over Cuba. Cumberbatch is obviously brilliant in this film. He transports us back to the period.

They also go to a lot of effort, the filmmakers, to include actual quotes and historical records from the time. It's a haunting moment in the film where you hear JFK's words, weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. The Cold War tension in the film is so palpable, you've got to see it in the cinema. No point in seeing it at home. You're not going to get the same atmosphere.

Go and see it in the cinema. The Courier is releasing only in cinemas from August the 13th. Book tickets now at www.thecouriermovie.co.uk. That's www.thecouriermovie.co.uk. Thank you for listening to this segment today, brought to you in partnership with The Courier. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, made it to the end of another episode. Congratulations, well done you.

I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do here at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give a little rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account.

So please, however, don't do that. It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us. I really appreciate it. See you next time.