Oh What A Time... - #81 Spies the Sequel (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re returning to a much loved subject: spies. We’ll be hearing about the British spy William Oliver, the origins of MI5 and MI6, plus how the Stasi operated in East Germany.Elsewhere, this week we’ve been discussing exactly how massive milk used to be; we can agree from ‘Milk Bars’ to sponsoring the football league cup, it was simply an enormous beverage. If you’ve got anything to add on the golden age of milk, you can do so via: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Welcome back to part two of Oh What A Time and our episode on spies. I'm going to start this part by talking to you boys about one of Britain's most important spies. This is a man by the name of Kay. Are you aware of Kay? Have you heard of Kay before? No. No. Okay. So Kay is a man who helped to create and then run the security service MI5. Now it's not surprising you don't know much about Kay, and this really blew my mind this fact because although MI5 was formed in 1909, do you know when the government first formally acknowledged its existence? How long it took for the government to…

Oh, like bizarrely recently, wasn't it? Yeah. Have a hazard of guess. When do you think the government finally admitted that MI5 existed? 1970s. 80s. Later. When in the 80s? 89. Correct. 1989. 80 years. It's mad, isn't it? Before the government even admitted this kind of organisation existed. But I know where the office is. Yeah, but did they claim it was something different back then? I haven't checked that actually. Mason- No, no, no. But what I'm saying, every time I drive past the office, I think everyone who's walking in there is a bloody spy.

Al- But do you know what I do? You ever go past that building on the... Is it the south of the Northern River? I can't remember. In London. Mason- I can't remember. Yeah, but it's a very famous looking building. Toby- Intimidating looking building. Next time you go past it, look at all the satellites and weird things on the roof. What does all that do? Spying stuff. Mason- That's my bet. Either that or Sky Sports. Toby- How many freeview receivers have they got in there? It's on the south side of the river on Vauxhall Bridge. I go past it quite often. I cycle past

it. I look at everyone walking in with prep bags. I think, hang on. Back from a spying mission in France. That is a really good point. That must be a bit of a bizarre place to work around where the people you're meeting at lunchtime in, you know, going to get their itsu. Yeah, you're a spy, mate, no? No. What are you doing going in there? I'm just using the toilet every day. I love using different toilets, different ones in my office, so I'll just go in there.

Why are you wearing a long Mac and sunglasses in July? I don't know, I'm just, because I'm ill. I'm ill again. So yeah, so it was 80 years from 1909 to 1989 before the government finally acknowledged it existed. This was through the introduction of the Security Service Act. That's what it was known as. Before that point, people had no idea it existed. It started off, as I say, in 1909. It was created originally though, as the Secret Service Bureau. That was what it was known to begin with. And it was given the task of rounding up and identifying enemy spies. That was the initial idea of it, particularly those from Germany, a role at which the Bureau seemed to be particularly good at.

Overseas intelligence operations were directed by a different spy, not Kay. This was directed by someone who was given the code name C, but was actually called Mansfield Smith Cumming of the Royal Navy, which does feel like that's like a proper old school early 20th century spy name, isn't it? Mansfield Smith Cumming. If I was a member of a rival spy network, I would pop open the phone book and spot his name and go, that's your spy. There you go. I'm taking the rest of the day off. How did you do it? I was trying to imagine if Bond had been Mansfield Smith Cumming and his phrase, the name Smith Cumming, Mansfield Smith CumCumming and his phrase, the name Smith-Cumming,

Mansfield Smith-Cumming. It doesn't feel quite as sort of cool and snappy, does it? Yeah. And then the baddie just goes, sorry, what? What? I'm going to have to write that down for me. He's called James Bond. If he'd been called Mark Evans, it's just, what's your name?

Simon. Are you a bird? Are you a bird? No, I can't. I can't lie. They've never got normal names, have they? They could say Smith Cumming is that double barreled. You go, no, but this is, and then you raise a shotgun. Oh, lovely.

OK, get this guy on the writing team for the next Bond film. There you go. Because that is good stuff. Because Roger Moore knew that humour was absolutely integral to Bond. I think we've gone away from that a little bit in recent years. So let's get some humour back into Bond, into the franchise, I think. Let's be less nervous. Let's enjoy ourselves again. OK, so Smith-Cumming, he is setting up the overseas operations. However, when the Secret Service Bureau was reorganised in 1910, Smith's Cummings overseas section was renamed the

Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as? MI5. For a point. MI6. MI6. There you go. So I didn't know this. MI5 basically deals with things that- Internal. Exactly. And MI6. Yeah, external.

Yes. So MI6 is overseas. I'll give you an interesting little side point about the Smith Cummings guy, the guy who set up MI6. He had the unusual habit of always writing in green ink. That was his thing. Which gave rise to it. He's a murderer. Well, it gave rise to a widely held notion that anyone who used green ink was either very eccentric or a spy. So this was a real thing. If anyone was seen to be writing in green ink, there'd be suspicion that you were a spy. Red ink, teacher. Everyone else, normal, blue or black. Green spy. I get it.

Spy, exactly. Pastel colours, teenage girls. I think that's a sort of tricky situation. So let's say you are Smith Cumming, you're writing in green ink, that's your thing, and then a rumour starts up that anyone who writes in green ink is a spy. Do you stop writing in green ink, that's your thing. And then a rumour starts up that anyone who writes in green ink is a spy. Do you stop writing in green ink, or does that bring attention to the fact that you don't want people to know you're a spy? Yeah, tough ones, no. What do you do? What's your option there? Or do you sort of slowly move towards blue,

in slightly less green ink each time, so people'd sort of go green, sort of jade, turquoise, sky blue, navy blue, and then black. You're going to end up on black. And at every point you can just go, no, I've always written in this colour. What are you worried about? Now, do you have any information that you can give me from your embassy? I don't know what you're talking about. What about invisib- I thought you were going to say Invisible Ink. That was big for a while

when I was at school. Yeah, that was big. But you used to get it in joke shops. There was a bit of a joke shop, spy shop crossover, I think, for a while. Yes, I think that's a good observation actually. Yeah, for laughs and spying. Yeah, Invisible Ink is still massive. My son's got a spy kit. He got a spy kit a few months ago. And invisible ink's in there. He loves it.

God, they're recruiting early, aren't they? I'd have my say. They really are. Well done. You just outed your son. Yeah. They used to recruit at Oxbridge. Now they're going to nursery schools. You go downstairs, he's gone into hiding. He looks sneaky, that little kid. They can fit in the air conditioning units and all this sort of stuff. They're far more sneaky. I would be such a shit spy. God. Imagine being an informer. Reading that bit, the first bit, really stressed me out. Like, being inside, having a double life, spying on people. The fear that you would be outed at any moment must be all. The guilt as well, knowing who I am, the guilt of fibbing to someone as well would be an issue.

Will Barron Well to save your country, oh I get it. You hate your country. Neil Milliken You're not patriotic. Will Barron You want us to be taken over, good, I get it, I understand that. Neil Milliken So very briefly, you touched on it, L there, where else is green ink now used? You nearly were correct actually. Banks? Schools. So there's been a huge shift towards green ink because it's seen as less aggressive than red ink. So teachers are

encouraged to use green ink nowadays rather than punishing red apparently. I don't know how much easier it is to get F- written in green than it was in red, but still that is the point. So really in schools green ink hasn't become a thing. It's encouraged. It's less angry. It's the way it's seen. I didn't know that. Okay. There you go. Right. But we're not here to talk about C and MI6. We're here to talk about K. His real name – here we go again – is once again, is a classic spy name from this point, Vernon George Waldegrave Kell. That's Vernon George Waldegrave Kell. So once again, open the phone book, this guy's

a spy. Will Barron Yeah, he was either going to be Viceroy of India or a spy. You've got so few options. I mean, all the options are good ones, but there's so few things you can do if you've got a name like that. Will Barron So he was born in Great Yarmouth, 1873. He saw military service during the Boxer Rebellion in China in the turn of the 20th century. This is where he began to get involved in intelligence work.

He was aided by his remarkable capacity with language and he had a cover story, which was as a foreign correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. That's what he told people he did. I was thinking about that for you, El. If you were a spy, that would be too formal for you. I've decided you go under the name of features writer for shoot magazine, would be. I think would have to be what you went with. Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to work out if, I don't know, how many kick ups with a load of old elastic bands of Nicias Jr. can do. And that's why I'm in the country, actually.

What are you going with, Chris? What's your journalistic alibi? That seems to be the approach here. What about cartoon writer? I think that's a risky one, a bearing one you can't draw. Can you? That's an insane decision. West Ham, in case West Ham get into Europe again, you are doing analytics on teams they might face in the Europe conflict. Oh, that's nice. That's really good.

Or just the spot the ball section. Yeah. So there you go. Perfect. So in 1902, Kay returns to Britain and he's tasked with studying military intelligence on Germany, which alongside growing public anxieties about Germany's ambitions as an imperial power at that time led to the creation of an intelligence bureau designed to study exactly that phenomenon.

Now what's fascinating about this is the context. Would you like to guess, aside from the sort of global news, where a lot of these public anxieties about overseas spies were stemming from? Why there was this fear about German spies, why there was... The public were just increasingly stressed about it and they wanted something to be done. Do you know why that is? It's really interesting this. Why the British public were worried about German spies. Yes. Yes. In the early 20th century, why the British public were worried about spying and overseas spying on Britain. What it was that really sort of kickstarted a fear here and led to the need

for an organisation of something to try and deal with it. It's one of the key catalysts. I'm going to guess it's the royal family. Not the royal family, no. Would it have come from popular culture? Like a lot of people read Sherlock Holmes' novels or something. Exactly. That's exactly it. There was a recent boom Like a lot of people read Sherlock Holmes novels or something? Yes, exactly. That's exactly it. There was a recent boom in the popularity of the spy novel around this time. So, Erskine Childers had The Riddle of the Sand, that was published

in 1903. Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, 1907. G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday in 1908. And by the time Conrad's Under Western Eyes was published in 1911, the genre was fully established with even Sherlock Holmes being turned into a government spy hunter, sort of double agent thing. So this created this sort of real interest in the general public about spies and a genuine concern that we were being spied on and that we needed something to sort of deal with it. And this is one of the things that kind of led to the thought process that maybe an organisation could be set up to balance this out, to counter

out that. Because of public pressure. That's extraordinary. Exactly. There was concern in general public about this and it coincided with this. It's amazing really, isn't it? The impact that popular culture can have on something. This organisation is set up in secret, admittedly, and K works there. Although, and he kind of runs it to begin with, although he's largely desk bound, it's worth saying, because of chronic asthma, which meant the intelligence would come to him and then he would act. They could hear him eavesdropping on the phone.

It's a phone tap. What makes you say that? Exactly. Okay, we know it's you, mate. What are you doing? Put the receiver down, mate. We're not going to... No! Not at all. I can tell him being on the phone's tapped because you hear a little click at the start of the call. I think it's a lot more obvious than that actually. Will Barron Foreign powers would always have their meetings on the top floor now as well because there's no way he's not going to walk up to listen in.

There's no way. He's not going to do that. I keep thinking about Bond once again, the idea of how it would have changed things if he was asthmatic. I'm imagining that opening scene where he comes in and he fires the gun and there's a circle around him. It's that but with an inhaler. So he walks in the middle of the screen and there's a circle around him. It's that but with an inhaler. So he walks in the middle of the screen after the inhaler. James Bond themed. Glass of milk at the casino. Oh yeah, that's nice.

A healthier Bond. But even though Kay was at his desk, he was incredible at his job. He forged close relations with the chief constables around the country, some of whom were extremely enthusiastic both about spying on their local populations and registering potential threats. None more so than the chief constable of Glamorgan, there's a guy called Lionel Lindsay, who maintained, this is what he kept, vast registers at the constabulary's headquarters in Cardiff. He deployed surveillance photography. He sent undercover officers to attend almost every political meeting held, so much so that

Kell had to tell him to calm down a bit. He had these people working for him. A lot of these chief constables were working with him, but a lot of them were quite overzealous about it. But Kell's great success came during the First World War when he broke the entire German spy network almost in one go. So he arranged for the secret registration of foreign nationals, some 30,000 people, and then he used this information to narrow down on the true extent of German espionage, which in this case was

a small group of 22 people determined to capture British naval secrets. In all, 31 German spies were put on trial during the First World War with at least one executed for treason at the Tower of London. However, Kell, or Kay, was convinced that there was a wider conspiracy. And with conscription introduced in 1916, he began to add anti-war campaigners and those opposed to conscription to his list of subversives. That's often what happens, isn key sketches. It broadens out. Communists followed. And after the Russian Revolution in 1917, by then MI5 had a cross referenced index of a million entries and personal files of some 40,000 individuals. Which is amazing when you think this isn't done by computer, this is done by hand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. A slow, painstaking process. However, I'll finish with this, despite his incredible achievements, after the First World War, Kay was put in a difficult position. His relationship with the rival intelligence organizations, which is MI6, a special branch, was such that he was constantly having to defend the work of his own bureau to save it from being shut down. Even though there was his incredible success in World War I, there was threat of it being downsized and cut down. So in fact, by the outbreak of the Second World War, MI5 was so small, there was only 330 staff compared with 850

in 1918. That's extraordinary. It was quickly overwhelmed by the workload and Kell was made to pay the price and he was pushed into retirement and a younger man was given the job in his place and he died in 1942. So he didn't know how Britain won the war. He didn't, exactly. Yeah, remarkable. It was said of him after his death that he was a calm man, a modest man, a patient individual, if a little inflexible is the way they described it. Here's a little example which I quite like to end. Early in the First World War- Like Kevin Keegan.

Exactly. Early in the First World War, Kell refused to attend any cabinet meetings held on a Sunday on the grounds that he had to attend church. So even at the beginning of the war, during a war, he's like, no, this is my thing. And indeed it was MI6 and the Greenink Brigade that went on to have the last laugh and they benefited most from the romance of subsequent spy literature, not least James Bond novels and the work of John Le Carre. But you know, MI5, their incredible work Right, part three. I am talking about the Stasi in East Germany. And a couple of months ago, if you'd asked me to name things about East Germany that I knew when East Germany was a communist country between 1949 and 1990, the stars would have been one of the things I'd have said, one of the first things I'd said actually. And then, oh what a time full-timers, the subscribers who get

bonus podcasts will know that we do book reviews. And it was my turn last time and I, for my book review, I did Beyond the Wall East Germany, 1940-1990 by Katja Heuer, which I absolutely loved. And it's had glowing reviews. As I said in the Boneless Podcast, actually, certainly in the UK, it's had less favourable reviews in Germany from what I can tell, but the reviews across the board in Britain were, you know, unanimously positive. And I loved it, but it is a revisionist look at East Germany. And I came out of it thinking, wow, you've got full employment. Women's rights were far improved and you had free childcare and all these very, very educated workforce and all these living standards had improved by the 1980s. Lots of people had a car, lots of people had a fridge and a washing machine, all this kind of

thing. Will Barron At times you made it sound like Elysium, like it was sort of this. Will Barron I wouldn't say I'd go that far. But, you know, Katja was born in East Germany. You know, she has very vague memories of the wall coming down in 1989. And also, I've met East Germans who are old enough to remember it as you know, communist East Germany. Like Angela Merkel, I've not met Angela Merkel, but Angela Merkel is one. And often there is a phenomenon where they are very nostalgic for the old way. There's actually a German word for this, for nostalgia for East Germany. Ostalgia, I think the word is. You know, I did obviously talk about the Stasi in that,

and I said, you know, there are two sides to the story, of course. But now we're going to talk about the Stasi. So it was a notorious organization. It developed in East Germany after the Second World War. So the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, as a percentage of the population, it sort of employed an awful lot of people. So in the Gestapo, the Nazi predecessor,

there were about 7,000 Gestapo employees for a population of 66 million. That's about 0.1% of the population. In East Germany, there were 91,000 Stasi employees, and that's for a population of 16.5 million, so 0.6% of the population. So it was wide and far reaching. Now as historians of the Gestapo have demonstrated,

its work largely relied not on hard intelligence, but rather on the sporadic and voluntary information provided by the public, so neighbours with scores to settle, imaginative inventions, etc. Now the Starsey on the other hand, not only took the willingness of people to inform on their neighbours, but they formalised it into a system of surveillance. But also it created an entire spectrum of collaboration with instructions on how to train, meet, report, analyze, and control would be informers. So at their height, voluntary informers, this was, I was amazed by this,

trebled the size of the Stasi and made about 1.5% of the entire East German population into some kind of intelligence operative. It's incredible, isn't it? Yeah, there's lots of like people spying on neighbours or like performing in their neighbours to settle scores and things like that. Have you ever seen the film? We should do a watch along with this film, The Lives of Others. Oh no, I've not seen that actually. How the Stars He Operated. It's about a 2006 film. It's amazing. Oh, okay. Yeah, we should watch that.

It's definitely my first nomination for a watch along, because it really details what it was like for those people. Okay. Now, each residential building had its own designated informer, and they reported their findings to the local police station. What was that? Each what did? Each building?

Each residential building. So if you lived in a block of flats or something, there was a designated informer. Like a sort of janitor. Our street's got a WhatsApp group, but a lot of it is to do with bid collections. And things being stolen from the porch, which is a big problem where I live. But you're relaying all that information to the government, aren't you? Because you are the... You're the spy on your street, yeah. Absolutely. Straight to Keir Starmer.

So each residential building had its own designated informer and they would report their findings to the local police station, but no matter how minor. So if a relative or a friend stayed overnight or if a particular radio station was being listened to or if a party was held. So informers were given a name, Inoficiel Mitobaita, or IMs, and it's thought that in the mid-50s, 1950s, there were as many as 30,000 IMs on the books. So their numbers grew steadily so that by 1968 there was some 100,000 and in the mid-70s at their peak, almost 180,000 people were willingly engaged in informing. That's approximately one adult in every 60. Now, that was the thing because when East Germany collapsed and there was the reunification

of Germany, it took them ages to sift through the Stasi's files, because there was just so much of it. Mason Hickman I've actually been in that building. I've been in the building, the Stasi headquarters in Berlin, in East Berlin. And when the Berlin Wall fell, everyone just ran in there and was trying to grab files and stuff like that. Will Barron Yeah, and they were trying to get rid of some files because they didn't want to incriminate themselves. I think for a long time, this is in Katja Hoyer's book, Beyond the Wall,

you had access to your own file. You could ask for access to your own file. Have you ever read an article by Timothy Garten Ash in The Guardian? He was a historian. There was a file on him because they assumed that he was a spy. So he wrote a book about his own file in the late 90s. And you said you'd been in that building. When we recorded the bonus episode, I really enjoyed recording it, I said to Izzy, I said, oh, both Tom and Chris have been to Berlin. We've got to go as a family. And Izzy said, why? And I explained, I said, Chris has been in the building that the stars used to have. And she said, I just don't know what there is that's in it for the kids. Our son is five. If there were documents on them, maybe that'd be quite fun for them.

They obviously missed that. They were born too late. Yeah, yeah. So she said, I think if you're going to go to Berlin, you should go with your friends rather than family. So maybe we can all go to Berlin and record a podcast in there. I'd love that. Yeah. Just one thing on the Starzheadquarters that sticks with me so vividly, which was that what they would do is that they'd want to capture your scent. What? What, links? They had suspicions about you. They would call you in for an interview. You'd sit on this chair, you'd have the interview, they'd let you go. And then the chair you would sit on would have special removable material on the bottom

of it that they could pull off and pop in a jar, put your name on it, and if they ever needed to hunt you down, they'd go to the sniffer dog, smell that, that's what he smells like, go get him. I think you've mentioned this before, that is mind-blowing. So they would have been a room just full of... Smells? That's Chris Skoll's bum smell, sniff-a-dog. Off you go. Yeah, and luckily for the dog, it had a curry last night, so I don't smell it anyway.

The art, of course, would be to turn up wearing someone else's trousers. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I usually use Daz, but I washed my clothes in person yesterday. Well the thing about reporting you for listening to radio stations, that's obviously if you're listening to politicised programming, not just sort of like taste in music or whatever. Yeah, no, not just a minute. So some 250,000 East Germans were arrested or imprisoned by the Stasi. So IMs shared various traits.

Not the least of which was membership of the ruling socialist unity party, the Stasi. So IMs shared various traits, not the least of which was membership of the ruling socialist unity party, the SED. Many were employed in positions that implied the passing on of information, so management positions in factories or businesses. But voluntary surveillance was only one mechanism in the arsenal employed by the Stasi. There was also a system of inducement,

especially for teenagers. So schools were active recruitment centers, as were hospitals. So doctors were, after all, exposed to sensitive information on a daily basis. So one had to be very, very careful when seeking support for mental ill health, because psychologists were favored as informants, right?

So other informants were just coerced. Either you spy for us or we do something bad to you. But the total number of coerced informants was relatively low, about 8% of the total. So remarkably, it was not unheard of for the spouse or child of a dissident to be an informer. Wow. It's so 1984, isn't it? Yeah. I must admit, we don't live in East Germany, but I'm looking at Izzy in a slightly different way now. Don't quite trust her. Yeah, absolutely. She's told you can't go to Berlin.

Yes. She's restricting your movement. She's trying to… Unlike Claire, your wife, she hasn't come up with a single feature for this podcast. She's trying to bring it down from the inside. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. You have to ask why. Will Barron So these figures, right, don't account for the notoriety of the organisation, which derives from its behaviour as the sword and shield of the communist regime. So it destroyed personal relationships, sent individuals to prison for an

indeterminate length of time. And when prisoners did emerge, as one historian observed, their health, self-confidence, and future working lives were damaged beyond recovery. So prisoners were subject to torture, isolation, sleep deprivation, and other psychological manipulations, and even. So it was said the foreshortening of lives through exposure to radiation or disease. So the entire technique was called decomposition.

One device, a very notorious device that was used in this process, was a mysterious closed box attached to an unpleasant and uncomfortable chair positioned in a detention cell. So according to some accounts, this apparatus exposed the prisoner to dangerously high levels of X-rays, or worse, radioactive isotopes.

And it was a direct cause of the foreshortening of numerous dissidents lives. So Jürgen Fuchs, who was a novelist, died in 1999. He was only 49 and he died of a rare form of leukemia, something attributed directly to his nine-month imprisonment at the hands of the Stasi in 1976-77. That's horrific. So unlike the Division in British Intelligence, which gave us MI5 and MI6, the Stasi was a catch-all intelligence service with an overseas bureau, so the main directorate for reconnaissance or HVA and the military wing, the Felix Dzezinski Guards Regiment, and the latter was an elite

unit. So it was entirely separate from the main armed forces, which could be used to quell any popular uprising or rebellion. So the directorate on the other hand was widely used overseas and it had links with Cuba and Angola. And it's the department shown in Deutschland 83, 86, and 89. I don't know if you've seen that TV series. No, I haven't, no.

Deutschland 83, and that's fantastic, right? It took a special interest in recruiting visiting overseas students and young academics, especially those from the West. And then football comes into it. So the Starsy took a very great interest in the beautiful game, just like their sister intelligence agencies across the Eastern Bloc. So Dynamo Moscow were closely identified with the NKVD and the KGB. The Stasi team was Dynamo Berlin, which coincidentally was the most successful football team in East German history. All thanks to the head of the Stasi, Eric Melke, who is written about a lot in the book Beyond the Wall. So he arranged for favourable referees engaged in bribery, intimidation,

forced transfers, even murder, all so that Dynamo Berlin would win the league. Title after title followed from the late 70s to the late 80s, obviously stifling the game in East Germany and it turned fans off top tier football. And something similar happened in the ice hockey league too, although calling it, you know, it's a bit adventurous to call it a league because there's only two teams. Dynamo Berlin, now known as the Berlin Ice Spares, and Dynamo Vaisvasa, I think is how you pronounce it. Berlin won the championship 15 times between 1966 and 1989, and their opponents are the remaining nine. Now, Darrell, who I think has got a far more objective view on sport than I have, Daryl Ewethy, our brilliant historian, said at the end of the research

you wrote for us, what's the point of sport if you know what's going to happen? When you support Swansea City, I'd quite like MI5 or MI6 to have a word actually, yeah. To guarantee you mid-table safety. That would be great actually. If Mx5, Mx6 could sort of have a word of the Premier League and if we could do a Man City, only for a few years. Does Dynamo Berlin still exist? What is that now? That's not Hertha, is it? That's a great question. What did it become? Yeah, you don't hear about Dynamo Berlin anymore, do you?

What's Hertha Berlin? Were Hertha Berlin around then? Yeah, yeah. Dynamo Berlin still exists. Hertha Berlin is, I would consider, mate, funnily enough, Hertha Berlin, I would consider my second team. What league are Dynamo Berlin now? I've got Hertha Berlin mug on my desk right here. Oh yeah, good club. So what league are they in now, Dynamo Berlin? Berlin at FC Dynamo. They're in the Region Liga,

North East. And they're kind of mid-table obscurity. So I think losing the full support of the stars in the government has had an impact. Yeah. God, they were East German champions. 78, 79, 79, 80, 80, 81, 81, 82, 82, 83, 83, 84, 84, 85, 86, 86, 86, 87, 87, 88. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, their success has fallen off a bit. Yeah, absolutely. Since the referees.

It's a bit like Liverpool. They also always knew what the opposition tactics were going to be. In the week before, actually. Thomas Doll played for Dynamo Berlin. Wow. Andreas Tom. He's sort of a player I remember. Bernard Schultz, a player I remember from the sort of late 80s. That's amazing. But to be fair to Darrell, I think I do not know what he means. Would it be a strange feeling as a fan? Obviously saying the support for the top league fell away during that time for opposition fans, but as a fan of Dino Ebelin, are you thinking this is what is this kind of… Will Barron Of course, and also, you know, I mean,

I'm saying this, we're recording this the day after Man City lost to Liverpool at Anfield, but for years, even when they did lose a game, it felt like a blip that they would just get over. Jason Vale Yes. Will Barron And it is, when a team seems to be almost invincible, especially if you're neutral, like I don't support Man City or Liverpool or Arsenal, you know, any of the teams who are sort of directly involved in the title race, it does ruin it a little bit for the neutral. But I wouldn't mind the MI5 or MI6 maybe to take a bit of an interest in this once just for a couple

years. Get us back in the Premier League. Mason- Not all the referees. Mason- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just 80% of the referees. Mason- 80% of the referees and all the linesmen. That's all. And all the goalies. Mason- VAR. That would be very easy to manipulate, wouldn't it? Get them in. So anyway, there we have it. The Starz. If you want to hear more about East Germany, as I said, we did a bonus podcast about it. So you need to become an Oh What A Time full timer and a subscriber. And you can do that on the Oh What A Time website, because it really, really is a great book and a fascinating country.

Absolutely. And also it's worth saying there are so many Oh What A Time full-timer subscriber episodes you can get right now by joining Wondery+, or signing up the other ways. Oh, fill your boots. Because they're all waiting for you. A reservoir of history. Yeah. Of a light-hearted history for you to dip your toes into. Big time.

Exactly. Plunge, skinny dip, whatever you want. Skinny dipping in history. Brilliant, thank you so much for listening. I'll be honest, I can't shake the image of James Bond in Casino Royale at the bar not ordering martini, ordering two pints of milk and then turning to the table with a milky mustache to derision from the baddies. Ah, neither that. Sorry, I've just loved it as a drink, I've done since I was very young. Shaken or stirred? Neither, just milk. Just pour it in, just normally.

No, thank you guys, thank you for listening, we really appreciate it. If you want to get in contact with the show, you can hit us up on hello at owhatatime.com any subject ideas anything you want to send our way we always love to hear from you and we'll be back very very soon with yet more history fun bye goodbye bye Follow Oh What A Time on the Wondry app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. And before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.