Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The KGB Spy Who Exposed Russia’s Secret Plan to Attack The West - Richard Kerbaj

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

This is an unbelievable true story of a KGB defector who helped MI5 blow apart the Soviet spy network in Britain, and why British intelligence decided it couldn’t trust the CIA with the secret. It��s a story about espionage, paranoia and betrayal during the Cold War, but as Richard explains, the lessons about Russia, China and the shadow war against the West couldn’t be more relevant today. Richard Kerbaj is an espionage historian, BAFTA-winning and twice Emmy-nominated filmmaker, known for specializing in research on intelligence agencies and national security. Get a copy of his brilliant new book, The Defector: The Untold Story of the KGB Agent Who Saved MI5 and Changed the Cold War Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://www.scaramucci.net/allthewrongmoves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Do you wish you could just hit Skip on the worst part? of your life, you know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. Visit BetMDMdm casino and check out the newest exclusive. The price is

right fortune pick. BetMGM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. We have a material advantage over the Russians. Our materialism is where these Russian agents show up in Washington or they show up in London and they're like, okay, wait a minute, the propaganda doesn't fit the lifestyle going on here. I want to taste this and it's a little bit easier for us to recruit people than it is for

them to recruit people. As host countries, it's easier to recruit. It's very difficult for the British and Americans to recruit in their countries. That's because they've got repressive regimes, the result of revolutions, whether you're talking about Russia or China. it's very difficult to penetrate their systems in the ground. You're having to sort of do it in most cases through a third country. For us, the majority of the defections that we've had during the Cold War, even the Second World

War, up until today, have been voluntary walk-ins. These are people who realize that there is a sense of freedom in the West that they cannot possibly dream about having in Russia or in China or Iran or North Korea. And they feel that this is a great opportunity to begin a new life. But also, there is the issue of validation. How do they validate these people who are walking in? So from a U.S. perspective and a British perspective, if someone's approaching you, the first question you have to ask is, what's the motive?

The second question is, are they genuine or are they deep covers coming to penetrate our system? Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today is Richard Krabage. He's a writer, investigative journalist, a BAFTA winning filmmaker. But man, what a book. Okay, the Defector is the title. The Untold Story of the KGB agent who saved MI5 and changed the Cold War.

So this was like John La Cerey stuff, but it was real. I mean, it was nonfiction. And, I mean, it's obviously got to be turned into a movie. I mean, this is unbelievable book, Richard. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And thanks for, I'm thrilled that you've enjoyed this.

I'm not sure how to pronounce this guy's name, but I'm from New York. You have to bear with me. But you're going to have to tell us who Oleg. Oleg Leighalan. Leighlin is, okay. So Oleg Leighalan is essentially, he was a KGB officer who was deployed to London in 1969 to recruit British spies, essentially. That was his job description.

But he got, he sort of veered away from his job description because he got caught up in the London nightlife. And also he had these sort of proclivities towards womanizing and drinking. And so instead of doing his job, he was out partying most of the time and that really upset his wife. So he was suffering from this premature midlife crisis, as it well. And he decided that one way to go about this was to potentially seek a divorce that might resolve. that might resolve his issues because his bigger issues were he had about four girlfriends. He didn't know which one to elope with. His girlfriend, his wife was becoming difficult in his mind.

And so what he did is approach MI5 to provide secrets, hoping that somehow by providing secrets, MI5 would help deal with his marriage problems. He could have, of course, sought marriage counseling, which would have been much easier for him, but it wouldn't have been as fun for our story. Okay, so this, just so we set the scene for everybody, this takes place in spring of 1971. So we're in the full-blown era of the Cold War. He's officially, if I remember correctly from the book, he's a Soviet trade delegation official, but he's actually KGB.

We do that all over the world. And what's so interesting about the book is that, you know, it's womenizing and it's sort of the stuff that the can. GB does to Western officials in terms of compromise to catch them. That's the irony he catches himself with his own compromise, right? I mean, that's more or less what happens here, right? Essentially. That's essentially what happens.

And I think it's important to frame it in the context of what was taking place during the 1960s in the lead up to this moment. So in the early 1970s, when he defected, there were about 550 Soviet officials operating in the UK, more than 200 of whom were Soviet spies. And we know this because of the information he would ultimately provide MIFO about this. No, no, he was the Benedict Arnold of the Soviet Union. There's no question about that.

He's a patriot to us and a traitor to them and that's how the world works. But I want to go into him for a second because we're reading this. I'm saying to myself, this guy does not fit the image of the James Bond of the KGB, right? He is a drinker, a partier.

He's polymorous. He's having lots of affairs. How did something like this end up inside one of the most dangerous parts of the KGB? How wasn't he screamed out prior to his arrival in London? So what got him in was the language skills that he'd developed. And he developed those language skills. He spoke English. And so in the 1950s, he joined a college in Odessa.

And he was talent spotted by a college. colleague of his in class who essentially co-opted him to join the KGB initially as a surveillance informant. And then from there, he essentially was, they figured he's got the set of skills we require, we could build this guy up and that set of skills was his ability to learn languages, specifically English, because initially they had earmarked him for deployment in the United States. And so in the early 1960s, in 61, 62, they started training him in multiple methods from photography to surveillance to had a spot of tail.

And his first marriage at this point was already on the rocks. And because of his behavior, they figured he's probably not a reliable person. We should cut this deployment, which they did. And then they sent him off to Clypeter to do very basic information gathering. And so that was a huge setback professionally for him. And it wasn't until the late 1960s that he would get his final break. And I think by then he had demonstrated that he's got the talent and the abilities and the commitment, at least based on what they were seeing. But it was only when he landed in London.

worried about a double agent setup, though, right? You write about this whole, you know, when someone comes to see you and says, I'm ready to defect, you're like, okay, this could be a double agent. We've got to be careful on that side as well, right? That's right. So that was the backdrop. So the backdrop there and the contamination of that process and the intelligence process actually came through the U.S. from the CIA in particular.

In the early 1960s, the CIA had received a defector. His name is Anatoli Galitzin. and Anatoly Gilizan warned the CIA in late 1961 that the KGB had been creating a program to train diplomats and Soviet officials in how to defect. So essentially what he was saying is anyone who comes after me is one of these sent agents. And that worked well for the CIA because the CIA's head of counter espionage, a man called James Jesus Angleton, who was highly paranoid at a baseline, realized that perhaps what this guy is saying is absolutely true because he feared that given what had taken place across the pond in the UK with all the defections there that we would come to know as the Cambridge 5. So Burgess and McLean and

ultimately Philby, he thought, well, this what this man is telling us has to be true. And that was one of the tips that the Jim Angleton received, the other tip that he received was that the KGB had compromised the CIA. And so they set off on this mole hunt and ultimately this mole hunt would look into more than 40 officers and consultants working for the CIA, essentially destabilizing the entire organization and its thinking and its analysis. And they imposed that thinking, that contaminated thinking onto their partners in the UK. So by the time Oleg Leigh Allen approached MI5 in early 1971, he approached him against the backdrop of all of this contaminated thinking about, what if this person who's approaching us is actually a scent agent? They debriefed him,

and they debriefed him over several months. And they ultimately discovered that what he's saying is true. What was really fascinating about this is unlike all of the other approaches, that they had previously and all of the other thinking that had been going on within MI5. In this instance, MI5 realized that perhaps they shouldn't share the information with the Americans. And this is the first known case where MI5 had done this. By virtue of tactically blocking out the American agency, so the CIA and the FBI in this instance, they were able to gather their thoughts, properly assess it, and realize that what this guy was saying was actually true.

And he provided some secrets regarding the number of spies in Britain and the agencies that they were working for, the majority of them were working for the KGB and the GRU. And they were using certain covers, including press officers. Some were press officers. Some were businessmen. Some were sort of other sorts of entrepreneurs. And he himself, as you pointed out earlier, was this textile specialist who was supposed to be here selling socks and buying socks actually, rather for the Soviet Union. And the other secrets that he provided gave a very clear insight into Soviet plotting against the UK in the event of a war with the UK.

and those included contaminating British seawater with radioactive waste, bombing government departments in Whitehall, Central London. They included assassinating members of parliament and a host of other things. So they had a very clear indication of what was going on, and that was a clear indication that they didn't share with the CIA at this point or the FBI. And they needed to figure out, well, how do we use, this information to expel a huge number of spies. And so that became a political decision, not just a national security decision, which is why they sat down with the Prime Minister of

the Day. So the heads of the respective agencies sat with the Prime Minister of the Day, Ted Heath. And they decided that not only will they not share the intelligence with the US at this point, but also they were going to withhold information about the planned expulsion. Because from the Prime Minister's perspective, he was concerned that Nixon, the Nixon administration, would put an end to their ambition to expel these spies because Nixon would have feared that this would upset the daintant between the United States and the Soviet Union, and he would have prioritized that over Britain's own national security. So this is an instance where Britain puts his national security first ahead.

of the so-called special relationship with the U.S. Yeah, listen, I mean, I love that angle of the story as well as many other angles of the story, but I guess, you know, when you talk to my friends that the rest is classified and you think about spycraft for a second, this is really an unusual story because this is an improbable guy entering the space. It turns that he has valuable information that helps out. my five, but also because we are not trusting, you know, we probably miss 22 different opportunities to bring more people in, okay, that were likely defectors, right? So this is a-

Not only in the U.S. that did happen in the U.S. This is a shadow game, basically, right? Richard? I mean, this is, people need to understand. Like when I was in the White House, and again, there was a brief ill-fated time. But when I read that security briefing, when I read the Presidential Daily Brief, what struck me about it was the uncertainty. What struck me about it is the, you know, here's a 50% chance of this.

There's a 60% chance of that. There's a 40% chance of this. This is based on human intelligence where the person may be one of us or he may not be. I mean, you're reading this and you're like, it's not a Hollywood script. There's just so much lack of, information, frankly. There's so much opacity to this whole thing. I think you did a brilliant

job of describing that. But, you know, what did the newly classified materials give you that previous accounts on this period couldn't have divulged? Well, Learland's file at MI5 has never been disclosed. So they've not declassified it. What I discovered during my research for my first book, so I wrote a book about the Five Eyes, which is the spy network created by the US and the UK that brought together those two countries along with New Zealand and Australia back in 1956. And through that spy network, it was actually essentially set up as a, it was set up to confront the Soviet threat.

that's essentially what it was. And through the research that I was doing for that, I came across this Leigh Island story. I discovered there was not much on it. So what I needed to do is figure out a way to get to it. What the Americans tend to do very helpfully for espionage historians is that they over declassify. And that may seem counterintuitive because there is this kind of idea that's generally perpetuated in the media that there's multiple coverups that don't give away any information. In fact, if you were to go to any of the agency's websites,

you'll see that there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of documents that have been declassified. And in so doing, in many cases, they declassify, incidentally they declassify material associated with other countries. So what I was able to find is material declassified by the Americans, which shed light on information the CIA and the FBI was receiving from MI5. And so I was able to use that material to create the world and create the character. We get a great deal of insight into him as a person, the childhood that he had, the broken

marriage that he had to deal with because his parents were separated, his father's death, the inspiration that he received from his family through his family, the fact that he had a half-brother who was killed during the war and the way that shaped his thinking. He ultimately named his son after his brother. We get a sense of his idiosyncrasies, his bad habits, and the way that he had to very much struggle at a very young age as a young teenager, at one point having to leave school to find work and look after his mom, after his father's death. So you get a real sense of his character through those files,

And those files were shared by MI5 with the FBI largely. And so I was able to go through them. And there were hundreds, if not thousands, of pages. But with any declassified files, and you'd be familiar with that from your time at the White House, you've got bits of information. You don't have the full picture. So you're having to assemble a picture based on several bits. And then you try to get corroboration elsewhere.

And thankfully, because of the context I have, within say the British Security Services or the US or other agencies, I was able to get some confirmation about some of those things on background and I pulled it all together to tell this story. Guys, thank you so much for listening and subscribing to open book. You know we've got 200 authors on this show. It's been a lot of fun for me, but I'm also an author now too. And I've got all the wrong moves available.

Go to scaramucci.comnet backslash all the wrong moves. You can buy your copy today. It's a lot of fun and lots of commentary about what's gone on in the U.S. over the last three decades. You know, it's one of the reasons why you'll never see the Kennedy assassination file. I mean, it's just never going to happen so people can pretend it is. And if they throw it out, it'll be in a Rubik's Cube and this teen structure. You'll have no idea what's going on.

I want to talk about James Jesus Angleton. And just for everybody's benefit here, he was a CIA counterintelligence. He was there for 20 years. But I feel like paranoia, which is one of the byproducts of being in intelligence and one of the byproducts of Spycraft, did him in. I think it destroyed him. Tell us a little bit about this man, what he was doing for the Americans and how he was interacting with MI5 and the British agents at the time.

Yeah, I think he could argue that Jim Angleton, he was known as Jim Angleton by his friend. this, he was, and probably remains as one of the most mysterious and fascinating figures in Western intelligence. So in the early 1940s during the Second World War, he was a part of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which is the predecessor to the CIA. And he was deployed to Britain to work alongside MI5. And he got to understand and learn about the double cross program. And the double cross program was essentially a program set up by MI5 to capture Nazi spies and turn them back on their masters. Hence why it was called the double cross. And through that, he learned this concept of penetrations and then countering them in the other direction.

He took that with him all the way to the CIA until he became the head of countering them. to espionage in 1954. And as head of espionage, he was the chief mole hunter. And he took that job very seriously. But also, he took it so seriously to the point that he felt that he knew better than anyone else at the agency, including the director of the agency. And he had this incredible level of access and ability to impose his will on the situations within the agency. through the 1950s he encountered several problems of the CIA so for instance the CIA's first officer who was deployed undercover to Russia was exposed CIA's first agent who was recruited from within the Soviet Union was captured and killed a double agent who was working

for the, an agent who was working for the CIA and MI6, a man called Oleg Penkovsky, who was part of the Soviet intelligence apparatus, he was captured and ultimately killed in 1962. In 1964, Angleton's very, very close friend and one-time mental, a man called Kim Filby, would ultimately defect from the UK to the Soviet Union. So all of that coalesced to in his mind corroborate his suspicion and reinforce his paranoia. And so you come to 1964, he's got all of this going on in his head in addition to the defector who'd come in in in 1961, as I mentioned earlier, Amand Gold, Anatoly Galitzin. So he's got one person in his ear saying, this is what the KGB is able to do and this is what

they're doing to you. And from another perspective, he's thinking, well, this is the outcome of all of the KGB. EGB's operations, so of course they're able to penetrate and damage the CIA and other agencies. He got so paranoid that he thought that the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was a Soviet spy to the point that when Harold Wilson came into power, Jim Angleton flew out to the UK and sought an urgent meeting with the heads of MI5 and MI6 to inform them that your new prime minister is a spy. He provided no evidence to... corroborate his allegations and the evidence that we know he had, which was hardly evidence,

was actually hearsay and conjecture from Anatoly Galitzen. And all of that fed through the system. In addition to that, he oversaw an operation in collusion with the White House back in 1965 where they deployed a couple of people under the cover of CIA officers to London to ingratiate themselves with the British intelligence community and in so doing gathered dirt on MI5 and its leadership so they could take it back and use it to discredit the head of MI5, a man called Roger Hollis, who himself would ultimately become a Soviet spy suspect and who would be investigated as well. So MI5 investigated its own deputy, Director General and Director General,

And there were questions about Harold Wilson, all because of what the CIA was feeding into MI5. So come 1971, they decided to withhold the information tactically and successfully. That results in a huge victory where MI5 was able to expel 105 Soviet spies from Britain. And they had the ability to expel more, but they just said, this is what we're doing for the time being. We've got a second hit if we need to go for it. And also what they did is they were able to say that you cannot reallocate another 105 to fill those spots. You've lost this quota. So it was a huge thing.

What was really fascinating is all of the predictions that MI5 had made prior to that about what the Soviet counterattack would be, turned out to be false, because in fact the Soviet Union did very little to counter that. They just got rid of four officials who were there and I think 18 others who were. previously been there, but they told him you cannot return. So taking that sort of sledge hammer to the Soviet intelligence apparatus was hugely successful. And then within a couple of years after that, Jim Angleton would be driven out from the CIA because of the cover-ups. And among those cover-ups were information he'd received from the Brits after the expulsion of Soviet spies, which he did not share with his agency.

leaders. And there's a great scene in there about all of that. You think, you know, it's my last question before I go to the five words at the end of our show. But do you think that we have a material advantage over the Russians in the following sense? And I actually mean the word material. Our materialism is such where these Russian agents show up in Washington or they show up in London. and they're like, okay, wait a minute, the propaganda doesn't fit the lifestyle going on here. And I want to taste this.

And it's a little bit easier for us to recruit people than it is for them to recruit people. Am I wrong in thinking that? Sure. As host countries, it's easier to recruit. It's very difficult for the British and Americans and other members of the Five Eyes to recruit in their countries. And that's because they've got repressive regimes. that are the result of revolutions, whether you're talking about Russia or China, it's very difficult to penetrate their systems in the ground.

You're having to sort of do it in most cases through a third country. And you're right. For us, the majority of the defections that we've had during the Cold War, even the Second World War, up until today, have been voluntary walk-ins. These are people who realize that there is a sense of freedom in the West that they cannot possibly dream about having in Russia or in China or Iran or North Korea or any other, you know, name all of the other repressive regimes. And they feel that this is a great opportunity to begin a new life. Of course, there are many setbacks that come with that potential threats they might have to face. But also, there is the issue of validation. How do they validate these people

who are walking in? So from a U.S. perspective and a British perspective, if someone's approaching you. First question you have to ask is, what's the motive? Second question is, are they genuine or are they sort of deep covers coming to penetrate our system? And that system, I think, is improved remarkably, but still to this day, I mean, there have been multiple cases. There was a case recently in the US regarding Chinese interference in the US and recruitment of local Chinese people in New York. to run those police stations. And that forms part of something else that I'm doing. My next book that I'm researching at the moment is actually about

the history of Chinese espionage against the West dating back to the Qing dynasty in the late 1800s. And what's really fascinating is the other parallels between what was happening in the late 1800s, you know, 1800s and what's happening now in regards to their repression campaigns. You know, listen, it's an amazing book. You capture it well. It's very timely, given everything that's going on in the world now.

My producer and I put five words out of your book. I want a sentence from you. I'm going to say the word or the phrase. You give me one sentence. Okay, ready? I say the two words, called war. You say what? Hysteria.

Paranoia. No question. Well, you do a great job of describing that. I say the words which don't exist in Russia anymore, but the three letters, KGB, you say what? impressively capable. Yeah, really good at what they do. Yeah.

No question. They've built a lot of seeds of distrust. And of course, they had their failures, but they were impressively capable to recruit so many high-grade intelligence officials within the U.S. and the UK, particularly the UK. Russia. I say the word Russia. From an intelligence perspective, it has proven to be remarkably impenetrable and

continues to play an enormous role, even as Russia, not the Soviet Union, in influencing global events. Okay. Am I five? Tainted with failures during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, but I think as a result of its Director General, Martin Fernville-Jones, who approached the problems as a lawyer, because that's his former profession, he saw a way to distance himself from the CIA to which he was so closely associated and was constantly deferring to. And as a result, that made an enormous

difference for British intelligence at large. Last one, ready? Oleg Leone. The most fascinating human being of research. to date in the context of spy stories. Well, listen, this book is amazing. Thank you. I was a big tribute to you. I hope you write another one that I'll be interested in reading. I took this book on the Disney Cruise and my wife was like,

what the hell are you doing now? And I'm like, I can't stop reading this book because it's a brilliant synthesis of a lot of things that are real. And having had, even though it was a short stay in the government and talked to many people in the agency, you really subtly described a lot of things that are going on that people should be made aware of. And so I give you a lot of credit for that. Richard Krabash, the title of the book, The Defector, The Untold Story of the KGB agent who saved MI5 and changed the Cold War. Congratulations on this. Thank you. I'm grateful. I'm grateful. Hope I get a chance to see you soon.

Thank you. Thank you so much. I look forward to it. Do you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better.

Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.