Stuff You Should Know - What was the KGB?

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

The KGB was the notorious strong arm of the Kremlin. Run afoul and you died. Learn all about them today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, you may not know this yet. And if you don't prepare to be blown away, we are creating right now the first ever Stuff You Should Know book. It's called Stuff You Should Know,

colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And you can pre-order it now. That's right, and if you pre-order everyone, there's an incentive because you get a free gift. And don't worry if you've already pre-ordered because you can just head on over to StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com. It's a very beautiful little webpage.

And it's got all the information. And if you've already pre-ordered, can't you just like upload your receipt and get that pre-order gift? Yep, you can, and they will mail it off to you and you will get it in the mail and you say, oh, thank you, don't mind if I do. And it's a poster that you will love and cherish

and possibly pass on down to your children as an heirloom. That's right, everyone. We couldn't be more excited about this book. It's really coming together well. It's us through and through, and you can go check out some excerpts at StuffYouShouldReadBooks.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,

a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are comrades in arms here at SYSK. Stuff You Should Know. Let me ask you something. Okay.

When you were researching this and thinking in your brain about talking about it, did you get nervous? No. Okay. I guess you did? A little bit. What were you nervous about?

Talking about the friggin' KGB. Yeah, oh, like they're- And how they just kill anyone that they don't like. Oh, okay. Now, you know, I got the most nervous ever when we recorded, I wrote on, and we recorded on Delta Force. Really?

I was really nervous. You think they're gonna come kill you? I don't know. I mean, they're supposedly, they're not supposed to exist. And we were talking about how they do exist. So I was like, surely not. But no, I know what you're talking about.

It didn't happen in this one. So maybe this is the one that'll get me. Because KGB, you know, those are the, and it even says in this article, like, when you think about the knock on your door in the middle of the night, come with us, that's KGB ops right there. Right, but that was if you were a Russian,

a Soviet citizen, which is- That's true. Something, it's weird because like, you know all about the KGB, just having been raised as a Cold War kid, you know? But I never really put two and two together that it was a really all-encompassing secret police kind of thing that they had going on.

Because not only were they big on spying and getting their hands on advanced weapon technology and running disinformation campaigns around the world and trying to destabilize the United States and its reach around the world, they also were really focused internally and domestically as well. So that they were a secret police force

that would come and get to centers and send them off to prison camps in the middle of the night. They basically did it all. And all of it was geared Chuck toward keeping the Soviet Communist Party in power. And they were successful for several decades, actually. Yeah, and I mean, from reading this research,

it seems like, I mean, they did do all the things, but their main charge was squashing from within, it seems like. Squishing your head from within. So KGB stands for, I'm gonna try and read this. I'm late on me. Russian. Kometet, that's easy.

With a K. Yeah. Gosudars venoj bisopasnosti. It sounds like you just raised like an Aramaic demon. Klatu vorato. So that means in English, Committee for State Security. They were headquartered. And we're gonna say were a lot

because technically the KGB itself is not around anymore. It's just been renamed though. So same stuff going on, same place. They were and are now headquartered under the FSB at Lubyanka Square in Moscow. Which is where the KGB was, right? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's where the headquarters was and still is.

And it's this big, beautiful sort of intimidating building right there in the square. And I mean, that's just par for the course. The KGB has basically been this entity that's changed names and official titles multiple times since the very beginning of the USSR. But it's still the same thing. And it's actually really instructive to study it

because it seems that they are still very much up to the exact same things that they've been doing for decades now. And everybody very famously is well aware of the GRU which is military intelligence. But it seems that the GRU, the FSB and another group called the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service

are all basically like the KGB. They're just, it's just now been divided into separate entities, but they're all working together. But after the 2016 election, everybody got a pretty obvious taste of what the KGB has long been up to, which is trying to meddle in American politics and trying to sow discord among Americans ourselves.

And this is nothing new apparently. They've been doing it since the outset, well actually since after World War II at least. Yeah, I mean, they've been doing this. If you talk about sowing discord, there was Operation Pandora in the 1960s, which was basically the Soviets trying to start a race war within the US.

Yeah. Infiltrating groups like the Klan, the Jewish Defense League and the African American militants. Posing is them making fake pamphlets from the different organizations and blasting those out to basically try and start a race war.

It didn't work, but it did create discord. They've also posed as people from Antifa and Black Lives Matter and they're still doing the same thing today. Yeah, except now they're doing it in this hyper accelerated manner because things can spread so much more quickly on social media.

And you can turn so many people's opinions on social media so much more quickly as well. So there doesn't seem to be officially any disagreement that the Russians meddle in American affairs. And I have long been like, well, it doesn't excuse it, but we can't ignore the fact that America meddles in other countries affairs too

and has for a very long time too. And that is definitely instructive also and something to pay attention to. But first of all, it's a what aboutism. But secondly, from what I read, there's this scholar who wrote this really, really interesting article in the Brown Journal of Public Affairs,

I believe is what it was called. Yeah, the Brown Journal of World Affairs, guy named Calder Walton wrote this article on the KGB and it's disinformation campaigns, super readable, really exciting kind of, but he basically says, yes, America has done some very, very shady stuff in the affairs of other countries

and in its own affairs too, like the CIA dosing Americans with LSD to see what happens kind of thing. But the Americans and the Brits operations just pale in scope and breadth compared to what the KGB has done and what it seems like the FSB is now still doing right now.

Yeah, not nice guys. So I just want to shout out that article, it's called Spies, Election Meddling and Disinformation Past and Present. You should check it out. Yeah, I mean, if you want to look into the KGB and spying in espionage, there are so many great articles and documentaries

on YouTube that you can watch, some a little more fun than others, some very dry. The BBC has a two-parter on the KGB that's very dry but very instructive. So the KGB, if you want to talk about that organization, you got to go back to pre-KGB in December 1917 when Lenin created a secret police agency called the CHECA, C-H-E-K-A.

They were the punishing sword of the revolution, is what they were known as. And this was basically, like you said, it's gone under many names. It was the KGB before it was called the KGB. It was there to keep leadership and power, imprisoning, killing opponents both abroad and within the country, keeping people under surveillance,

censoring news and basically starting the espionage program on foreign soils. Yeah, the CHECA was followed by the OGPU, then the KGB, then the FSB slash SVR. But from that moment, the CHECA was formed till today. There has been a steady, continuous, basically unbroken security apparatus that has been charged with domestic and external

spying surveillance, espionage, all that jam. Yeah. From the get-go. The, today they might still call themselves CHECASTS within the organization. It's a name, the CHECA, that original name is kind of stuck around if you're sort of on the inside. And they, you know, there are many ways

that they can get what they want. This one was a pretty interesting example here. At one point, there was a group early on in the Soviet Union's existence where they had some socialists, some anti-communists that basically got together and they said, we're an organization now called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia.

And what they didn't know is that the Monarchist Union of Central Russia was actually infiltrated by so many moles, it was a fake organization that real people joined that were socialists and anti-communists. But it was all a big setup to get them all in one place, basically, root out who they were. You know, you gotta know your enemy,

know who your resistance is. And they found who they were and they killed them. Yeah, isn't that nuts, man? Like think about the effect that it has, not just in getting rid of your opposition by forming a group where they all show themselves, but also like that becomes legendary. Like that's one of the first things

that this group, this security group did. And like it basically sends a pretty clear message, like don't, you can't even trust your own, the people you think that are your allies, you know? Talk about sewing discord among opposition. That's just, and like that was 100 years ago and it still like can give you chills just to think about that.

Yeah, I mean, you start a group that you think is gonna be battling your oppressor. And it turns out that group is so infiltrated that it's not even a real group. Well, I got the impression that it wasn't even that they were infiltrated, but that the Cheka, or I should say the OGPU actually started that group to attract people, you know what I mean?

No, that's what I'm saying. They infiltrated that circle and then started this fake organization. Yeah, that's so nuts, man. So one thing that a lot of people forget and our younger listeners might not realize is that back in World War II, the US and the USSR were allies.

We weren't like BFFs or anything like that, but we had a common enemy in the Nazis, us, the UK, the US, and the Soviets. And I read that from this time of basically working with the US and the UK, the USSR saw how good we were at disinformation campaigns and it had two effects. It taught Soviets how to do these things.

It basically said, hey, this is a really good way to sow discord and to get fake information out like with your enemy. So it taught the Soviets how to do that, but it also made the Soviets think that they just presumed that the US and the UK were creating the same operations in the USSR too. So it really kind of hardened

the Soviets' enemy ship of America. Like it really kind of predisposed the USSR to be enemies with the US and with the UK and with the West in general. And it just kind of took off from there. And just to be clear, I saw a good distinction definition between misinformation and disinformation where misinformation is clear where the source

of the information is coming from. It's just the information is faulty. So the US government is giving out like bad info about coronavirus or something like that. That's misinformation. Disinformation is where the information is faulty, but it's not clear where the information is coming from or where it came from originally.

It's just popped up as like a rumor or something on social media. But the information is faulty either way. It's just whether the source is clear who the source is or not. That's what disinformation is. So the Czech are operating in World War II. They are spying on our Manhattan project

such that there's one quote in here that said they knew more about the creation of the atomic bomb than Truman did. They've really infiltrated things. This gave them a huge leg up in making their own bomb and their efforts to welcome themselves into the atomic age. Like they would have been way, way behind

had it not been for their espionage efforts in there in America. There are ways that they did this. There were spies who were sort of the tried and true ways to pose as a diplomat and actually get in an embassy in a different country, but you're really a spy. You could also, if you've seen the movie The American or the TV show The Americans,

that's called an illegal when you basically pass yourself off as someone of that nation's origin. After World War II in Finland, they would find records of infants who died at birth, take that identity and then basically become a Finnish person, it's called a legend. And you are essentially living in that country as an American or as a Finnish individual,

but you are really a secret agent for the Soviets. Right, and I mean like super, duper deep cover, so much so that you can expect to go live like a pretty mundane everyday existence for years or decades as an American or as a Finn or something like that, whatever your background, wherever it says you're from. And then you might be called on to assassinate somebody one day or to start working sources.

And it's not flagrant, it's not obvious, the point is, is that they make kind of contacts and friends with low level people at the edges of powers, how I saw it described. But I also saw that same person describe, who described illegals like that as saying that there's probably more of them in the world today than there was even during the Cold War.

That's so scary. Isn't it scary? But here's the thing, this is one thing that I've learned about studying the KGB. It's possible there are far fewer illegals in the world today. Maybe there's zero in the US, but the fact is, somebody said that and the KGB's track record is enough

that it's possible that's the case. Right, and that's what matters. And that's all it takes. Now all of a sudden people are paranoid and like wait a minute, you Tulsi Gabbard, are you actually a tool of the Kremlin? Are you a plant by the KGB? Are you a sleeper agent who's running for president?

Like people start to get accusatory and you can't trust anything anymore and now you're starting to see your enemies all over the place and all it took was a rumor that there's more sleeper agents that are associated with the KGB today than there were in the Cold War. Now everybody's paranoid

and the KGB's work is done for the day. And that could simply be disinformation. Exactly, exactly, because disinformation can, it takes on a life of its own. That's the point of disinformation, that it makes people behave differently than they would if they had not heard that rumor and started to believe it. Because the other fact about disinformation,

we should do an entire episode on it, I think, is that it has to have a kernel of truth. Like the Black Panthers have to suspect that the Jewish Defense League is or was prejudiced against them secretly. And so like these documents that were found or sent to the Black Panther headquarters just prove this suspicion that they already have

or something like that or vice versa. So it has to have like this kernel of truth for somebody to be like, no, here's the proof. And then it just takes off from there because people love urban legends. I wonder if there's ever been an Army colonel named Colonel Truth. I don't know.

All right, I think we should take a break and ponder that. And we'll come back and talk about when the KGB was born right after this. ["Stuff You Should Know"] Stuff you should know. Wash and show. Woo! Stuff you should know.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So the KGB, I promise to tell you, it's when that little baby was born.

That little baby was born in 1954 when the intelligence agency that, like I said, long been operating was reorganized officially finally as a KGB with that same mission in hand. They were known as the, this time as the sword and the shield of the Communist Party. And if you're talking about the structure of the agency itself, it depends on,

I mean, there's a lot that we don't know, but it depends on who you're asking. I've seen anywhere from a quarter of a million to 700,000 people on staff if you count the whole extended network of like foreign border guards and stuff like that. Yeah, I think 700,000 is the most I've seen, which is an enormous amount.

Yeah, huge, huge compared to any kind of like CIA or any other countries, intelligence organizations, the KGB is just massive. Right. The other thing that I saw about the KGB is that you can make a pretty good assumption that just, especially during the Cold War, that every single one of those agents

were loyal to the Communist Party. And one way that they made sure that every single agent was loyal to the Communist Party was to basically let them know that the other members of the KGB were spying on them. There was entire sections that were dedicated to spying just on the armed forces, just on the military alone.

And that was one of, I think, 20 different directorates, little divisions that were responsible for different kinds of tasks or different specializations. Yeah, the official, like if you want to look at the official sort of charge of the KGB, it is four areas in size. It is the struggle or an organization, I guess, the struggle against foreign spies and agents,

the exposure and investigation of political and economic crimes by citizens. That certainly encompasses a lot. Protection of state borders, that's what I was talking about, like the border guards and stuff like that. And then this is the big one, protection of state secrets. Right.

And then so like, those are the big four, but there was another about 16 of them dedicated to everything, like making sure that the phone and radio systems were encrypted to making sure the transportation sector wasn't infiltrated. Like the KGB had its fingers in absolutely everything. There was one directorate that was specifically tasked with surveilling and monitoring foreigners

and people who the KGB suspected were potentially dissidents who were Soviet citizens. And they mostly hung around like Leningrad and Moscow because that's where most of the tourists were. But that was like a whole KGB division. That's how many people they had and how many resources they threw at keeping tabs on the power structure and making sure that any challenges

to the power structure were squashed in the cradle. Not even strangled in the cradle, squashed in the cradle. Yeah, and they recruited the best, the smartest people, the brightest people, but like you sort of mentioned, it's not like, like the KGB was something to be feared by every citizen of the Soviet Union, I think. Oh yeah. But joining the KGB to thwart that was not,

it's not like that got you out of any sort of surveillance. Or in fact, it may have even put you under a bigger microscope, who knows? Yeah, I mean, they had every level of the military infiltrated with KGB agents, like every platoon, every detachment. If you were in a group with the military, somebody was a KGB officer posing as a soldier.

That's right. In their own military. That's amazing. Yeah, by the end, I mean, I think it started like I said, in 1954, by the end of the 1960s, it was firmly, firmly in place as the watchdog of everybody in the Soviet Union. Right.

And I mean, again, with the, like people tend to say like, well, the KGB was the counterpart of the CIA, but I mean, and the CIA's done some shady stuff, including domestically, but from basically all sources, the main point of the KGB was domestic surveillance and domestic control of domestic challenges or dissent toward the Communist Party. That's right.

Buying on people, tapping phone lines, harassing people, arresting people, exiling people. If you were a religious activist, good luck. If you were a human rights advocate, good luck. If you were an intellectual, if you were just a, you know, part of the intellectual sort of university system of the Soviet Union, you better watch what you say, because you are definitely being watched

and every word that comes out of your mouth, even in a classroom is being recorded. Yeah, and I mean, some, if you were super high profile, you might make it out with your life and your family might get out alive, but you would be exiled for criticizing the government. A writer named Alexander Solzetsch, Solzetnysen. I didn't even practice that.

Solzet, Solzetnysen, yeah. I think that's kind of close. He was actually, I think a science teacher who started writing books about how bad things were in the Soviet Union and eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature, but he was eventually exiled. If you were less of a well-known person

and you were critical of the government, you were more likely to find yourself in the Gulag, which is a system of prison camps that we referenced earlier and Solzetsnysen, I think I said it right that time. I think that's right. He estimated that about 60 million people were sent to those camps over the course of the 20th century.

Yeah, I mean, it's impossible, literally impossible to put a number on the amount of human lives lost due to the KGB, but there are people that have estimated like perhaps tens of millions of people taken out by the KGB over since its history. Which is, yeah, I mean, I'm no CIA apologist, but I don't think the CIA has that on their hands. They have millions of millions, you know?

Which again, I mean, we on the outside tend to think of the KGB mostly as like the spy agency, but yeah, they kept people in line by killing them or sending them to secret prisons and making them leave in the middle of the night from their homes and never be seen again. It's just completely nuts and the effects that that has on a society is just,

I can't imagine, I can sadly, but I can't imagine. I've never lived through anything like that. Yeah, and if you run an organization or a country or a nation from fear tactics, from the top down, that eventually is gonna bite you in the behind because what that does is everyone's paranoid against each other. No one, like in the case of Stalin, let's say,

if Stalin didn't like what you told him, he would literally shoot the messenger. He would execute anyone who told him anything that didn't basically support what he thought should be going on. Like it wasn't like, hey, Stalin, we found out some pretty bad stuff that's going on. Like that's a good thing.

That means we can root these people out. It got to a point where they wouldn't wanna go to Stalin with bad news. And that's not good either. No, and they had to go to him with some news. So what they would do, it would just kinda naturally incline toward intelligence that supported their view rather than something

that said, hey, you're really unpopular and there's an uprising potentially coming. They managed to squash anything like that. But in the end, what's called sycophantic intelligence, where it's just basically feeding you, telling you what you wanna hear, that eventually will run afoul of reality. And that's what people credit with the KGB

dropping the ball on the fall of the Soviet Union back in 1991. Although, as we'll see, there's actually a lot of direct influence that the KGB had on that. But there's this idea that throughout its history, there was Stalin kind of kicked off that thing where just tell me what I wanna hear or else I'm literally going to kill you.

And that it was carried on even long after Stalin was gone. That sycophantic kind of intelligence, which is really surprising because there was a really successful organization externally. It was that they think that potentially for as good as they were at espionage and stealing secrets, the Soviets were apparently not,

and I have to preface this, let me just caveat this. This is reading American sources about the KGB. The KGB was really good at keeping a code of silence. There were, especially toward the end of the USSR, more and more KGB agents started to defect. But even when they defected, we weren't sure if they were plants. So there was still like what they said

was taken with a grain of salt. But the idea that the KGB was very successful in stealing secrets supports this idea now that the Soviet Union would not have been a superpower. Part of this two superpower polarity that ran the world in the Cold War had it not been for stealing secrets, which doesn't explicitly say it,

but suggests that they were, they did not have the best and brightest as far as technology and science is concerned, which is kind of surprised to me because I'd always heard that the Soviets had really, really smart scientists in their own programs too. But this researching the KGB made it sound like

they wouldn't have been able to keep up had they not stolen advanced weapon technology and built their own versions of it. I'm confused, I have no idea what's true anymore. Yeah, I think- Welcome to 2020. I think it's definitely true that they're spying efforts in the Cold War, especially when it comes to nuclear armament were very much ramped up

because they were spying with us. Yeah, but I think- On us. They were saying, they were saying they wasn't just getting the atomic bomb, but basically like all their advanced weapons technology was the result of stealing it. And the point is, is kind of a two-handed compliment or backsideed compliment

that they were really good at stealing secrets, but that they wouldn't have been able to be a nuclear superpower without stealing secrets. I think that was what I found. Well, and it also could have been, and I'm just speculating, it could have been a thing where that was such a part of the system was that is, hey, we don't need to put resources for steps one through five

because we can steal that stuff. Right, exactly. And we can just start on step number six or whatever once we have whatever intelligence we need. Sure. But what do I know? I'm just a dumb podcast. Do you want to take another break?

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, we're going to take another break, everybody. That's no secret. ["Stuff You Should Know"] Stuff you should know. Dosh and shark. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with a Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Man, what is going on? What's wrong?

I'm making puns left and right. It's terrible. Can we talk about spies? Sure, yeah, let's do it. So, uh, I think we did a, we did an espionage podcast years and years ago, I think. Yeah, spies, how spies work, I think. Was it just spies or was it espionage as well?

Well, they go so closely together. It's basically the same thing. Yeah. The Soviets were really good at, well, I don't know about really good because who knows how many times it happened, but they had some very effective moments of turning Americans into double agents.

A few notable people over the years, a man named Aldrich Ames, he was a 31 year CIA officer and for about nine years was feeding the Russians, or I guess it was the Soviet Union at that time, highly classified information from the CIA. His big thing, it seemed like, was outing CIA sources and stuff like that.

Yeah, turned KGB agents. Yeah, so I mean, there's all kinds of ways. There were other people that fed documents. We'll get to them in a minute, but he was outing sources and I think his actions directly led to at least that we know of 10 CIA sources being compromised and killed and then, you know, in the hundreds of intelligence operations that he was kind of dropping the dime on.

And that's, I mean, in addition to the loss of life, as far as the intelligence community is concerned, when you kill somebody like that, you're killing like decades worth of information that the person has walking around in their head and contacts and just general knowledge of how things work. So it's a really big deal in addition to, again, killing somebody.

You're wiping out like the institutional memory that they carry with them too, that's been helping out the other side. Yeah, he is in a medium security prison in Indiana today, serving a life sentence, as is Robert Hansen. He's one that is a little more, I mean, he worked up until the, I think 2001. And they said that his espionage was possibly

the worst intelligence disaster in US history. He made about $1.4 million in cash and diamonds over the years, selling classified documents to the KGB. Total double agent caught in 2001 after the FBI paid $7 million to a KGB agent to out him as a mole. Very famous case. Yeah, I remember that as well.

I remember Aldrich Ames too made it really easy on people. Like he was like spending lavishly and was not that well off to begin with and was just being very flagrant about it. I feel like Robert Hansen was a little smarter about it if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, who's the other guy? There was one other guy that basically was spilling secrets

about our submarine program. I don't, no, there was a naval captain after World War II, somebody, St. John, was that in the 60s? That was him. Yeah, yeah. I can't remember his first name, but someone St. John, he was a naval captain. Yeah, there was a trove of KGB files

from an operation from the 60s that basically confirmed he was indeed a Russian spy. Both of the Rosenbergs were indeed Russian spies. Alger Hiss, who I think went to his grave denying that he was a spy, was in fact a spy for the Soviets. So they did have a pretty good success of turning Americans into informants. So did the CIA and the KGB apparently,

but the stuff that they got was pretty useful. And again, it was not limited to advanced weapon designs, but also industrial technology, stuff that we were saying, there's embargoes on this, you can't export this, they still managed to get their hands on this because of their contacts that they turned in the US. Just basically anything you would want

to keep your economy humming along just from stealing, that's how you could do that. Yeah, the Navy guy, he's the one that volunteered himself basically, because he wanted money, it all came down to greed. He walked into, oh yeah, no, I'm talking about John Anthony Walker Jr. That's who I'm talking about too.

Okay, not St. John. Not St. John, the patron saint of hipsters, I don't know. Yeah, John Anthony Walker Jr. is the one that wanted money and he volunteered by, because it's not like he was anti-American who wanted to see the Communist Party thrive. It was all motivated by greed and he walked into an embassy in the United States

with like a code card or something and said, hey, I'll sell you this for $3,000. And they bought it and he was like, and you know what, that went well, so just put me on the payroll. And he got his family involved. He had his, I think he tried to get his father involved, his daughter, his son, his wife.

His son's baseball coach, everybody. Well, at one point the Russians basically knew where all of our submarines were at all times because of this guy. That's right, yeah. And his wife was apparently a really bad alcoholic, probably, you know, and no small part due to this. And eventually outed him after,

I mean, he was way too loosey-goosey with who he tried to get involved. Like you can't try and get your whole family involved and then have them say, no, I'm not into it. And then just be like, all right, well, I'm gonna keep doing it. What's for dinner? Yeah, she ratted him out though.

She would call a bunch of times apparently and either chicken out or she was really blitzed and couldn't get across what she wanted to say. But eventually she did to an office in Boston and they thought, well, this is just some drunk wife trying to get her husband in trouble. Ignored it. It sounds like a sixties thing to think.

Eventually though, they did look into it and they, you know, they searched the guy's house and they found like briefcases full of classified documents. And it was just, I mean, this went on for 20-something years, I think. I think from what I understand, the most damning evidence was he had one

of those Russian fur hats with the ear flaps. That didn't mean. So the, as good as they were at turning people at creating illegals, those sleeper agents, which may or may not be all over the world right now, one of the things the KGB has long been known for disinformation campaigns. And from reading that guy's article,

spies election meddling and disinformation past and present, called their Walton's article, basically every conspiracy theory that I believed as a teenager, apparently was a KGB rumor, a disinformation campaign. I could not believe this as I was reading. It was like a trip through my, you know, formative years, basically.

The idea that the US government created aides to target developing countries. KGB. The idea that American tourists used to go down to South America and Central America and adopt kids so that they could harvest them for body parts. KGB, get this Chuck, there's a poll. I don't remember when it was conducted,

but it was sometime after the Kennedy assassination where more Americans believed that the CIA killed JFK than what the Warren commission concluded, which was that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. More Americans believed what turned out to be a KGB disinformation campaign than what the Warren commission came up with. That they came up with the one that the CIA killed JFK.

That there was the KGB that did that. And you know, the friend of your friends, mom who was on the elevator with Eddie Murphy, KGB. That's right, everything. I mean, all that stuff, flash your lights at somebody and the gang comes and kills you, KGB. But it's just so bizarre to think like, what? Like, no, I thought that I talked to people

about that like late at night, like we had conversations about this stuff. And when you see that and when you read it and realize that like this has been going on for years, it really puts things into focus now. Like the 2016 election meddling to the idea that there's like GRU agents, military intelligence agents who are posing as members of Black Lives Matter

or who posed as like Tea Party members during the 2016 election. Like that they were actually working for Russia. The idea that that's still going on just becomes all the more clear when you look at some of their past campaigns. Something I do occasionally, I don't know why, I torture myself, but sometimes I will read comments

on a foxnews.com article and someone will say something. And then you can leave a comment about the comment and someone will comment like, okay, thanks a lot, Dimitri. Yeah, nice, that's funny. But you don't know, man, that's what they do. They infiltrate message boards and they infiltrate social media.

And like you never know, like, yeah, it's just, it's really staggering that this kind of stuff still goes on to this degree. Yeah, and there's nothing we can do about it. Yeah, for real. So let's step back for a second because we kind of hopped ahead. But I want to go back into KGB history.

KGB was around from 1954 to 1991. And we said earlier that the KGB had a direct role in the fall of the USSR. And they did because there was a KGB head who was appointed by Gorbachev because he thought that he was an intelligent, moderate person who was open to new ideas. And it turned out he wasn't.

He was part of that same old KGB establishment who wanted things to stay the way that they were. And he actually led a coup against Gorbachev. I was too young to know what was going on, but there was a coup against Gorbachev where he was under house arrest for a minute. And the coup finally failed because it became clear that the military wasn't in on it

or wasn't going to take part in it. But it eventually led directly within months to the downfall of the USSR, the breakup of the USSR. Because in the meantime, they had elected for the first time a democratically elected president. And when Gorbachev saw that basically this coup was a vote of no confidence in him, he stepped aside, separated the Communist Party

from the presidency. And all of a sudden the USSR wasn't there anymore. It was just Russia because these satellite states started saying, hey, we're independent now. We'll see you later, Soviet Union. And the USSR fell apart, kicked off by this coup that the KGB initiated. Yeah, and I think Yeltsin, excuse me,

officially split it up, right? Yeah, yeah, he said, KGB, you're dissolved. We're gonna break you up into the FSB and the... Yeah, do the same stuff. Right, exactly, but just do it separately. I figure if I separate you guys, you might be less evil. And apparently that was not the case. Yeah, and apparently, not apparently,

but very famously, Putin came straight out of the KGB. He was a KGB agent in the mid 1970s supposedly because he saw a movie about Russian spies and I guess thought it was awesome. Yeah, he said, I wanna do that. There's a picture of him in one of these articles where he's in the 70s wearing like this Newsy cap and just looking super 70s.

But he also looks like Putin, man. Just complete poker face. He's staring off camera at something. Who knows what he's taken in. It's a really cool picture. There's another picture too. Supposedly of him posing as a tourist standing next to Ronald Reagan.

Oh my God. Have you ever seen that picture? No. Oh, it's nuts, it's just so great. But then you're like, is that Putin? And I went and looked and it turned out that there is still disagreement of whether it's him or not,

but most people say that that's not him. That he would have been in Dresden at the time. He wouldn't have been in the Soviet Union. I'm looking now at, oh my God, that certainly looks like Putin. Doesn't it? But the official line is that is not Putin. With his little camera around his neck.

Right. And so Putin was not just in the KGB. He became the head of the FSB. And this is a real testimony to just how powerful the KGB and the KGB's remnants or successors remain. He went from head of the FSB to the president of Russia. That was the step that he took. And he was not the first person to do that.

Other KGB heads had worked their way up to become the head of the Communist Party and the de facto head of the Soviet Union at the time. So all of this kind of goes to show you that nothing, even the fall of the USSR really did anything to slow down the KGB. And the advent of technology helped kind of actually speed things up quite a bit.

Yeah, and if you think those murders are a thing of the past, that is certainly not the case. I remember, as I'm sure you do, in 2006, Alexander Litnovenko. Litvinenko. Litvinenko, he was the one that was killed by the radioactive polonium 210 that was dropped in his beverage.

And they have a history of doing, like that's a really awful way to die. And they have a history of killing people in really awful ways, because it sends that message that not only can you die, but you're gonna die in a really awful, awful way. And everyone's gonna know, dating back to Trotsky, who went to Mexico City and someone came up behind him,

Ramon Mercator, with a ice axe and sunk it three inches into his brain. He said, how do you like this projection? Oh my God. That was actually so bad, I think that was brilliant. Thank you. I was hoping you'd come around to that way. That was really good.

I got you, Mercator projection, that's lovely. But yeah, he killed him with an ice axe, but he lived for a day. I thought, I'd always heard this story and I always thought that he just like planted him in the brain and that was it. But Trotsky got up and was like fighting him off and people came in and kicked this guy's butt.

And he survived in the hospital for like a full day after this before he died. Well, yeah, Litvin Yanko, he survived long enough that he helped solve his own murder. There's a really great guardian article on it called Alexander Litvin Yanko, the man who solved his own murder. And it's definitely worth reading for sure.

Yeah, I mean, just a couple of years ago, what was that guy's name, Scripol? Surgey Scripol, he was the one with the nerve poison. He wasn't killed, it was an attempt on his life though. Yeah, but it was just like every time you think, man, this is Cold War stuff, it just pops up in the news again. And you're like, man, it's still happening.

Yeah, and I mean, we should say both of those attacks were in London. Like this wasn't in Russia or Moscow or anything like that. This was in London. These guys lived in London in exile and they were still murdered in London through radioactive material and nerve gas that was smuggled in the country.

And that actually kind of goes to stand as evidence that there still are these illegals, these deep cover sleeper agents that are working for what used to be the KGB and is now the FSB. Yeah, and that's why it's a really big deal that a president of the United States would want to cozy up to somebody like Putin

who is making great efforts to put who he wants in office. Yeah, I mean, it's just pure and simple. Like that's unbelievable. Absolutely, Chuck. Well said. You got anything else? I got nothing else but rage.

So if this floated your boat, go check out Spy's election meddling and disinformation past and present. It's a great article. Check out Alexander Litvinenko, the spy who solved his own murder, the man who solved his own murder. Check out the big thing.

They had a good one called the history of the KGB and it's legendary methods. So I think you'll like all three of those. And since I said, I think you'll like all three of those, it's time for Listener Main. This is about the heroin lossages. Remember that when I wondered if they were still around? So this is from Martin.

Hey guys, in the heroin episode, Chuck was wondering if there are any still heroin lossages lying around somewhere and Josh quickly refuted. But Chuck, you have been vindicated. I work in an unnamed museum in an unlamed location in Canada. I'm not even gonna say where in Canada, even though he does.

And we have four different packages for heroin lossages from Bayer. They're under lock and key, of course. We received them in a donation from a local pharmacy that closed down in the 30s. And they gave the museum a wide array of drugs to add to the collection, along with the heroin. We also have a bottle of arsenic

and two packets of amphetamines. One package has two pills missing. Oh man. Love the show, you guys are keeping me sane during quarantine. I steadily make my way through your back catalog. That is from Martin. Nice, Martin. That was much appreciated.

Thanks for shining some light on that one. And if you wanna shine some light for us, we love that kind of thing. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.