The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Spies and Traitors: Kim Philby, James Angleton and the Friendship and Betrayal that Would Shape MI6, the CIA and the Cold War by Michael Holzman

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Spies and Traitors: Kim Philby, James Angleton and the Friendship and Betrayal that Would Shape MI6, the CIA and the Cold War by Michael Holzman A brilliant exposé of how Kim Philby—the master-spy and notorious double agent—became the mentor, and later, mortal enemy, of James Angleton, who would eventually lead the CIA. Kim Philby's life and career has inspired an entire literary genre: the spy novel of betrayal. Philby was one of the leaders of the British counter-intelligence efforts, first against the Nazis, then against the Soviet Union. He was also the KGB's most valuable double-agent, so highly regarded that his image is on the postage stamps of the Russian Federation even today. Before he was exposed, Philby was the mentor of James Jesus Angleton, one of the central figures in the early years of the CIA who became the long-serving chief of the counter-intelligence staff of the Agency. James Angleton and Kim Philby were friends for six years, or so Angleton thought. Then they were enemies for the rest of their lives. This is the story of their intertwined careers and a betrayal that would have dramatic and irrevocable effects on the Cold War and US-Soviet relations, and have a direct effect on the shape and culture of the CIA in the latter half of the twentieth century. Spanning the globe, from London and Washington DC, to Rome and Istanbul, Spies and Traitors gets to the heart of one of the most important and flawed personal relationships in modern history.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're wonderful. Another podcast we've got going on. We're very thankful to have you coming in again. Thanks, guys, for coming by. Be sure to subscribe to the show. I don't know where the wonderful came from. We just feel really wonderful today. Do you feel wonderful, Michael? Oh, very wonderful. Mike, he can't even hold himself back. He's so excited to be here. We'll be talking to Michael here in a second. But in the meantime, you want to see the video version of this, go to, let's see, youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. How do I forget that? Goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. See everything we're

reading and reviewing over there. And also go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. There's just an endless monolith of groups over there that you can go and look at. Monolith, is that the right word? Who gave me a book deal? Anyway, guys, Monolith, we just put funny stuff at the beginning of the show to make it interesting for you guys. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character.

I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. what is it, like 33, 35 years now? We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold,

but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that

are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Anyway, guys, we have a most amazing author on the show, and he probably knows how to pick better words than I do at the beginning of shows. He's the author of the new book. It's coming out October 5th, 2021. The book is called Spies and Traitors. Kim Philby, James Angleton, and the friendship and betrayal that would shape MI6, the CIA, and the Cold War. His name is Michael Holzman.

He's going to be talking about this. This is exciting considering the James Bond movies coming out, MI6, all that good stuff. Michael was born in Brookings, South Dakota. He's the author of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA and the Craft of Intelligence, biographies of Guy Burgess and Donald and Melinda McClain, and the novel Pax, 1934-41. He lives in Briar Cliff Manor, New York. And that might be Pax, 1934-41.

Is that correct, Michael? Welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. We were just testing you. Thank you. Testing you to see if We were just testing you. Thank you. Testing you to see if you knew the title of your own book. It's a rough comedy day to hear this work in this room today. Michael, thank you

for coming by. Congratulations on your book. Books are a lot of work, but we certainly appreciate you coming by and sharing it and all the time you put into it. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs, please. The book is coming out from Pegasus Press and it's available on Amazon. Actually, all my books are available on Amazon.

There you go. How many books do you have, by the way? Seven or eight. Yeah. And if you go on YouTube, you can see he's got several thousand behind him, I think, on his bookshelf. So he's a very well-read gentleman.

I'm the jelly of your library there. What motivated you to write this book, Michael? I had written a biography of James Angleton, and I had noticed that he had gotten very wound up with Kim Philby. I had actually acquired some more information. The CIA has been releasing information that they say is about the JFK assassination and they

release this information by backing a truck up to Langley and filling it with files and then dumping them so they're in no order whatsoever and I found out that not only were they about the Kennedy assassination

but they were about everything that the CIA had done I went through those and I found out that not only were they about the Kennedy assassination, but they were about everything that the CIA had done randomly. I went through and I found out that there was a lot more information about Angleton and I needed to update that. Awesome. Awesome. So who are these characters? Give us a basis of who these characters are for those who aren't familiar with these names? Okay, well, this gets pretty deep into secret intelligence service. See, most countries have organizations that spy on other countries. Probably every country has organizations that spy on other countries.

And then within those organizations, they have organizations that try to prevent other countries from spying on them. The first of these was the Indian Intelligence Service of the Brits. And they used their secret intelligence service in India to keep the people in India from becoming independent. And the famous book about this is Kim by Roger Kipling. The Brits then took this home and they set up secret intelligence services in England just before the Second World War. There was one that was to keep the empire and the people at home in line. They called that MI5. And then there was one to spy on everybody else. They called it MI6.

When the Second World War started, the United States had none of these things. And they needed somebody to teach them how to do it because they didn't want to be left out. So they set up the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, and sent people over to England to learn how to be spies. The spy craft. I think it's important to realize that

spy is not a technical term. What you have are civil servants who have pensions and regular salaries and so on. Those are officers. Angleton and Philby were both officers. And then you have agents who the

officers employ. And they don't have anything except death benefits for their beneficiaries. Oh, wow. That's probably not a good thing either if you're having to cash in your death benefits, right? Yeah. Among that data, I found a lot of these forms that people had filled out saying, yes, I accept to work with the CIA, and my grandmother should get the honorarium when I'm killed. Now, are these the type of CIA people that you see that are usually unnamed

on the wall of, I forget the name, the wall of honor or whatever? Ed Langley, yeah. Ed Langley, they're just a star, there's not a name. Those are the officers. Okay. Those are the employees. The agents have an unmarked grave. Okay. Those are the employees. The agents have an unmarked grave. Okay.

Wow. You don't even get a marked grave. Wow. Jeez. There's the honor in that. Nice. Nice. Give us an overall arcing of the book or some details that you think that we can tease out to readers to get them to go buy it.

Okay. that you think that we can tease out to readers to get them to go buy it? Okay, once I got interested in doing this, writing a dual biography of Angleton and Philby, I went into it. And what you have is that, as I said, was an employee of MI6, the Foreign Service, Secret Intelligence Service of the Brits. He had a very interesting background. He was born in India,

that's why they called him Kim after the book by Kipling. His father had been a British agent who had worked in India and then had worked in Iraq. And at a certain point, he was told to go to Saudi Arabia, it wasn't Saudi Arabia. It was before the First World War. And make friends with a chieftain there who was called Ibn Saud. And he did. And then he spent the rest of his life promoting the career of Ibn Saud who became king of Saudi Arabia.

Oh, wow. And also Kim Philby's father, whose name was Sinjin Philby, became famous as an explorer. And he was parallel to T.E. Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, wow. Lawrence of Arabia was supporting a fellow named Hussein, and Sinjin Philby was supporting him. And I went to the archives in London once, and I found these hit books that were the memoranda, the reports that Lawrence had written and that Filby had written.

It was very thrilling. There was a story about the father. And I decided to look at the father, James Angleton. And he turned out to have a completely different thing. He was born from absolutely dirt poor farmers in Indiana, but he went west to make his fortune. He went to Idaho, near you, Boise. And this was before the first world war. And he went into what was then high tech, which was cash registers. And he got a job selling cash registers for a national cash register company. And he went from there with absolutely nothing to become head of the largest American company in Italy.

Oh, wow. Head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy. So his son, James Angleton, grew up in a palace in Milan. And then was sent off to private schools in England, went to Yale. So that was the beginning there. So you have these very interesting father stories that tie into the sons. Now, this is interesting. James and Kim, they were friends for six years, and then they become enemies.

So this is an interesting spy tale, isn't it? Yeah, I should think so. So what happens then is that James Angleton is sent to London to learn how to be a spy, and his teacher is Ken Filby. And Ken Filby remains his mentor for a number of years. They work together in London against the Germans. Then Angleton is sent to Rome to work against the fascists there. And all the time he's asking Philby for advice.

What do I do in this situation? Do I shoot this fascist? Or do I capture him and milk him for information? What should I do? At the end of the war, Kim Philby is made head of anti-Soviet work for MI6. This is

rather ironic in retrospect because when Kim Philby was in college in 1933 in Cambridge University, he became a member of spy service for the Soviets. So from

1934, he's a Soviet spy, an agent, as I said earlier, eventually being a civil servant for the British intelligence service. He rises in the British intelligence service

until he's seen as perhaps the next person to become head of it Philby and Angleton work together across the Atlantic in 1949 Philby is put in charge of all relationships between British and American intelligence

services for the prince and then he's revealed to have communist friends oh that's always trouble that was trouble yes so two of his friends donald mclean and guy burgess who are diplomats disappear and guy burgess have had been renting a room have now had been living in Philby's house in Washington. And people say, he's a friend of yours. And he's a spy. And you're very important in the British intelligence service.

Maybe you need another career. So he's fired. Wow. This upsets Angleton. Because he finds out that one of his best friends and his teacher is a spy. Wow. The ultimate spy games. Yeah.

So then you go from about 1950, 51 to 1962, where Philby's knocking around and all the time Angleton is trying to catch him, setting traps, having people watch him and so forth. In 1959, the old boys, the folks who have been friends of Philby's in MI6 say, we've got to take care of you

guy. And they get him a job with the Economist newspaper and the Observer newspaper and they send him to Beirut to be the Middle Eastern correspondent. He does that pretty well. And it's a strange situation where almost all the

news that the British public get from the Middle East in those years is from Kim Philby as a journalist. So he writes these stories, which are very nice, I think, political analysis stories, gives a copy to The Economist, gives a copy to The Observer, gives a copy to MI6, gives a copy to KGB. So he had a lot of carbon paper they were using by writers at that time. Eventually everybody decides, the Brits and the Americans decided

that this is not going to work, and they tried to get him to confess. Just before, the night before he's supposed to confess, by coincidence, there's a Russian freighter in the harbor at Beirut, and he goes down there, he's picked up,

goes to Moscow. So he was bad? Yeah. Wow. Wow. And he becomes a trainer for KGB spies. Wow. In Moscow for the rest of his life.

So this explains why they're enemies then. Yeah. So meanwhile, Angleton is rising through what becomes the CIA. Mm-hmm. And he goes back and he thinks about what's happened. Before

Philby was revealed, they had collaborated on a number of things. There was an attempt to overthrow the government of Albania. And oddly enough,

everybody who was sent to Albania to work on this got killed. Oh, wow. And there was a project to overthrow the Soviet-inspired government in Poland. And oddly enough, everybody who was sent over there got killed. And Angleton thinks the common denominator here is my friend Kim Philby.

Wow. The one guy. So for then, years after that, after Philby. Wow. The one guy. So for then, years after that, after Philby had gone to Moscow, whenever anything went wrong with the CIA, Angleton said, this must be Kim's work. Wow. And he got

kind of nervous. Wow. He's rising up in the CIA. He was a very good bureaucrat. They were both very smart. Angleton was smarter actually. And very highly educated. So he's rising up in the CIA and he's given CIA. He was a very good bureaucrat. They were both very smart. Angleton was smarter actually and very highly educated. So he's rising up in the CIA and he's given various top secret, what they always call special projects. One was they set up an operation at the airport in New York where all the international mail came through And the CIA intercepted every piece of international mail and opened it and read it.

And then they had a similar operation with telegrams. So if you, in those years, 52 to 70 or something, if you sent a letter to your grandmother in Belgium, the CIA has read it. Oh, wow. If you send a telegram to your banker or your stockbroker in London, the CIA has read it. Wow. And that

was Angleton's work. Wow. Can they still do that? Well, they probably can. They can do whatever they want, really. When Kennedy was assassinated, as you probably know, there were a lot of stories about who did it. Mm-hmm. It wasn't me.

And it was very important to the CIA that nobody thought the CIA did it. Mm-hmm. So they made Angleton the liaison with the Warren Commission. Oh, wow. And his job was to say, it wasn't the CIA, it was the Cubans. It was the mob that mobbed it. Now, doesn't that seem a little suspect, though?

If you're working that hard, that doesn't protest too much, as Shakespeare used to like to say. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Okay. All right. I always thought that the grassy knoll

was very crowded. They had lots and lots of people on it who were trying to assassinate Kennedy. Too soon. I don't know. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's such a horrible event in American history. But, you know, what it was. Whenever there was a need for somebody to do a special project, Angleton did it.

Oh, wow. Finally, in 1972, he got into a fight with the new director of the CIA, Bill Colby, who fired him. Wow. And which seemed clear to Angleton that that meant that Colby was a spy, obviously. Oh. And then he retired. Oh. This is quite the interesting times.

The CIA, the director of the CIA, and how the CIA worked. When I grew up, I remember reading about the Bay of Pigs. I think it was 1,000 Days by Salinger. And how the CIA was whole, the Bay of Pigs and that whole thing. And it's interesting how the fingers that have been in the pies over all the years and different governments, Pinochet and stuff that we've tried to muck about with.

But this is really spyware stuff. Do you see this becoming maybe a movie and spies or something? Because everyone loves spy movies. If somebody wants to make a movie, that would be nice. Sure, there you go. British versus American Intelligence. That might be, would that be kind of a premise for this, maybe?

Yeah, something like that. One of my favorite movies was The Russia House. And that was kind of Americans versus the Europeans with their thing. That was a good movie because that tension in that movie was awesome. So this would make a great movie too. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, yeah. So what other things do you want to tease out to readers to get them to pick up this baby? Well, there's the story about fathers was living there so the two of them used to go along all these people by the way were alcoholics mostly an alcoholic too most of the british and American government as far as I know were alcoholics in the 40s, 50s and 60s, I don't know how, well we know how things went, but anyway

there are stories of Kim Philly and Sinjin Philly getting drunk and going through the streets of Beirut singing English public school songs that's probably something I'd do yeah, it's probably out of my alley right there, so this should be a pretty interesting book, it's going it's probably on my alley right there so this is should be a

pretty interesting book it's going to come out on october 5th and traitors mi6 cia cold war do the cia and the mi6 get along back then do they get along now how does that whole thing work do they are they looking each other over whatever watching each other's backs sort of thing or whatever well officially they got along one of the things that Angleton did was he set up a coalition of secret intelligence services called the Five Eyes, which was the British, the Americans, the Canadians, the New Zealanders, Australia. So there's a lot of connections at that secret level.

Angleton thought that the split between the Soviet Union and China in the 1960s was a fake because he knew that their secret intelligence services were still working together. Nice.

Nice. And you can see this going on. Actually, there's a news story today that's a related issue that the chief of the joint chiefs of staff in the last days of the trump administration called up his opposite number in china and they made a deal about how to how to work together in a period that seemed to be very unstable wow and no one knew that until this morning.

And I imagine that the head of the CIA has the same kind of relationship with the heads of all the other secret intelligence services around, whether or not they seem to be officially friends or enemies. That's crazy, man. That's crazy. So it's going to be an interesting book. It's going to launch. Any last words before we go out that you want to tease out?

Be careful. Be careful. Check out the book, guys. It's going to be coming out October 5th. Spies and Traitors, Kim Philby, James Angleton, and the friendship and betrayal that would shape MI6 and CIA and the Cold War. Thanks for being on the show, Michael. We certainly appreciate it.

Thank you. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs or wherever you want them to order up the book. I think you can just look in the usual places you look for books. There you go. There you go. Thanks, Manas, for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4ChessChrisVoss.

Hit that bell notification. Go to goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places. You can see our stuff there. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership,

Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now.

We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me.

There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold.