The Rest Is History - 37. Spies, with Ben MacIntyre

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

History is littered with stories of espionage and its capacity to change the course of events. But does spying truly matter and has the human operative finally been replaced by the computer? Ben MacIntyre, author of books including Agent Zigzag and The Spy and the Traitor, joins Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook to discuss the history of spying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. music perhaps by shirley bassey perhaps by adele or perhaps knowing my co-presenter dominic sandbrook by duran duran then poor mccartney and wings surely a familiar theme strikes up we're looking down the barrel of a gun dominic appears from the right of the frame dressed in a smart black tuxedo strides across a white background before bang he swivels and shoots the camera holding the pose red trickles down cue stylized title card which reveals the words the rest is history welcome to the show

Dominic um do you fancy yourself as uh as James Bond I actually to be honest I see you so see you as more a kind of le carré figure tom lurking in the background everything about that introduction has been quite offensive from the sort of erotic tone with which you did my bond like appearance to then the implied comparison with george smiley and of course the truth is we all fancy ourselves as james bond don't we but if you ever read those smiley books and there's that sort of description of him the sort of shabby man in the Mac trudging from library to library in the pouring rain. I mean, that basically is the life of a historian. But you see, I wouldn't even be George Smiley. I'd be so useless. I'd miss all the key clues and kind

of end up shot by Carla in some back street or something. However, fortunately, we do have as our guest today, and our theme, as you probably guessed by now, is history of espionage, history of spying. We do have someone who knows pretty much everything there is to know, not about the fiction of spying, but the reality, even though his books are in many ways more gripping than fiction. And it is, of course, Ben McIntyre, author of Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, Spy Among Friends, among many others. One of which, Ben, was The Spy and the Traitor about Oleg Gordievsky. And I name check that because it was the most recent of your books I read. And I read it last year in a wintry St. Petersburg. And it was the perfect fit of subject

matter to location. So Ben, thanks so much for coming on to The Rest is History. Delighted to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm looking forward to this. We've been talking about both James Bond and George Smiley and I guess for us in Britain, there is a risk that we tend to see the history of espionage almost entirely in fictional terms. Do you think that's true? I think it's true. I think it's also true that there is a strange and enduring link, I think, between British fiction and espionage, because it's no accident, I think, that many of the greatest novelists of the 20th century were themselves spies. You've mentioned Ian Fleming and John le Carré. They were both in the intelligence, but there are many more.

Somerset Maugham, John Buchan. There are, I mean, almost, it's an uncanny link, I think, because I think in lots of ways the work of espionage is not so far removed from the work, from what novelists do. You try to imagine an artificial world, and you try to lure other people into it. And the better you are able to frame this artificial imaginary world, the better spy you're going to make. Graham Greene's another brilliant example. They all learned the trade of fiction, I would say, through espionage. So I

think it's no accident that the two are, particularly in British culture, deeply intertwined. In fact, funny enough, I thought it was rather telling in a way that when Stella Rimmington stepped down as head of MI5, the first thing she did was to start writing novels. Well, but you know, actually it was Luke Jennings, am I allowed to say that? Who wrote it? Who then went on to write Villanelle.

I hope I'm not betraying too many secrets there. You've shattered the illusion. But Ben, doesn't that then raise a question? So if you think about a book like Graham Greene's Ant-Man and Havana or Le Carre's The Tailor of Panama, which is kind of inspired by that, there's a sense that the whole thing, I mean, without giving those books entirely away, there's a sense that the whole thing, I mean, without giving those books entirely away,

there's a sense that the whole thing is a fiction, that the spy is selling a fiction to their superiors, a fiction of what's happening in the country, but also a fiction of their own influence and the fiction that spying matters. I mean, does it matter? I mean, lovely that you mentioned Our Man in Havana because, of course, Our Man in Havana

is directly based by Graham Greene on a real intelligence case. It's based on the Garbo case. Now, the Garbo case was this extraordinary double agent in the Second World War. His real name was Juan Pujol. He was a failed Spanish chicken farmer, believe it or not, who turned up in Britain. Well, he was actually brought to Britain by MI5 in the end. And he invented an entire sort of army of sub-agents. He ended up with 23 people, each of whom had a different backstory and wives and so on, all of whom were completely invented. And they were used to feed back very, very important disinformation to the Germans on the eve of D-Day. Now, Graham Greene knew about this story. And so he absorbed this, what seems like a, I mean, and Garbo himself was

a failed novelist. I mean, that's what he really wanted to do. So he created this fictional world, which then had a direct impact on reality, and then became fiction again afterwards. So the makey-uppy stuff that he was doing during the war changed history and then became fiction again. I mean, another great example is the Operation Mincemeat story, again, which I've written about, which wonderfully sort of started as a sort of mad idea in the mind of a group of intelligence officers who were all frustrated novelists or poets. I mean, what they did was to create an entirely false identity for this dead man, who then was shipped onto the coast of Spain and had a dramatic and very important effect on the invasion of Sicily, because it helped to convince the Germans the attack was actually

coming in Greece. Now, that was revealed as a novel by Duff Cooper after the war, because he wasn't allowed to publish it as reality. And then once it had become a fiction, then one of the authors of the plot was allowed to turn it into a real book, which then became a film, The Man Who Never Was, which then became a nonfiction book in my case, and then is about to be a film again. So the weird interplay between the two continues. But to answer your question, most espionage doesn't make an enormous amount of difference. That seems a strange thing to say from someone who has written now, I think, something like 12 books on espionage. But because most espionage cancels itself out.

We know what they know that we know that they know that we know. And where you are on that kind of strange continuum is kind of where you're winning or losing in the spy game. Macmillan was always of the view that we should just get rid of all spies completely or indeed just tell everybody everything. And then there would be no problem. But but very. And usually what espionage does and espionage is itself a rather loaded word. But but what the sort of spy game does is that it oils the wheels of traditional diplomacy. It allows access sometimes to important information that makes us safer when it works and makes us radically more unsafe when it doesn't work. I mean, so let's think of the Gulf War.

I mean, you know, when intelligence is privileged beyond what it is worth, it can be catastrophic. But very occasionally, it does have a strategic impact on the way states behave. And Operation Midspeed is a good example. The D-Day deception is another very good example. I mean, without the success of that spy operation, would the Normandy landings have worked? Well, possibly. Would there have been greater budget? Absolutely, certainly. Ben, just for the benefit of those who are not familiar with either of those operations,

could you just sketch out exactly what those two operations are? Both in the Second World War, and they're both, as you say, kind of almost fictional projects designed to deceive the Nazis into thinking something's going to happen that doesn't. With pleasure. I mean, in order, Operation Mincemeat was an attempt to persuade the Germans that instead of landing in Sicily, the great Anglo-American armada that was setting off from North Africa, that instead of aiming for Sicily, which was the obvious target, that whole flotilla was heading for Greece. And it was a very complicated general deception plan. But the key element of it was what sounds like a completely bonkers idea, which was to get a dead body. And in fact, the idea, here's another link, comes from Fleming. Because Ian Fleming, when he was assistant to the head of naval intelligence, was asked to come up with a list of ruses, one of which he produced something called the Trout Memo. And the Trout Memo was so-called because he compared catching spies and the whole work of espionage to fly fishing. And number 51

in this list of totally mad ideas was, let's get a dead body and drop it somewhere where the German spies will find it, because a dead body is more believable than a living person. And so they did exactly that. They got hold, they found, totally illegally, they found a dead body in a warehouse in King's Cross. They turned him, his real name was Glindore Michael, but they turned him into someone completely different. They turned him into a major in the Marines, and they equipped him with a uniform and a backstory and everything that you would if you were a novelist. And also with key counterfeit papers, letters from senior commanders that indicated quite clearly

that an attack was looming in Greece and that the Sardinian campaign was a complete feint. And they took this body and they shipped it ashore on the coast of neutral Spain, where they knew that a particularly effective German spy was operating. And it worked. Astonishingly, because of the Bletchley Park intercepts, you can follow this lie as it goes from the south coast of Spain to Madrid,

Madrid to Berlin, Berlin to Hitler's headquarters, and then straight down the gullet of the German high command. And it worked. I mean, they moved considerable numbers of troops from one side of the Mediterranean to the other. So that's the bizarre Operation Mincemeat story. And the other one, perhaps even more significant, was the one surrounding the D-Day deception, which involved the use of double agents. They were the key elements in this. Now, these were people that

the Germans had sent to Britain to spy against the British, who had been picked up by the British and either executed and then impersonated or turned or otherwise used to feed information back. And the bizarre thing about that was, again, because of Bletchley Park, the British were able to intercept not just some of the German spies that were coming to Britain, but all of them, every single one, bar one, character, there's one remaining mystery. There was one particular Dutch agent who parachuted into Britain who went by the unimprovable name of Engelbertus Fucken. And Engelbertus Fucken has never been...

That wasn't his code name. No, that was his real name. God knows what his code name was then. That's such a Bond film name name was then i mean what a gift to a novelist but but so he was found engelbert i'm going to say it again engelbert as fucking he's found in in a in a in a in a bunker in cambridge and nobody knew how he got into britain without being caught they put a real panic through mi5 because he was the only one but otherwise they captured a lot of them and they they used them. And Garbo was an example that we talked about at the top of the cast. But there were a

whole set of others. There were five essential ones. And they used them to send information indicating this time that the obvious target, which was Calais, was the target. So it's the reverse, if you like, of the Sicilian deception. And again, what it did was it buttoned up large numbers of German troops in Calais, waiting for an invasion that never happened. Now, it's almost impossible to quantify what impact that would have had. So you're in the, because what if history doesn't, there's never really worked. But you know, it is perfectly reasonable, I think, because you can see the troop deployments that it has, it's one of the very few occasions when intelligence goes straight into strategic thinking, that it actually materially affects and changes the way people behave. I mean,

you mentioned Gordievsky as well, Tom. I mean, that's another one of the rare ones that really did actually materially impact Western policy towards the Soviet Union. So you mentioned Gordievsky, and your two examples are kind of Second World War examples. But the thing that the conflict that most people think about with spying is the Cold War. I mean, the Cold War is in many ways defined by spying. You know, Bond, Le Carre, the sort of spy who came in from the cold. And do you think spying mattered in the Cold War as much as it mattered in World War Two? If you're measuring mattered by actually having an impact on the way states behave,

I think not really, because of course, the Cold War was cold. I mean, it was never it never, it never actually led to to what it did in certain areas, but it never led to direct conflict. So, so while it was hugely extensive, far more extensive, the espionage of the Cold War era than anything that was going on in the Second World War, and there's something delightfully amateurish, really, about the way it was done in the Second World War. It became much more professionalized. It became much better funded. Did it have a profound impact? Rarely, I think. But that question may not have been fully answered yet, because of course, a lot of the material, a lot of the archival material is still closed up. But there are,

I mean, and Gordievsky is a very good example. I mean, that's a really good example of a spy who was able to inform his masters, in this case, MI6 and the CIA, able to inform them what the enemy was thinking. And that's the critical element of espionage. If you can get inside the head of the opposition and not only find out what he's doing, but what he's planning to do, you're a big step ahead. What Gordievsky did, Gordievsky was a career KGB officer. I mean, he'd been born into the KGB. He was a very good KGB officer, in fact. He sort of came with the blood, really. But in Copenhagen in the 60s, he turned. And he turned really almost entirely for ideological reasons. Again, a very rare thing in espionage. Most espionage is about money. Most people in that world, particularly agents, by, by cash, cold, hard cash.

That wasn't the case with Gordievsky. He decided, he's a highly intellectual man, he decided that he was serving a brutal, repressive regime, and that he really needed to, you know, that he really needed to flip to the other side. So Gordievsky was turned, and for a decade, was passing information to MI6 and the CIA that was going straight to not just Downing Street, but going to the Oval Office, it was going straight to Reagan's desk. And it is clear that some of the things he was able to reveal materially changed the way that Reagan and Thatcher perceived the Soviet Union. And in many ways, he sort of paved the way for the beginning of the end of the Cold War. And I'll give you just one example. There are two terrific examples. One is that Gordievsky ended up as the sort of designated

head of the KGB in Britain, which meant that he would have access to the crown jewels, really, he would have access to everything the KGB was doing in this country. And when Gorbachev visited, the famous visit in December 1984, Gorbachev's job for the KGB was to draw up a memo of what Gorbachev should say to Thatcher. Now, that memo was actually, of course, drawn up by MI6. And so you have a unique situation here where one spy is advising both sides on what to say to the other. So when Thatcher emerged from that meeting saying, this is a man we can do business with, well, there was a very simple reason for that. Gordievsky had rigged the business. I mean, the whole script had been written beforehand. So that's just an example of how, you know, and that's a small way that the sort of the minutiae of relations between states can be materially affected by espionage.

But Ben, I mean, a much bigger one, and on the whole question of does spying affect things, is that it's Gordievsky, isn't it, who tips Thatcher and Reagan off that, what was it, in 1983 with Operation Archer, this NATO attempt to simulate a nuclear attack, the soviets thought that this was genuine preparation for a first nuclear strike by nato absolutely and the world came teeteringly close to to nuclear war so i mean that that then has a a seismic impact on the way that that reagan ultimately thinks yeah we've got we've got to we've got to denuclearize. Hugely important and much forgotten, actually, the whole Abel Archer story, which was terrifying, actually. I mean, some historians think, and I think there's a good argument for this, that it was the closest the world came to nuclear Armageddon since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it's almost completely unknown these days.

It's beginning to sort of emerge. And what Gordievsky was able to explain to his handlers in London and then passed on to Washington was that this was, if you like, it was genuine paranoia on the part of the, if you can have such a thing, on the part of the Kremlin. That the Kremlin genuinely believed that this, the build up particularly to this, to this defence operation, which was just a practice run, really, was being perceived as the real thing in the Kremlin. And you can see a dramatic change in the rhetoric and the posture of Reagan and Thatcher from that moment. They realized that they were being perceived as the aggressors, which they'd never really thought of themselves as. And you can start to see a gentle thawing that then continues right to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And it's absolutely fascinating. But you can argue that Gordievsky played a signal part in making us all safer, you know, in preventing an appalling misunderstanding, if you like. And that came from being able to point

out what was actually going on inside the heads of the sort of gerontocracy that was running the Soviet Union at that point. But Gordievsky also raises a really interesting question, which is there actually in a lot of your books, certainly the Cold War ones. It's about that dividing line between the spy and the traitor. Because, I mean, Gordievsky was a traitor to his country. I mean, he's a hero to us. And he's viewed as such. And you've obviously written about Philby and Kim Philby and Agent Sonia in your most recent book. a traitor to his country. I mean, he's a hero to us, and he's viewed as such. And you've obviously written about Philby and Kim Philby and Agent Sonia in your most recent book.

And a lot of these people, I mean, what's fascinating about them to me is they're so ambiguous. Are they heroes or are they, you know, how do you deal with that? Well, yes. I mean, I think that, yes, I mean, our hero is their traitor. Their traitor is our hero. It's, I mean, Gordievsky himself would utterly reject the notion that he betrayed anybody. But his KGB colleagues, many of whom I interviewed for that book, regard him as we regard Kim Philby, that he was a rank.

Whatever you felt about the regime, their argument is on a human level. I mean, many of them said to me, look, we all felt that the Soviet Union was troubled. It was all going down the pan. But only Gordievsky decided to betray. Only he decided to turn around. And so the ambivalence in that title is completely intentional, that the spy on the train. I think there is a distinction to be made, though. And in the end, I mean, Philby and Gordievsky are the obvious comparisons. There is a difference, though. And the difference in the end is a sort of moral one. Kim Philby was serving a brutal, repressive Stalinist regime that was murdering millions

of people. And he knew it. I mean, he was in a unique position, Kim Philby, as an MI6 officer on the Soviet desk, to know what was really happening. He couldn't claim ignorance about what was going on. Gordievsky had seen both sides, and he too, he came, well, he, in sharp contradistinction, decided that one side was on the side of right, and one wasn't. So there is an important moral distinction in the Cold War. And then there is a sort of much more practical element, which is that Philby was responsible for the deaths of many, many hundreds of people. He knew that the people he was tipping off, the Soviets, too, were going to be executed. They weren't even going to be tried. Gordievsky made it a central part of his agreement to work for MI6

that there would be no bloodshed as a result of what he was doing. And so there are different systems. The people that Gordievsky identified to the West as being Soviet moles were tracked, they were eventually arrested, they were tried, and in some cases, they were put in prison. On the other side, those that were identified by Philby and others working for the Soviet Union were rounded up, tortured, and shot. I mean, so there is a practical difference in that as well. Ben, I feel we're almost just skimming the surface here, but we're already tight for a break.

So we're going to have a short interlude, and then we'll come back. And I've got a question for you following on from that what you were just talking about I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews

splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are with Ben McIntyre. We're talking about the history of espionage. And Ben, before the break, you were talking about the ideological dimension of spying. And does that add something extra to the mix on top of national rivalries? Because I'm thinking the early modern period, the heyday of spying then was Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I, Spymaster. And that, of course, is the great rivalry between Catholics and Protestants. And what you get i guess with the the communist revolution in russia is the sense of a great titanic struggle between communism and the capitalist world does that kind of really soup up espionage in a way that that perhaps it hadn't been before in the 19th and even in the

first world war period undoubtedly because you have these two you have a sort of manichean that perhaps it hadn't been before in the 19th and even in the First World War period? Undoubtedly, because you have these two, you have a sort of Manichean struggle between these two world ideologies, but it's, let's be honest, bent on world domination. I mean, you've got, when the stakes don't get much higher and thrown into the mix in the Cold War, you also have the possibility of global annihilation added in as well. So you've got, you know, the stakes are incredibly high. And it's one of the interesting things really about modern espionage is that although it does have an ideological dimension, that's, you know, we talk about Islamic fundamentalism and so on, but much, as it were, domestic intelligence is really about nationalism now.

It's about the projection of sort of power by other means. It's not really a massive ideological cleavage. I mean, Alexander, Alex Younger, recently, former head of MI6 was saying, you know, Russia is the main threat. And that is probably right in an espionage world. But it's not really an ideological conflict. It's about projection of power and influence and economics in a huge way. So I think, yes, I mean, one has to be a bit careful of ideology, though, because we were talking about Kim Philby, and Kim Philby was famously the most infamous of the Cambridge Five spies. And he was a communist as a young man who had signed up in the 30s with the predecessor of

the KGB and then did unbelievable damage to MI6. And he always painted himself as a sort of ideological warrior and crusader. It's not quite accurate that. I mean, he certainly he was a committed communist to begin with. But over time, many other influences, and this is true of many spies, came to inform the way he behaved. And they included hubris, ambition, and the drug of espionage. I mean, the drug of secrecy is a very strong one. It's very toxic, and it's very difficult to give up once you've tasted it. And, you know, a sort of certain macabre love of adventure, too, and a kind of a resilience and a sort of, somebody once described

it as the ruthless exercise of private power. I think that is, I think that comes very close to describing a lot of the motivation, which is outwith any kind of ideological commitment. And it's my firm conviction that by the time he was actually, he sort of went into exile in Moscow, by the time he escaped Kim Philby,

he really didn't believe in communism anymore. It was, he was just, He was just hooked on the game and couldn't give it up and the romance of it. So again, in a way, that takes us back to the whole, it's an imaginative business, espionage. And once you've sucked yourself into that story, and you've become, as it were, an actor in your own drama're it's very hard to stop so i think it's well while there are ideological spies they're quite rare um gordievsky is a good example he's someone who still today exudes a kind of sense of his own moral rectitude in doing in doing what he did that he feels he was on the side of right it doesn't make him it's sometimes an easy character

to deal with because zealots are often not easy companions. But he's very rare. I mean, those people who are purely motivated by a belief are hen's teeth in this world. All the people we've talked about so far, Ben, have been men. But obviously there's a huge fascination with female spies, the kind of Matter Harry archetype and the sort of James Bond, you know, the spy who loved me, this sort of glamorous agent. And your most recent book, Agent Sonia, is about a woman who's not

I think a terribly glamorous character. Are women more effective? Dominic, we should name check a JHGS, one of the on Twitter who has actually asked us on that. Exact question. Which female spies in history?

Well, he says which female spies deserve to be depicted in film. And maybe, you know, maybe Agent Sonia would make a great film. But my question was really, do women make better spies because they're less likely to be suspected, do you think? Because people tend to, our archetypes are so often male. Well, that is undoubtedly the case of agent, about agent Sonia, whose real name was Ursula Kaczynski. She's, her story is absolutely extraordinary because yes, there have been women spies throughout history from Mata Hari onwards. They, and before actually, but they tend to be agents. They tend to be people recruited by men to do a specific job. You know, they're couriers, and this is true of the SOE agents in the Second World War. You know,

they are, what makes Ursula Kaczynski, Agent Sonia, different is that she was a pro. She was a professional intelligence officer trained by the Red Army, and she regarded it as a career. She, you know, she rose to become a colonel in the Red Army Intelligence Service, not an organization noted for its equal opportunities policies. And I don't, in her case, baking scones in a tiny village in the Cotswolds, was not going to be suspected of being a sort of super spy. And she played that card ruthlessly and absolutely brilliantly because when MI5 did finally get around to realizing that something was going on, they picked up the radio signal. She built a very powerful radio transmitter in the privy in the back garden. And the radio interception service was picking up the signals. And they did eventually come to interview her. And she was absolutely brilliant. I mean, these two men with long mustaches and trillby hats turned up at the front door, and she knew exactly who they were and what they were up

to. And she said, Oh, should I get my husband, she said, and went back to sort of baking a birthday cake, which she'd been making. And the MI5 report as a result of that meeting is utterly brilliant and very funny in retrospect, because it says, well, it can't possibly be Mrs. Burton, because she's far too busy with her domestic duties to be involved in any kind of espionage. And Ursula knew exactly what she was doing. I mean, she's very funny about it. So, Ben, presumably the best spies are the ones who are not going to be featuring in your books because we don't know who they are.

I mean, would be the kind of logical implication of that. Well, you're right, actually. Well, we're talking, there are so many different sorts of spies. I mean, if you're talking about sleepers, if you're talking about, as it were, what the Russians used to refer to as illegals, people who are implanted in foreign countries under usually under civilian cover, in order to sort of absorb into the local populace and then be deployed. And everyone does this. I mean, the Russians were particularly good at it. They had a whole section of the Ljubljana that was used to create false identities to implant people in foreign countries. And some of your listeners will have watched the Americans until the present day, you know, there are sleepers among us. They come in different forms. It's not quite the same. It's not it's not there isn't that rigid ideological iron curtain that you need to get around in order to plant your spies. But believe me, they're among us. And Gordievsky is of the view that there are more illegal spies of different shapes and sorts operating in the West than at any time including the height of the cold war we've got um two questions i'd like to pair one from calvin

and he asked what are the examples from history if any where spies made a definitive difference to a war course of history and we've kind of touched on that already but then there's um there is uh um there's also one from arif uh mahmoud who asks, how important was spy Kermit Roosevelt Jr.? Historian Hugh Wilford describes him as being among the most important intelligence officers of their generation in the Middle East. Kermit Roosevelt Jr., I think, was the grandson of? Grandson. Yes, grandson. And key player in the American kind of establishment of American supremacy in the Middle East.

Yeah. And the reason I ask that I pair those is that there is obviously a temptation, if you were looking for spies, to find them, and perhaps to overemphasize the role that they play. And I guess that MI6 had this reputation, perhaps up to the 50s, maybe in Iran still does. And the CIA definitely does. The idea that everything that happens in the world happens because people in Langley are pulling strings. That's right. There's a hidden hand behind everything. And you're right. I mean, one shouldn't look for... Yes, I mean, I think that one has to take that into perspective.

Just to answer the first question, I mean, one of the sort of world changing events, and I should have mentioned when we were talking about the wartime stuff is the Bletchley Park intelligence operation, because of course, that was a dramatic, had a dramatic impact on the way the war was fought. And the way the war was shortened, it's still debated how much it was shortened by, but there's little doubt that it shortened the course of the war. That's a brilliant example of when intelligence really does matter. You know, it makes a huge difference. Of course, that's a different kind of intelligence from what we were talking about. We were talking about human intelligence, which is individuals dealing with other individuals and extracting secrets from them or misleading them. Signals intelligence,

which is what Bletchley Park is, and what is the preponderant form of intelligence today, is about messages. Today, it's about emails and texts and intercepting, you know, Facebook messages and so on. The Roosevelt story is very interesting. I mean, Kermit Roosevelt was very important. It's certainly particularly important in a pretty ugly, I think, sort of episode of history, which is the toppling of Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran, the consequences of which we are still living with today. And if you want to know why the Iranians feel so strongly about Britain, it really does go back to the entirely justified belief that a democratically elected leader was deliberately ousted by a CIA MI6 combined plot. And it's a

pretty disgraceful episode in many ways. I mean, again, one can't indulge in what history, but it did not have the effect that the West wanted it to have. And eventually it drove Iran in a completely different direction. So yes, he was important, but perhaps not in a way that one would necessarily want to celebrate. It's quite interesting that those files have yet to be released on exactly what MI6 and the CIA were up to and the extent to which they were involved. And you say that, you know, that there is a tendency to over-celebrate spies. And that is undoubtedly true. But there is a real conflict within the intelligence world itself about whether these stories should be told at all. Because of course, MI6, like the SAS,

trades on its own secrecy. It's the idea that you're not going to find out what it's really up to, because that's how it recruits more people. And that's how it engages agents who believe they're never going to be exposed in their story, they're never going to come out. But that conflicts with the fact that they're frightfully proud of what they do. And also, they have some great stories to tell. MI5, the Internal Security Service, is much more open about its past. It's much more prepared. I mean, it is indeed prepared to declassify its files. MI6 never declassifies its files. There is no declassified MI6 archive anywhere. But the time is coming, I suspect, when, you know, this sort of like conflict within sort of the intelligence philosophy itself is going to be writ large because we don't really like secrecy anymore.

We don't approve of secrecy and we associate people keeping secrets with people having something to hide. And so I think eventually MI6 will be forced to put all of this out there. I mean, there's a sort of selective attitude to it. I mean, they were very interesting about the Gordievsky story, of course, which was an MI6 run operation. And while they would not let me see the files, despite begging on my part for a long time, they were prepared to let me interview every single MI6 agent who was involved in that story, which technically they're not supposed to do. I mean, in theory, each one of them was breaking the Official Secrets Act. Hey, you know, it's a story

that MI6, oddly enough, rather likes, because it really works for MI6. Had they not achieved what they had achieved, you would never have heard of Oleg Gordievsky. And Ben, looking further forward, we've got a good question from the Lundy Project. He says, or he or she says, in the 20th century, spying was all about human capital. So there's your Gordievsky's and your Agent Sonia and your Operation Mincemeat and so on. So it's all about individual human beings who you've got on your side, who you're trying to turn and all that kind of thing. And the only project says basically is that dead with cyber warfare? Is espionage now basically rows of people sitting behind desks in open plan offices kind of tapping away?

There is no doubt that the lead intelligence agency in this country, as it is in most countries, is now GCHQ or the equivalents. You know, that is where the hard grind is being done. Although I was incredibly flattered. I was given a tour of GCHQ the other day. And one of the programs they have for training people on how to create false identities online, which course, you can do. I mean, we imagine that it's the same process, really. You can create an avatar online. In fact, in some ways, it's much easier to do. You can give them a backstory. You can give them a false history.

You can give them Facebook. You can give them – it's called, to my intense pleasure, it's called Operation Mincemeat, the training module that they go through to try and create these things. But no, yes, I mean, signals intelligence, SIGINT, is now the lead operation. But signals intelligence doesn't really work without human intelligence. And human intelligence is a vital adjunct to signals intelligence. So let's go back to the war again.

The Bletchley Park secret was a signals intelligence victory, but it was achieved by human intelligence, by individuals, in many cases, stealing the secrets, the enigma secrets in order to do it. And the same is true today. You still need human intelligence. It doesn't really work without human intelligence. So say, you know, you know, that there's a particular individual in RACA who is who is using his mobile phone to send messages that you need to break into. You still need someone in Raqqa to identify him. You still need somebody in that cafe able to say, it's that guy over there. He's on the phone now.

So the human and the technological always intertwine. And although it's a strange rivalry within intelligence, you know, the human people don't really like the singing people and it's a ridiculous kind of, it's a ridiculous rivalry, as it is between MI5 and MI6. Nonetheless, they all admit when they're in calmer moments that they can't operate without each other. And so increasingly, intelligence officers in this country and around the world are expected to be able to do the technical stuff as well as the human stuff. You've got to have both. So the idea of this

specialization is really going, I think. And modern spies, they can all code, believe me. They understand their way around the inside of a computer. And it's quite interesting the way that the two elements are no longer, I think, distinct in lots of ways. They are regarded as one portmanteau skill, if you like. And is there a particular spy story that has never been told that you would love to tell, that you think matters? He can't tell, Dominic, or he'll be shocked. I can't, Fred, I can't tell you because I'd have to, well, obviously I'd have to kill you.

Look, I think there are, I know there are actually, there are plenty of Cold War stories that haven't yet come out. The very fact that we don't know them is probably evidence that they're really very good, you know, and I don't think Gordievsky was alone. I know he wasn't. I know there were characters on both sides who were who were having a similar impact it's difficult though because as i've said finding the finding the documentary material for this stuff the more modern you get the harder it

is to lay your hands on and to write sort of narrative non-fiction stories which you kindly said at the beginning you know i try to make feel like novels, but yet they are completely true. I never make anything up. It's not a word that is invented in there. If I say the sky was blue that day, the sky was blue that day because I know it. That's harder, much harder in the modern times, because I rely very heavily on letters and postcards and poems and diaries and photographs and all that kind of tangible stuff that allows

one to do the sort of warp and weft of the daily life of these people. In modern times, you know, it's going to be really hard for historians of the future, I think, particularly intelligence historians, to try to get the material because nobody writes it down in the same way. The evidence isn't there. And one of the impacts, and one has to admit this, of a more declassified world where these secrets are coming out is that the intelligence services weed their files really carefully. Or don't write it down, I suppose. Or don't write it down. Or a lot of it is in very ephemeral form. I mean, we imagine that every text message we send and every email we receive

is somehow being archived, but it's not, you know. And so, you know, there isn't, I'm so lucky in a way because the period that I cover, you know, there's almost always a box in the attic filled with something that somebody can let me get my mitts on and then plunder. That's not going to be the case because none of us keep our emails, none of us keep our, and getting hold of them will be very very difficult so so the more modern it gets really the tougher it becomes to tell these stories with the kind of with the detail that makes them work i hope i think that that's probably a slightly if you're a historian

a depressing note on which to end but perfect note on which to end so if we're going to write the history of espionage uh don't start now would probably probably look further back get cracking to the earlier stuff no look i mean it will be declassified but it will require different skills i think i mean it will it you know it won't be quite the same flood of material that you get in the second world war which was a highly literate war i mean everybody wrote everything down it's one of the wonderful things about it um you know but everyone said this is the telephone oh no one's going to be impossible to do the history of the 1980s or the 90s dominic has proved that's complete nonsense because you know because of

the telephone no one's ever going to write anything down we still write it all down there's still a record of sorts it's just a different sword my books will be twice as long if the telephone hadn't been a terrifying thought and i think the perfect note on which to thank ben very much um we will be back when we'll be back we'll be back on thursday won't we um no we won't we'll be back on monday thanks ever so much for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

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