The Spy Who - The Spy Who Defused the Missile Crisis | Unpacking the mind of a spy legend | 5

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Few spies have motives as hard to decipher as those of Oleg Penkovsky. Was he a hero, an egotist or a madman? The Spy Who's Tristan Donovan sits down with Jack Basu-Mellish, host of the LSE Cold War Podcast, to discuss Penkovsky’s actions, plus the lessons to learn from the events of the Cold War. Can the history books really be trusted?Listen to The Spy Who ad-free on Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/the-spy-who now. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of The Spy Who early and ad-free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. From Wondery, I'm Tristan Donovan and this is The Spy Who. To trust or not to trust? That's the question at the heart of many of the stories we tell on The Spy Who. But few spies have motives as hard to decipher as those of Oleg Penkovsky. As one of the executive producers, I and the writing team spent hours debating him and trying to divine his motives.

And it's that mystery that makes Penkovsky one of the most fascinating figures in the history of espionage. Was he a brave hero, someone who paid the ultimate price to avert nuclear war? An egotist chasing glory and afternoon tea with the Queen? A madman hell-bent on world destruction? Or possibly all of the above. He is, after all, not a character any sensible novelist would invent. He's messy, illogical, a glorious intense riddle of contradictions. And we're not the only ones who've tried to unpack the mind of

this legendary spy. Ever since the CIA published the Penkovsky Papers in 1965, him and his role in the Berlin and Cuban Missile Crises and in the wider events of the Cold War have been hotly contested. So, what can we learn from the events that took place during that time? Are the events still relevant today and can we trust the history books to educate us

on what to do should the world face such threats once more? Here to help me unpack these pretty big questions is Jack Basu-Mellish, International Relations PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science and host of their Cold War podcast. Hi, Jack. Thanks for joining us. Happy to be here. So, I was really excited to be working on this season. I'm really fascinated by the Cold War, almost a slightly fascistic kind of interest in it,

which I blame on my 80s childhood of watching Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows and action movies like Red Dawn, where it's kind of communists invading America and that kind of thing, which is obviously not really the true story of the Cold War. So let's start off with the basics. For those who don't know, could you give us a brief introduction to the Cold War? Who were the countries and leaders involved? And why was the Cold War so important? My major interest in the Cold War

is it really sets up the contemporary world that we have today. It's the end of the sort of Victorian world where most of the world has gone from being ruled by these

big European empires to these independent nation states. And the conflict of the Cold War shapes the emergence of all of these countries onto the world scene. So you see. And the conflict of the Cold War shapes the emergence of all of these countries onto the world scene. So you see it as a sort of post-empire kind of story of the world.

Yeah, I think the traditional story of the Cold War is this war between West and East, right? This war between the capitalists and the communist world, between Western Europe and the United States, the Soviet bloc, the Warsaw Pact. And obviously, in many ways, that is the case. Those were the key belligerents. But another way to sort of think about the Cold War is rather than dividing it east and

west, to divide it north and south. So what you have is these two competing superpowers trying to enforce their vision of the world on a newly emerging global South in Africa and Asia, which is where the battle lines are largely drawn in the Cold War. The actual conflict doesn't really take place in either the East or the West, it takes place in the global South. So I also think a really important part of the Cold War is this sort of third force, this non-aligned post-colonial force that's trying to resist overtly being influenced by one side or the other.

So get this, the Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you a profile. Her first act as leader asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax supporter. Oh yeah. Check out her record as mayor. Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah. Higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals.

They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party. In this past season, we've heard a lot from different strong characters. We've had President JFK. We've had Greville Wynne on the MI6 side. The CIA's Joe Bulik. All of who played a very important role in all of this. But obviously, Penkovsky is the person who gets the credit and is seen as the man who saved the world in some corners.

Is that fair? Is his role overplayed, particularly in the Cuban Missile Crisis? Do you have a particular kind of take on him? I think it's very interesting and it's one of the perennial problems of a history of spycraft and something that I have been wrestling with. You get stuck with this problem where so much of it is in the shadows and the only sources you have are the sources that the institutions want you to have, meaning that you can never fundamentally decide one way or the other where the truth is. And it's very difficult

as an academic to decide what level of sort of proof you need before you can draw a conclusion on something. Because obviously the positive case for his contribution is that the manuals that he provides lets the Americans determine that the missiles on Cuba are nuclear missiles and also that the missile gap the Americans believe exists doesn't exist. That's the sort of positive case. But you also have the completely negative case. Peter Wright and Paul Greengrass in their book Spycatcher say that he was largely of very little actual value to CIA and MI6 operations. So you can never really know how valuable any individual agent was when all the information is shrouded in the system that

we'll fundamentally never get access to. And obviously much of it's destroyed along the way as well. Yes, of course, yeah. So, I mean, when we were researching the series on Pankowski, I mean, one of the interesting things about him is how hard it is to get a grip on him as a character. You know, in some ways he seems someone who's genuine, kind of giving secrets over, really wants to kind of support the NATO side of this divide.

But then you have moments where he's going, oh, you know, you should blow up Moscow with nuclear weapons. And it's a really hard character to get a grip on. But also, I imagine, in terms of these world-shaping events, it's quite a dangerous character to have providing intelligence. Do you think kind of governments rely too much on that kind of thing, that kind of, you know, the information gathered by spies is overvalued in some way and over-relied on?

The more and more you look at any individual who has spent their whole life working their way through an institution and then suddenly decides to switch sides, it tends not to be because of a very clean and obvious reason that you or I could understand, because it is such a massive break with the whole structure of their lives that they've been in, of all the people they know. And that means they tend to flip for very esoteric personal reasons, which can then lead them to adopting very extreme positions. Because you would have to believe that something was very fundamentally wrong before you would be willing to put your life at risk, your entire career, everything you've ever worked for and built just to try and give information to the CIA. And that's where you have to have these agents interpreting the data that they're being given.

The interpretation is important. Yeah, and I suppose that's where kind of intelligence can either be purified or kind of polluted in a way where the agencies are trying to decipher this, but agencies like any organization have their own world view that they're trying to attach and kind of go, well, I'm going to the president to argue this case. And I see the world in a certain way because I'm the CIA or I'm MI6. So I guess it's very difficult, I assume, to kind of unpick this. As I understand it, with Penkovsky, they had two separate designations for the intelligence that he was providing them. One set being technical documents, these sort of provable facts about the Soviet Union that he was providing them. And then the other one being his assessments, his own interpretation of those documents. And I would presume the interpretation was taken with a much bigger grain of salt than the physical technical documents that he was handing them over. Because you have to assume everything that he is telling you about the Soviet Union is being colored by his beliefs. the CIA giving briefings to the president is one of the, that is often the fundamental problem

with intelligence agencies in that they're fundamental, they're necessary part of the state. As long as there are hostile actors in the world, you're always going to need a security service to protect the country from them. But because of the world in which they operate, they have to have an assumption of hostility

on the part of the other actors. So if a president or prime minister becomes too reliant on just listening to his security services, you're only going to get information provided from a body which has an assumption that the opposing state must have hostile intentions. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess, kind of, Khrushchev was a perfect example of that with the whole we will bury you kind of image

he was projecting at the time, sort of threatening kind of, you know, we will attack, we have the power to fight back, where in reality there was like six nuclear missiles they had at the time. So, you know, a lot of it is kind of that Wizard of Oz kind of thing. Like, yes, we're going to be bigger,

more frightening than we actually appear. Fundamentally, the way these clandestine services work, you can never, as a president or prime minister, you will never be told how this information is gathered in a very fundamental way and what filters it's gone through. You just have to assume that your services are doing the job that needs to be done. And if they're going to make mistakes, then those mistakes can be very damaging. So it's whether or not you can trust the agency and the sort of culture of

intelligence within the agency to make the right decisions or not. Do you think it's changed a lot since the 60s? I mean, now obviously a lot of intelligence gathering is done through technology. A lot of it is satellite-based intercepts. It's much more signals intelligence-based and human intelligence-based. Does that mean the intelligence now is maybe more accurate or we're kind of still the same and kind of floundering around in the dark slightly with partial information. Whether or not

it's more or less accurate, I mean, again, we're never going to know because we're not on the inside of what the information that we're receiving. I think what's interesting in the Cold War is you get this transition point from, and Penkovsky is interesting

because he's really one of the last of what I might call the first generation spy structure. This post-World War II that comes out of the SOE and these sort of agencies, which we, in the public imagination, we characterize as these sort of men in duster coats, you know, dead-dropping secret information and film reels inside of cigarette cases and things like this. There's very highly organized, highly structured within

a state department conducting traditional spy craft. By the second half of the Cold War in the 70s and 80s, as there was an attempt to apply more congressional oversight to the CIA, what you get is a diffusion of its operations outside of the formal entity. So no longer are CIA operations about an individual spy collecting intelligence, but they're a sort of diffuse network of allies from other nations that are outside of the remit of the CIA. And this very diffuse network is even find out what happened to them because they didn't leave an archive in the way, you know, MI5 is still presumably writing things down that we might one day get access to. And then the other side of that

is this sort of mass data collection. So it's very strange, actually, in that you have both a diffusion of power out of the institution in terms of the agent-led spycraft, and then you have this massive concentration of power out of the institution in terms of the agent-led spycraft. And then you have this massive concentration of power at the same time in this technical storage of data, whether it's reading people's emails and all of this sort of technical online stuff that's going on now that would never have existed 20, 30 years ago.

Yeah. And I suppose that's what makes some argue there's a revival of the Cold War, you know, sort of Cold War 2.0, if you like, that's kind of happening now as kind of relations deteriorate between West and Russia. And I guess it makes that a different kind of war, certainly in intelligence terms to the original Cold War. Definitely. And you have much more concerted attempts to influence the domestic politics of states. I mean, attempts to influence the domestic politics of states are not something that's been newly invented by the internet, but the internet has allowed it to proliferate in a way that would just not have been possible. It's just not possible at scale to do it

in the same way that the internet has allowed it to proliferate at scale. Yeah, quite hard to print 10 million leaflets and distribute them. And not notice that anyone is doing it is the other important thing, right? Yes. Yeah, you don't have to kind of go,

well, there's only so many printing presses. I think we can work out who's been using them. Penkovsky's kind of billed by some books as the spy who saved the world because of his role in kind of helping to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. But we're kind of interested in other figures who played a role in that crisis and helped bring it to a peaceful conclusion. I mean, who do you think were other important people in that process?

I think it's very important to think about the world outside of just the Soviet Union and the West in terms of thinking about other important actors for the Cuban Missile Crisis specifically. I think the role of the Indian government, particularly Nehru, is very, very important as this go-between agent. And India during the Cold War adopts this very important position, which I think is really undervalued in the Cold War, as a state which is a liberal democracy in the sort of

Western sense, but it's also heavily non-aligned and has close relations to the Soviet Union historically. And therefore, it's able to act as this intermediary and also because it's the largest and arguably most influential post-colonial state it often ends up playing this role where it adopts a sort of leadership position where it tries to talk on behalf of the post-colonial world to trying to be a figurehead for the still colonized parts of the world and argue for their independence. So they play a big role in the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, in trying to manage relations between East and West.

You often find the Soviets make their first overtures to Western states when they're trying to cool tensions. They'll send a cable to Delhi, who will then pass it on to Washington. So they play a really big role. So was this something that was happening during the Cuban Missile Crisis then? Because the famous kind of hotline between Moscow and Washington DC

didn't really kind of exist at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think there wasn't that direct communication as there later was. So was Delhi kind of playing that central role there. So in the sort of the very short October crisis, they're less involved in terms of passing information. You have a direct link between Bobby Kennedy and the Russian ambassador.

But what you get in terms of India's role, and then this is another group that I would probably highlight as someone, as a really understudied part of the Cold War, is you get recognition of the Cuban government very early by India. So Nehru is one of the very first people that Fidel meets as a leader to leader exchange. That kind of way of thinking is partly why the Cuban Missile Crisis is inflated so much as this kind of big peak moment in the Cold War. I mean, you had the Berlin Crisis just before with the building of the Berlin Wall,

and that came quite close to nuclear conflict, and there were plenty of other times. But the Cuban Missile Crisis seems to be the thing that's stuck in the popular imagination as the defining moment of the Cold War. Do you think its importance is overstated? The Cuban Missile Crisis is, I think, genuinely the moment that the US and the USSR came the closest to actual nuclear exchange between the states, simply because what we find is that at sea,

there is such a bigger margin for error to be made between individual commanders at a ground level. And if a missile hits a ship with modern technology, even 1960s technology, it's very likely to be destroyed very quickly. And therefore, the sort of first response is also the last response, right? Like you should escalate immediately to the most extreme response if you feel you're going to be attacked

because you won't have a second chance to sort of climb the escalation chain. Once you know an exchange has happened where several thousand people have died, it's very hard then to grow back from that position. So preference for de-escalation is definitely something we should learn from these sort of naval-based conflicts that hopefully we can apply to the future so that nothing existentially bad happens. And that was, I think, the thing that was unique about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of course, in the Berlin Wall example, there was a very real risk that during the 60s Berlin crisis that US and Soviet troops might have fired on each other. But we could imagine a situation where, say, a Soviet tank fires on a US tank, but because of the timeframe involved, there could have been some ability to contact the leaders and step down that escalation

before it went into a full-scale nuclear conflict. Whereas in the Cuban Missile Crisis case, it was very clear that this was something that could have escalated immediately to that position. And that's why you get Khrushchev actually on October 22nd. So the Missile Crisis runs from the 14th to the 28th, and on the 22nd, Khrushchev explicitly disallows his officers on the ground from using the nuclear weapons

if they get invaded by US Marines. He explicitly says, you cannot fire these, the order can only come from Moscow, because he's concerned that should Cuba be invaded, the local commanders on the ground would use the nuclear weapons to defend themselves, and that would again start this escalatory chain that you can't step back from.

Yeah, and you saw that in Penkovsky's story as well, where after his capture, there's the distance called signal to MI6 that, oh, you know, there's an impending nuclear threat, which is thought the KGB had kind of got that out of him and done the call. And the guy from MI6 kind of made a cup of tea and thought,

I'm not going to pass that up the chain. Everyone's a bit on edge. Maybe it's better if no one knows. So, you know, at all these stages, you can just have individuals who just refuse to follow any chain of command and so change course of events. I think more important than the spycraft is diplomacy in terms of diffusing the Cuban Missile Crisis, because we get this perception of Khrushchev as this warmongering sort of missile obsessed president, particularly from Ben Chomsky, who calls him, you know, the atomic Hitler, right? But what we see and what really brings, I think,

an end to the missile crisis is his letter that he writes to JFK, the famous let us untie the knot speech. And it has some very famous lines in it. And then these are broadcast publicly. JFK ends the reading of them, basically saying, you know, we can't deny that he maybe has a point. And it's a reach out to de-escalate the situation because I think everyone must have spent hours under the extreme tension that this was going to be the end of the world. I've got a short excerpt of it here. It says, I think you'll understand me correctly

if you are really concerned about the welfare of the world. I see, Mr. President, that you too are not devoid of a sense of anxiety for the fate of the world, understanding of what war entails. What would a war give you? You are threatening us with war, but you well know the very least you would receive in reply would be that which you would experience the same consequences as those which you sent us. And that must be clear to us, people invested with authority, trust, and responsibility. We must not succumb to the intoxications and petty passions, regardless of whether elections are impending in this or that country or not impending. These are transient things.

But if indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it. For such is the logic of war. I have participated in two world wars and know that war ends when it's rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. I mean, during the Cuban Missile Crisis,

I mean, is there a kind of, if you could be a fly on the wall and come back in time, I mean, is there a particular moment that you would be curious as a scholar in this area to kind of have been there in the room and to kind of see for yourself? As a scholar, the amazing thing about the Cuban Missile Crisis is that at least from the American's perspective, we have that because JFK is secretly recording all the EXCOMM meetings without anyone else being aware of it. So we actually have the tapes.

The Soviet side would be interesting, but I think even more fascinating would be what's going on with Fidel and his cabinet. I would love to have been, well, I don't know if love, but as a scholar, I would be fascinated to know what's going on in Fidel's mind and inside of the little

cabinet of people he has around him. Because there are multiple cases where he's writing letters to Khrushchev saying, you know, if we have to be the sacrifice in the final thermonuclear war that ends the imperialist versus communist divide, then we're willing to sacrifice ourselves.

And Khrushchev is having to write him letters back saying, you know, no, we can win this war in the long run through our labors. Let's not all, let's all calm down a little bit. So, you know, he must, like Fidel and the Cuban communists must have known that they would certainly have been destroyed during the Cuban Missile Crisis, even if they assumed the Soviet Union would have survived.

So how did they reach this position where they were sort of more gung-ho for it than the Soviets were at some point. And in terms of Cuban Missile Crisis and how it was seen, I suppose, you know, this is a time where TV has just come into people's homes. Obviously, radio existed, newspapers existed. I guess, is this the moment where the reality of nuclear war and how close it actually was sort of actually kind of dawned on the public? Throughout the 50s, you have a lot of

sort of nuclear preparedness campaigns, you know, the duck and cover, all of this sort of stuff that you see, teaching kids in schools to, you know, hide under desks to survive a nuclear explosion, this sort of thing. So I imagine that people were very concerned about nuclear war very early on.

But the Cuban Missile Crisis brings it to a sort of new, very real reality. I also think it finally ends the sort of strategic culture in both countries, which is the idea that you could use in a limited way thermonuclear weapons to win a sort of limited conflict. In terms of our modern timeline today, I think that's the biggest existential risk to a nuclear escalation or exchange, which is that the two biggest risks are one, nuclear exchanges between small countries with small arsenals, India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, possibly in the future, North Korea. And then the other more existential risk, not that even those exchanges would obviously

kill tens of millions of people, would be a belief by one side that nuclear weapons can be used without invalidating mutually assured destruction, and them assuming that the other side also believes that when they don't. Do you think that sort of mutually assured destruction thing of the Cold War era has sort of been lost in the interim? I mean, it's now a good kind of 30 years since the Cold War sort of officially kind of came to an end.

Have we kind of lost that sense in terms of the governments at play? Are we not taking this seriously enough anymore? I think it's quite clearly in play in the modern Ukraine context, because that is the reason why NATO troops have not more on the ground assisted Ukraine and why Russian troops have not attacked NATO targets because it's understood that you can't be playing around with mutually assured destruction. I think the bigger risk for the future is whether or not mutually assured destruction exists in the context of a United States-China conflict, because the Chinese nuclear stockpile is actually very small in

comparison to Russia and the United States. We're talking multiple thousands of nuclear weapons each, whereas the Chinese nuclear stockpile is actually relatively small. And I think the Chinese state is focused on effectively achieving mutually assured destruction capability in the future because they're concerned about the, well, going all the way back to the 50s again, they're concerned about the missile gap between themselves and the United States of America. Do you think the people in power making such a state sort of look back a lot on the Cold War and the lessons to be learned? I mean, can history be applied that way? I mean, we kind of talk about, oh, learn the lessons from history, but obviously the context is always changing. I mean, maybe it's not that easy to learn the lesson.

The valuable lessons to be learned from the Cold War, I mean, I can't tell you what future leaders, whether or not they learn from them. Surely they talk to you every day. Yeah, have some of them ever read a book? Who knows? I mean, we can only speculate. But I think the things that the Cold War can teach us

is that we should have a preference for de-escalation over escalation, that opportunities for de-escalation, things like the famous red telephone between Moscow and the United States are valuable. And if we could develop within leaders a preference for restraint, pluralism, acceptance that other states have interests and that they should be allowed to exercise them within the bounds of the rules of the international system, we would have a much more stable world than a world in which one side sees themselves as in some sort of existential events of the Cold War.

I always think it's fascinating to explore what could have happened if things were different. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. believed the USSR hadn't managed to get any nuclear warheads to Cuba. But I think it's come out since then that the Russians did actually have nuclear warheads on the islands. And obviously, as far as we know, Penkovsky didn't actually know that and didn't manage to supply that information.

But if he had, the whole crisis could have gone very differently. I think you have to think of the position of the EXCOMM forces. Now, they could not know whether or not there were nuclear warheads in them or not. So you would surely act under the assumption that there were, because to have made that mistake would be existential. And that group of people still believed that the best US action would have been a direct ground invasion of Cuba to remove Russian forces from the island, because either they believed they could win a

nuclear exchange or that the Russians would blink at the last moment and they wouldn't use them. And then you have a very, very small group comparatively that effectively say, Cuba is a sovereign independent nation, we probably can't invade them for hosting Russian troops. And then the blockade option that Kennedy ends up proposing is sort of his way of finding a middle ground between the two positions. We can't just leave them alone. We also don't want to do a full invasion of Cuba, therefore we institute the blockade. If it could be proven that there were nuclear weapons there, would that have pushed more people in the hawkish side towards the peace side?

I probably think not, because I think they believe that regardless of whether there were nuclear weapons there, they could either win or that the Russians wouldn't use them. And probably a very big question to try to end with, but what do you think is the most lasting legacy of the Cold War? What is it that that kind of 40-year struggle has left us with? So there are a few things that I would pick out. The first is, of course, the point I opened the show with, which is that the Cold War is the background from which the majority of the world's population

goes from either citizens in or subjects of colonial empires to people living in nation states of different makeups of different political types, but not ruled by an external power thousands of miles away from them. And that is something that's fundamental. And a recognition that those states have a right to exist in the way that they didn't in the colonial era. In the 1800s, if a European power attacked an African kingdom to annex their territory,

it wouldn't fit into the understanding even of European diplomacy for, say, Germany to raise the fact that this is unacceptable because they have sovereignty, right? Because even the other Europeans did not think of these things as sovereign entities in the way that we do now. So the universalization

of the rules and norms to apply to everyone, unfairly applied is fundamental to the Cold War. The next is the sort of institutions which establish US hegemony over the system. So obviously the US wins the Cold War and the institutions that arise from it, which set the norms of trade, of finance, of diplomacy, peacekeeping, of all these sort of structures have a huge influence on the fact that at the end of the Cold War, we enter into this unilateral world where the US is dominant

and everyone else has to be a rule taker from one power. And then I think the failure of the Cold War to end in a system where future conflicts would then be avoided. So I think the things that we learn best from the relationships that have been repaired after the Cold War, like for example, the US's relationship with Vietnam, which is very good now,

is magnanimity in victory and magnanimity in defeat. Whichever way happens, the victor should treat the defeated nation with magnanimity and integrate them as best as possible back into the system. Because to have these actors who are outside of the system only causes instability in the future. And there was an opportunity in the 1990s to create a sort of new security community, which would have, say in Europe, which would have integrated Russia and the other Eastern European states and the Central Asian states.

But it would have required a concession towards those countries and also a sort of a gentle protection of their economy as they transition from communism to capitalism. So if we had made the decision to more gently integrate these states into the system, we could have maybe have had a totally different outcome. Yes, it's the mistake with Germany in 1918. Again, it's kind of, oh, we defeated them, punished them, and it took another war to kind of go, actually, maybe we should try and rebuild this country instead of stamping on it. And Germany, even at the end of the Cold War,

is the perfect example, right? You have East Germany has had to be integrated into a West German standard of living. It's cost an incredible amount of money and a lot of resources and a lot of time and a lot of political capital has been spent. But now it's a unified sort of functional nation. Whereas if you look at those countries

that were sort of left outside of the package of EU integration after the war, they have ended up becoming the future belligerents of the next Cold War, quote-unquote. So I think that sometimes this sort of totalizing victory that you think you have over your opponent only breeds the instability that you'll have to deal with later. And sometimes a bit of magnanimity on the part of the victor in a conflict

will provide them with the stability to go forwards and not have to deal with problems going on. So I think this sort of preference for pluralism and a preference for magnanimity when you are the victor in conflict is the lessons of the Cold War if I was a policymaker that I would learn from it.

Yeah, excellent. Well, thank you, Jack. That's been really fascinating. And I'm really interested now to go away and kind of find out more about India's role in the Cold War because it's something that's completely passed me by. So I'm kind of quite excited to learn some more about that. So thank you again. It's been

illuminating. It's been really great to take part. And it's a really interesting subject. And these spy organizations are always going to be a necessary part of the state and keeping us safe. But it's also interesting the ways in which they influence policymakers, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. If you're interested to hear more from Jack, you can listen to the LSE Cold War podcast. Do join us for the next season, The Spy Who Sold Peace to the IRA, hosted by Raza Jafri.

Next time, we open the file on Willie Carlin, the spy who sold peace to the IRA. When Carlin quit the British Army to return to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, he received an unusual job offer. To spy on his own community. He would quickly find himself deep within the Irish Republican movement, having to choose between preserving his cover or his conscience. Follow The Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spy Who Diffused the Missile Crisis. This bonus episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Tristan Donovan. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery, with story consultancy by Yellow Ant. The producer of this episode is Natalia Rodriguez. Our senior producers are Rachel Byrne and Philippa Gearing.

Our sound designer is Ivan Manley. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frizz on Sync. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turkin. The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Our managing producer for Wondery is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones, and Marshall Louis.