The Spy Who - The Spy Who Outran the KGB | Before Gordievsky, and the Secret War Inside Britain - with Author Tim Tate | 4

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

How did the Soviet Union infiltrate so many of Britain’s institutions? Investigative journalist Tim Tate dives into the dark underbelly of British-Soviet relations—uncovering a world where the Kremlin’s influence had already seeped into the heart of Britain’s highest echelons of power long before Oleg Gordievsky ever arrived. In conversation with spy writer Charlie Higson, Tim also reveals a shocking paradox: Gordievsky’s intelligence eased Cold War tensions, but after his exposure paranoia was sent spiraling out of control on both sides of the Iron Curtain.Have you got a spy story you would like us to tell? Email your ideas to [e-mail] 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 add free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Mom and Dad. Mom and Mom. Dad and Dad. Whatever. Parents. Are you about to spend five hours in the car with your beloved kids this holiday season? Drive an old Granny's house? I'm setting the scene. I'm picturing screaming, fighting. Back-to-back hours of the K-pop Demon Hunter soundtrack on repeat. Well, when your ears start to bleed, I have the perfect thing. to keep you from rolling out of that moving vehicle,

something for the whole family. He's filled with laughs. He's filled with rage. The OG Green Grump, give it up for me, James Austin Johnson as The Grinch. And like any insufferable influencer these days, I'm bringing my crew of lesser talented friends along for the ride with A-list guests like Gromp,

Mark Hamill, and the Jonas Brothers, whoever they are. There's a little bit of something for everyone. Listen to Tis the Grinch holiday podcast wherever you get your podcast. Podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Charlie Higson, spy novelist, actor, comedian, and this is The Spy Who. Thank you for joining us for our final episode of The Spy Who Outran the KGB.

Oleg Gorgevsky wasn't just a spy. He was one of the Cold War's most audacious double agents. a man whose betrayal of the KGB reshaped the geopolitical landscape. As the Soviet Union's chief spy in London, Gorgievsky secretly worked for MI6 for over a decade, feeding Britain and the West priceless intelligence on Moscow's operations, nuclear strategy, spies out in the field,

and the Kremlin's inner workings. His defection didn't just expose Soviet secrets. It deepened the paranoia on both sides, proving that even the most trusted insiders could be playing for the other team. To hear how his story unfolded, make sure you've listened to episodes one to three of this season. In this episode, I'm going to sit down with author, documentary maker, and investigative journalist Tim Tate, writer of books such as The Spy who was left out in the Cold and to Catch a Spy. Tim is well-versed in the world that leads up to Oleg Gorgievsky's defection

and the consequences which followed. We're going to discuss the relationship between the Soviet Union and Britain, how the Soviets got their hands on so many British institutions and the fallout from Gorgievsky's exposure. Welcome to The Spy Who, Tim. Thank you very much for having me. Before we start getting into the details around the relationship between the UK and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Can you take us back in time a little to the world before our spy Oleg Gorgievsky was operating? Why was the Soviet Union so interested in the UK? In fairness to the Soviet Union, it was interested not just in the UK, but in all of the countries of the West. It began putting out feelers in the 1920s, and for a very simple reason, It had a revolution to defend, in its view.

Western countries were trying to undermine that revolution. What Moscow learned very quickly is that it needed to know what Britain, France, Germany, and eventually the United States was up to. And it started looking. The Soviet Union isn't just the bad guy in this. Britain did exactly the same. And when the US caught up, it's still. started doing the same. There were spies everywhere. There's a lovely quote from a former US intelligence officer from the period who said there were so many spies and so many international

intelligence agencies looking for them. It was like the Christmas Day sale at Macy's. Did the decline of the British Empire make the UK more vulnerable to Soviet infiltration? Absolutely. It's not just the decline of the empire. End of World War II, Britain is essentially broke. Right. You know, we're in hock to the United States for the least land. We've got a government saying we have to have a vast expansion, so we have a worth of spending on a welfare state. And at least in secret at first, we have a government saying, we need a British atomic bomb.

It cannot fund all of this. At the same time, it is one of the four powers controlling the epicenter of the new Cold War battlefield, and that's the ruins of Germany. It's like a perfect storm. You have a declining power which has ambitions and pretensions above its pocketbook. You have an emerging power in the United States, which has the pocketbook but no experience. For an organisation like the KGB or the GIU, that's the military intelligence, we were wide open and vulnerable. And was the UK also a wide open backdoor to disrupting NATO and the UN? NATO starts in 1949, by which point the Cold War is well and truly in play.

How, if you're Moscow, do you get into NATO? will you choose the most vulnerable members, don't you? I mean, it's like hacking today. You find a backdoor into the most secure service. Britain was a terrific backdoor into NATO. You've spent many years studying this relationship. What's the most surprising or troubling insight you've gained about how espionage shaped the 20th century?

The most surprising and the most troubling is oddly not one that you're going to find in the conventional histories of intelligence and espionage. Excellent. Come the end of the Second World War, Britain and the United States particularly competed with themselves and with each other to hire Nazi intelligence officers because they were the ones who knew where the Soviet intelligence officers were. And for their part, Moscow did exactly the same. It tried to hire Nazi intelligence officers because they knew where Britain and America had its spies. What happened is that those spies essentially dictated early Cold War policy from both sides. The whole geopolitical sphere in 1945, 1946, is being dictated by ex-execated by ex-executive.

Nazis. I find that deeply disturbing. You've written about a man who had a dramatic impact on the world of espionage, Peter Wright. So can you tell us who he was? Peter Wright was for 20 years a very, very, very senior MI5 officer. He rose to the rank of assistant director. So you're pretty much at the next to top rung. He joined in 1955. He was appointed first of all as a principal scientific officer, and he starts to look at MI5's surveillance technology. MI5 had a pretty good Second World War. It had really done good work, some of it controversial. In the years after that, between the end of the Second World War and Peter Wright joining, it had basically gone to rack and ruin. When he gets there, as he described it,

everything's covered with this thick layer of dust. There aren't even, tape recorders, everything is recorded on acetate disk. Nothing worked. And the Cold War, if nothing else, from its outset, was always going to be an electronic war. And so Wright set about upgrading all of MI5 surveillance technology. And that's where the problem started. So he discovered that the intelligence services were not effective, that the Russians were out smarting them at every turn? There was a real problem, as he would later testify in a secret court session, and I obtained the transcripts of that. Between 1951 and 1958, this is right speaking, we had no success

against the Russians. Everything, we tried, every operation, being a technical operation, or double agent operation, they all failed. The reason was that the Soviet Union, the Soviet intelligence agencies, had, for two decades, penetrated Britain's establishment, not just politics, not just the civil servant, not just academia, they'd got agents in place inside MI5 and MI6. And was Peter Wright the first person to kind of discover all that? Pretty much, when he worked this out and the service said to him, right, well, you need to go back and find out where that problem started.

He was officially directed to go back to every last file going back to the 1930s. Again, he testified about this in a secret court session. Government insisted he couldn't say this publicly. He said, when I left MI5 in 1975, 1976, MI5's files listed. 35 eminent persons, a Soviet spies. Not one had ever been dealt with. It sounds like there's almost more Soviet spies in MI5 than they were British. And I gather, the suspicion went all the way to the top,

and that even Roger Hollis, the boss of MI5, was suspected of being a Russian mole. MI5 accepted, as a result of what Wright and his colleagues did, that it was penetrated, that there was a mole or moles inside there. When I was doing my research, this fascinating document, MI5 assessment, which had been passed to the Cabinet Office but kept secret for decades. And it says, in simple terms, there are only two candidates. There's the Deputy Director General and the Director General.

And what's the thinking on that now? Well, the thinking has been muddied because successive governments have tried to cover this. up. Wright went to his grave, yelling as loudly as he could, that Roger Hollis was most probably a Soviet spy. That's the Director General. Hollis was allowed to retire. He was never charged with anything. And there had been a succession, there were a succession of internal inquiries, all of which, to one degree or another, said, yep, Hollis looks like a Soviet spy to us. You said earlier that the Soviets had penetrated, which I think is the word used, many British institutions. Did this start sort of way back in the 1930s?

Absolutely started in the 1930s. Moscow has a long history of this. It's very good at this. To a degree, Britain and certainly the United States, where Johnny Come Lately is in this game? The Russians, the Soviets, have been at this since the 1920s. In the early 1930s, again, remember the background, the rise of fascism. Yeah. Who's going to combat fascism to a whole group of intelligent young men and women?

Communism, Soviet communism seemed the only bullwark against fascism. And Moscow cultivated that. It cultivated that belief, and particularly at Cambridge and Oxford universities, It got a recruiter. It got a spider, if you like, at the heart of the embryonic espionage web. And that's this extraordinarily talented academic who went on to become a member of the royal household, Sir Anthony Blunt. So he was the recruiter at... He was the recruiter at Cambridge.

He was a young Don at Cambridge. And he recruited other young men and women saying, come and join us. come and work against fascism, and he recruited an absolute stellar array of the brightest and best at that time. Come the start of the Second World War, they've left university, what do they do? They go into politics, they go into the civil service, they go into academia, and they go into the security services, and they're embedded. Peter Wright would tell you, and he did, and he wrote this. that there were hundreds upon hundreds of Soviet spies in Britain in the late 50s, early 60s. So we know the Cambridge Five, Kim Filby, Anthony Blunt, etc.

Their names are now very well known. But, I mean, who were some of the lesser well-known but equally damaging agents? Bear in mind, Wright is the man who exposed most of this. The one who he said was always the most important was Alistair Watson, who was, it's not a name that trips off the top reason. No, I've never heard it before. Few people have, but Alistair Watson held a very, very important role in defence and other areas. Those names like Watson, like the other ones that Wright developed, they don't mean nothing to anyone these days.

There is one name that does. Rothschild. Victor Rothschild, the third Baron Rothschild, was a close friend of Blunt. of Burgess, McLean, the ring of five. Ross trial goes into MI5 at the start of World War II. But he's very, very, to coin a phrase, economical with the truth about his associations. And his wife, his second wife,

who joined him in MI5, Tess, was under suspicion for 10 years of being a Soviet agent. But they kept them in place? Yeah. Whilst being under suspicion. They were protected. They weren't just kept in place. Peter Wright.

He uses them as sounding boards. He runs the evidence past them to see what they think. It's extraordinary. You could not make this up. I mean, do you think that this sort of system of recruitment of clever young people is continuing to this day? Is it as a vertis that or is it more covertly supporting organisations and movements that they think might be sympathetic. The recruitment is far, far better today.

At the time when the ring of five and all these people are recruited, certainly recruited into MI5, there was no system. I mean, again, I've got MI5's own reports which say, yeah, someone knew somebody else and went around to see somebody else and said, he's a jolly good chap. Let's have him. And it was as chaotic and as undisciplined as that, hardly surprising that some moles slipped in. But have they learned any lessons from all this?

I think so. Everything we think we know about intelligence operations, be that historic ones like Kodjevsky, modern ones. Everything is mediated. The narrative we are given is an approved narrative. It's almost impossible to get behind that narrative and ask to see and to find primary source evidence in real time. Whenever I talk to my colleagues in the United States, people in the same line of business as me, they say, well, you know, you can just get a Freedom of Information Act request and you'll get the stuff. And I said, yeah, I do. I do that with the CIA.

I do that with the FBI. You can't do that in this country. MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ are specifically excluded from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. People like me, people like you, cannot ask for documents. MI5 does, to its credit, release some files once they've become 50 years old, but it's only at its own whim, and those whims are utterly unfathomable. MI6 doesn't do that at all. So everything that we are being told is what somebody wants you, wants us, to know and believe.

That's exactly what Moscow does too. And it stops us evaluating and coming up with an accurate historical narrative. If we don't understand our history, we're doomed to repeat it. Peter Wright identified 35 high-ranking Soviet agents in British institutions such as MI5, MI6, diplomatic services, government departments, trade unions, journalists. There's a very long list. I mean, what happened to those agents? Were they all put in jail? I found this utterly shocking. Nothing happened to them. Nothing at all. Some of them were quietly retired, pensioned off with a nice fat government. pension. Others were moved out of harm's way into sinecures in government service where they

wouldn't have access to sensitive material. Not one had his collar felt. No one was ever prosecuted. No one was ever sent to jail. Even Sir Anthony Blunt, the spider at the heart of the original web, was given complete immunity. And continued, being the keeper of the Queen's Pictures, the monarchy's vast art collection, up until very close to his death. He was protected. He lived lavishly in central London. It was covered up spectacularly. The Soviet seemed to be very successful in actually recruiting British people, as it were.

But there was no similar thing of somebody over there trying to find westward-leaning students or whatever. Yeah, we did. We did have spies. Of course we had spies. We've always had spies. It's much easier to detect and to neutralize them

in a dictatorship, in a repressive regime. Here, we have freedom, to a degree, and that freedom is exploitable. And that's what the Soviet Union did. So the West was more reliant on people like Oleg Gorgevsky, the subject of the series.

Yeah, I mean, there's a long trail of defectors from really the end of the Second World War through to the middle of the Cold War defectors from the Soviet bloc countries and by and large

they all go wrong defectors aren't easy to handle but through their own failures British intelligence and American intelligence by and large screwed those defections up Gordievsky is

so far as we can tell, the shiny example of a success story. But what strikes me is that what he's providing is a very different sort of service. What Kim Philby, probably the best known of the Cambridge spies, the Ring of Five, or George Blake is doing for the Soviets, is betraying secrets. It's betraying agents. What Goyevsky's doing is providing something just as vital to the British government, which was analysis, which was an understanding of what the Kremlin was thinking. Now, I don't think you can underestimate that, but it's a different type of spying.

I mean, do you think that if MI5 and MI6 had worked more closely together and if they were more closely aligned, do you think things would have been different? Yes, very much so. There's always been hostility between MI5 and MI6, naked hostility at times. They're fighting amongst themselves. Wright and his group of officers were bitterly resented by old-school MI5 officers.

They were regarded as really rather dangerous. And frankly, if you're the KGB or the GIU in Moscow, you're going, that'll do very nicely, thank you very much. The big case which says this would have made a difference is Philby. He is an absolute diehard believer in Soviet communism. He's a spy from conviction, and those are quite rare. And he becomes throughout the Second World War and thereafter a very, very senior officer inside MI6 with the ability to control and in some cases derail.

British intelligence operations. MI5. It tried to get MI6, for whom Philby worked, on board to back it. It ran interference in the investigation. It gave Philby nice little outs and did so for years and years and years. And the damage that caused was enormous. It wasn't until Philby finally defected that MI6 suddenly said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was. He really was a soviet spy, wasn't he? Had they been thinking, well, maybe if we just keep it quiet, it'll get hushed up and go away, we won't be made to look stupid?

And they did end up looking stupid. It's not just them that ended up looking stupid. The Prime Minister, whom they had in, Harold McMillan, Six had induced the Prime Minister to give Philby a clean bill of health in the House of Commons. That made him look stupid. It made British intelligence look stupid in the eyes of the Americans. And it gave American intelligence, particularly the parts of it which were inimically suspicious of Britain in the first place. It provided them with a reason, A, not to trust us, and B, to try and meddle in the nexus, the intersection between British intelligence and British politics.

And boy, did they meddle. So do we know how successful Peter Wright was in improving technical surveillance? Do we know anything he actually personally helped develop that? Oh, absolutely. We know that two or three of his innovations were the gold standard, and they were beyond the gold standard. They were state of the art when we finally shared them with the FBI or the CIA. The agency CIA was particularly miffed that we hadn't shared them.

earlier. Wright developed groundbreaking technical capabilities to intercept communications, to remotely start up recordings using everyday objects. There's a phone on the table in front of you. He could make that turn in to a listing device. The Soviets were doing much the same thing, I should say. Right was at the forefront of doing it in the UK. Is he mainly sort of surveilling, if that's the correct word, stuff that's going on in the UK and communications between the UK and Russia, rather than being able to penetrate into Moscow itself? Well, it's both, isn't it? What he did and what they were doing was using those places they surveilled, or, in many cases, burgled, as a backdoor into finding out Soviet bloc intelligence,

their secrets. It's the mirror, if you like, of what Moscow is doing to us. And Wright and his colleagues, his words, bugged and burgled our way across London at the state's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants pretended to look the other way. It's just worth bearing in mind that at the time all this is going on, MI5 and MI6 don't officially exist. I mean, they've been at work for decades,

but they've never been established by law. And the government, in its quaint phrase, said these were unacknowledged. So because they didn't exist, Written spies were free to do what the hell they like. Laws didn't apply to them. Was he operating in a similar way to Gorgievsky? No, he was and he wasn't.

I mean, nothing is ever black and white, isn't it? He was a colonel in Polish intelligence. He had a side gig working for the KGB in Moscow. That wasn't uncommon, not least because Moscow liked to keep an eye on what its satraps were doing in Warsaw. He, like Gorgievsky, becomes disillusioned with the Soviet system. And in 1958, he volunteers to be what's technically called an agent in place. Translation, it's someone who risks their neck, staying inside, in his case, Polish intelligence, and feeding information to the West.

And he did that for two and a half years before he escaped, he defected, in a defection which is just as dramatic. as that of Kodyevsky. He arrives eventually in the U.S. His intelligence is shared with Britain and leads to the exposure of huge spy rings in this country. And I have the agency's own documents. It says this man is the most important spy we've ever had.

1600 Soviet agents, he exposed. 1600. No one has ever done that. Within two, three years of that, he was absolutely round the bend, claiming to be the last son of the Tsar of Russia. When he identifies the Portland spiring, that leads to the unmasking of three separate illegals, running a huge spiring, shipping admiralty secrets,

really serious secrets, stuff which helped. the Soviet Navy evade our submarines and our torpedoes, shipping that to Moscow with impunity. Am I find knew nothing about them? It just knew absolutely nothing, until Golynessy comes along, talks to Peter Wright, and the whole thing is set in motion. And that was not an isolated case. When spies like Gorgieski and Golienski are exposed, what's the diplomatic fallout between you, in Russia. It's priced in. That fallout is priced in. This is a game. It's called the Great Game for a reason. It's a game. We have spies. They have spies. We find their spies. They find our spies. When we find them, we kick them out. They kick out our spies in return. This is

baked into the cake. It's what happens. That Soviet Union's economic decline was evident in the 1980s. Why did the West still treat it as an evil empire? Because it was. It's the simple answer. I mean, yeah, it was, the West has known that within its own creation, the Soviet Union would eventually provide the seeds of its own destruction. It was never, ever going to last forever. But although it was financially, economically, beginning to fall apart dramatically by the

early to mid-80s, it still had enough power and influence to cause mayhem, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Europe. So, you know, when you say, well, why the British government and the American government, why did we take it so seriously? It's because it was serious. So Gorgievsky was exfiltrated in 1985. What do we see happen for the rest of the decade in terms of paranoia between East and West, because you would expect tensions to reduce. Yeah, and in fairness, that paranoia is both justified because the Soviets did get up to bad stuff just as we got up to bad stuff. But at the same time, it's coming from two fairly right-wing governments, the Reagan administration in D.C. and the Thatcher prime ministership here.

It suits those politicians down to the ground to say, here is the big bad wolf, the big, bad Soviet wolf. And everything we do is justified because there's this big bad wolf coming to blow our house down. That's politics. Now, the wilderness of mirrors phrase is used to describe the reality of Cold War espionage. where every piece of intelligence could be genuine, it could be deception or counter-deception. And from what you've been saying about your suspicions about how neatly presented Gorgievsky's cases, you seem to imply that it's very difficult to separate fact from fiction.

I think that's absolutely true. In terms of intelligence information, raw intelligence, when intelligence comes in, And our guys do this, their guys do this. They collect little snippets of information. I overheard him saying something there. That person there said something there. It comes in and what emerges on the desk of the counterintelligence officer is essentially a Rorschach test. And you look at it, the counterintelligence officer, and looks at it and says, I see that picture.

That's what that picture is. Another counterintelligence officer is quite like you'd look at it and say, yeah, I see a butterfly. That's part of the problem. The only way for you and me, the people who are listening to this podcast, to know and to have confidence, is to have access to the files, which, to be crude about this, we pay for. So, Tim, you've written about lots of spies. In this podcast, we unpack the story of one fascinating spy each season. Who do you think we should cover next? This is a hobby horse of mine.

It's Golianovski. The story of his escape, his defection, is so dramatic. When I was writing it, and bear in mind I had access to all the Polish intelligence service files on it, I was able to put together the tick-tock of the days of his defection, as well as the American files. It's such a dramatic story. It's such a story of bravery, of hubris, of ambition, of corruption. And on top of that, there's a good bit of sex and money in there as well. Well, maybe in a future series we'll get you back.

And you can talk us through that amazing story. of Golienski. But thank you so much for being our guest today. That was really interesting, but also slightly scary and depressing, whether we have learnt anything from this, or whether people have just learnt how to lie and use propaganda better. I think the latter. Yes. There's always a big question where you're looking at political scandal and secrets being exposed. You know, is this conspiracy or is it just incompetence?

Is it blundering? I got the impression from what Tim was saying that there was a huge amount of blundering and incompetence. And like the story in a classic Cohen Brothers movie, someone makes a mistake and then by trying to fix it, They make even more mistakes and the things escalate and it ends up in a far worse mess than it would have been if people are just owned up and being honest from the start and confronted these problems. But there's also this ongoing thing of all the different intelligence agencies being suspicious of each other and sort of almost treating each other as the biggest enemy rather than whoever it is you're supposed to be defending the country against. So the CIA doesn't want to talk to MI6 and MI6 doesn't want to talk to. talk to MI5, and they're all suspicious of each other. And at the end of the day, as Tim said, you know, we're paying them. This is all our money. Thank you for listening and do join us for

our next series of The Spy Who, hosted by Raza Jeffery. Next time we open the file on David Rupert, the spy who jailed the Omar bomb plotter. When down on his luck trucker David Rupert is seen mingling with IRA hardliners, the FBI and MI5 use him to infiltrate the Republican paramilitaries deadly inner circle. But what begins as an intelligence coup soon mutates into a deathly nightmare of bombs and blood. Follow the Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. Wondery Plus subscribers can binge full seasons of the Spy Who early and add free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.

From Wondery, this is the final episode in our series, The Spy Who Outran the KGB. This episode of The Spy Who is hosted by me, Charlie Higson. Our show is produced by Vespucci for Wondery, with story consultancy, by Yellow Ant. The producer of this series is Ashley Clivery. Our sound designer is Alex Port Felix. The supervising producer is Natalia Rodriguez. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Frisson's Sink. Executive producers for Vespucci are Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turcan.

The executive producer for Yellow Ant is Tristan Donovan. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Theodora Laudis and Marshall Louis.