October 19, 2022 • 43 mins
Tension mounts as Reagan's aggression deepens Andropov's paranoia. Surely, an attack from the West is imminent! Meet Oleg Gordievsky and Rainier Rupp, two spies whose loyalties aren't what they seem. These super secret agents scour the earth for signs of impending doom, but they have no idea that they're about to be embroiled in utter disaster. Produced by FilmNation and Pacific Electric Picture Co. in association with Gilded Audio.
Correction: This episode incorrectly states that Operation Barbarossa began the Soviet Union’s entanglement with World War II. Operation Barbarossa brought the fighting to Soviet soil. However, the Soviets had long been colluding with Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Red Army had themselves invaded Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland prior to Operation Barbarossa. We regret the error, not least because this falsity is a particular piece of propaganda emanating from Putin’s Kremlin.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
And I already have one cut in sight, which I
got as a suspicious This.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Is Olegg Gordievsky, a Soviet spy.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
There's a blue.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
I'm not very good at some models, but I sees
a shape and this is a color, and it is
behind us.
Speaker 4 (00:24):
Again.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
It's nineteen ninety. He's filming a British TV show called
World in Action, where he's demonstrating how the KGB trained
him how to tell if he was being followed.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
The philosophy is not to shake off the surveillance. Maybe
curtius to the surveillance, don't irritate them.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
In this video clip, he's wearing a faux goo tea
and a wig as a disguise his short athletic build.
His sport coat and pants are slightly oversized. In other words,
he looks like every other middle aged man in the
nineteen nineties. He blends in like a spy should.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Now I do absolutely unexpected. I turned right to stay
with me. They have to make the choke, and they
are making the joke. I set a trap for them.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I bet you were expecting something a little more dramatic,
James Bond style car chase that turns into a motorcycle
chase that turns into a fistfight on a blimp or something.
But no, this is what International Super spiderm really looks like.
An average looking man in a wig and a fake
go te, hands placed at ten and two, driving just
(01:34):
under the speed limit.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
You know, a bunch of ex operations, admitting that the
agents will not take place, but tomorrow we will try again.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
But the movies do get one thing right. Spies like
Oleg Gordievski, sometimes the fate of the world does depend
on them. There's one more thing I should tell you
about him. He's one of the two spies who would
be forced to intervene during an international nuclear crisis in
nineteen eighty three. Listeners, pour yourself up vodka martini, shaken,
(02:09):
not stirred, because today it's all about the spies situation.
(02:31):
Norman Fucko. I'm at Helms and this is Snafu, a
podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On season one, we're
telling you the story of a snaffo that is gigantic, absurd, terrifying.
It's able Archer eighty three, the nineteen eighty three NATO
military exercise that almost led to a real nuclear war.
(02:58):
All right, here's where we're at. The Cold War was
heating up or was it cooling down? I don't know,
whatever's worse thanks to Reagan and a drop off and
their teeny tiny inferiority complexes. Well, what did you think
I was going to say? Come on, get your mind
out of the gutter. Anyway, after a year of name calling,
aggressive impulses of an evil empire, the announcement of a
(03:19):
very mysterious space project and destroy strategic ballistic missiles, and
the scheduled deployment of super speedy missiles discouraging two can
fly up to one thousand miles in under ten minutes,
let's just say the Soviets weren't feeling particularly trusting.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
The West were wicked. The capitalists were unreliable. They would
trick into sie View as soon as they would look
you in the eye. You know, this was an evil
sort of Western system that these paranoid KGB officials saw
in the West.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
This is Taylor Downing. He's an historian and a documentarian,
and boy does he have the voice for it. He
says that a drop Off didn't believe Thatagan's antics were
standard political performance. He thought Reagan was building up to
something far more sinister.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
The fear was that the Americans had some sort of secret,
cunning plan to launch a preemptive strike. Obviously, in the
nuclear era, a surprise attack could be completely overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Overwhelming is putting it lightly. With the new euro missiles
in play, the Soviet Union would need to detect an attack,
get word to the leaders, notify the public, scurry into bunkers,
and launch a retaliation, all within seven minutes. And drop
Off was like seventy years old. You're not exactly sprinting
to bunkers at that age. I mean, your knees are
(04:44):
just not what they once were.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
They were determined that they must not ful prey to
a surprise attack from the West.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
And drop Off realized the only chance for Soviet survival
was to see an attack coming before it even happened.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
So Andrewpov had started this KGB program for its international
residences called Operation Rhyan.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
So Rhon is an acronym, and it actually is spelled
like the name Ryan. You're gonna hear a variety of
pronunciations for this acronym. I'm just gonna go with Ryan.
So what this acronym means is nuclear missile attack. It
was and Dropoff's crystal ball his chance at seeing the
incoming missiles before a button was ever pushed. Nope, and
(05:34):
drop Off could not see the future. This isn't that
kind of show. But what he lacked in psychic ability
he made up for in espionage.
Speaker 5 (05:43):
So Operation Rhiann was telling its agents abroad to look
for signs of the preparation for a nuclear attack.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
And this is where spies like ol Ed Gordievski come in.
Under Operation Ryan, a global network of Soviet spies began
to search for clue that might indicate that an attack
from the West was eminent.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
Many of these signs were very sensible. You know, our
hospitals being emptied in anticipation of mass casualties.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Were the missiles getting moved around, were blood banks increasing
their supplies. You get the idea. Signs that could rationally
point to the fact that the enemy is preparing for war.
But agents were told to look for other signs as well,
signs that were not so sensible.
Speaker 5 (06:26):
We're go and count the number of lights on in
the Pentagon at night or in the Ministry of Defense
in London at night, because if you knew that regularly
there were had one hundred lights on and suddenly there
are two hundred lights on. My god, they must be
planning for a war. So the whole operation that got
crazier and crazier as the leadership became more and more anxious.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Every two weeks, spies would report back to KGB headquarters
with a list of all the different indicators they saw.
Officials would accumulate a tally, and that taally would be
used to calculate when the attack was coming.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
I was told that there was this extraordinary perspect screen
in the KGB sentern that dul Bianca.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
According to Taylor, the KGB analysts had a giant screen
with a grid on which they would put x's for
each indicator.
Speaker 5 (07:18):
The KGB leaders could judge the overall leftl of tension
simply by looking at the number of crosses on the
big board in the main room.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Once the board was full of axes, that meant the
West was going to attack naturally, then the Soviets could
prepare accordingly, sound the alarms, or worse, they could strike first.
It was like a tic tac toe game of death.
Speaker 5 (07:45):
I mean, this is just so utterly crazy. Stanley Kubrick
could not invent this elderly savie gentlemen, you know, looking
at a big board with crosses on it, and it's
from this that decisions to launch nuclear weapons might be based.
Seems the craziest of satires that you could ever imagine,
But I was certainly told that that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Kind of sounds like the world's most fucked up game show. Okay,
you're for the center square. How many lights are on?
It's the pentagon right now? Oh, I'm sorry, it's two hundred.
That puts an X in the center square.
Speaker 6 (08:22):
And you know what that means.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
That's right, Well, that's our game. I'd say, join us
tomorrow night, But by then all of human civilization will
be buried under a ton of radioactive ash. Good night, folks. Now,
even after a lot of digging, we can't verify exactly
what Ryan actually looked like a Tic Tacto board of death,
(08:47):
or more likely, an algorithm in a supercomputer in a
basement somewhere. After all, the Soviets did have a habit
of using technology to soothe their nuclear anxiety. But what
we do know is that as spies our the West
for these insane indicators, that data would be input into
Ryan which would then output a measure of the balance
(09:08):
of military power. Some sources say the Soviets believed once
that power balance hit sixty forty in favor of NATO,
that meant an attack from the West was imminent and
the Soviets needed to strike first. Does this feel crazy
to you? It should, because it is. This is not
(09:30):
a system, this is not science or math. It's just
some made up arbitrary threshold. I mean, I am truly
at a loss for words.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
Here, completely mad, completely bizarre, completely crazy.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Thank you Taylor. That about sums it up crazy or not.
Operation Ryan would put spies at center stage in our
little Cold War story, more specifically two spies from different
lands who would be put on a crash course with
able archer a where they would be forced to act
to save us all.
Speaker 7 (10:09):
Gordievsky was born in the late nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
This is Michael Goodman. He's the head of the War
Studies department at King's College, London. He's talking about Oleg Gordievsky,
our fake goateed spy driving instructor.
Speaker 7 (10:23):
He had been the son of an officer of one
of the KGB's precursors. Something called the NKVD, but fundamentally
it was the same thing. But in other words, he
was born into the sort of world of secret policing.
I suppose you know, espionage or something which came in
the blood.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
You could argue Oleg Gordievski's brother was also a KGB agent,
so for him, becoming a spy was just like joining
the family business. Come on down to Gordievski and brothers,
your friendly neighborhood spies.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Now, to be honest, his career in the KGB might
have been pretty straightforward if it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
For this.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
B Diomaggio Ripartash Katoribus jell and Zajind's mercy Stay.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
It's nineteen fifty three, ole At Gordievski is fifteen, the
perfect age to get into a little geopolitical tomfoolery. He
had learned that he could pick up several transmissions from
west of the Iron Curtain. The KGB, of course, monitored
the radio waves closely, and if they caught a transmission
from the west, they jammed the signal jab seneskot iq
(11:28):
roling by nation Viktata, making the contraband broadcasts barely intelligible.
Western broadcasters would try to dodge the jammers. Eager to
get their clear message to Soviet citizens, they'd ease off
one frequency and jump to another. The KGB would chase
them down. The result was inevitably a game of free
speech squashing whack.
Speaker 7 (11:49):
Them on abrakis busham.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
But on this day, with his ear hovering next to
his short wave Baltika radio, the KGB's jamming signal wasn't
strong enough. This mole would go unwhacked. Gordievski was able
to make out a life changing broadcast from Radio Liberty
out of.
Speaker 4 (12:09):
Munich boch krofiat krovi.
Speaker 7 (12:14):
We're Sardetsky.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
I'll translate for you. He was the worst tyrant in
the history of mankind, the greatest criminal and executioner of
the world has ever known. His victims numbered millions. It's
March fifth, nineteen fifty three, the day that Stalin died.
I mean, how's that for a eulogy. In his memoir,
only Gordievski recalls listening completely spellbound. He had never heard
(12:40):
the Soviet Union disparaged before. At some level, hearing those words,
he knew them to be true. But despite the nagging
feeling that the Soviet system might be a broken one.
Only Gordievski would go on to join the KGB. You see,
an ordinary Soviet life seemed a little boring to him.
(13:00):
As a KGB man, he could travel, experience different cultures,
and have adventures. He said it himself, he wanted to
live a magnificent life.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
It was exciting, it was thrilling, it was romantic.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Though I didn't expect it would be as exciting in
my case as it jugged out to be.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
That's because all like Gordievski would become a double agent.
Kordievski was twenty eight when he got his first KGB
assignment abroad in Copenhagen.
Speaker 7 (13:44):
Kordievsky would have traveled under some form of cover. He
would not have been declared KGB officer.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
As he passed through customs, he told the agent he
was a Russian diplomat. Of course he was not. That
was only his cover. In reality, he was a Russian
Internet national superspy. Of course, Danish intelligence was always suspicious
of a new Russian diplomat.
Speaker 7 (14:05):
Is he what he says he is or is he
something else?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
So the Danish intelligence service would scrutinize his backstory, looking
for anything that seemed inconsistent. Anything that may reveal Oleg
Gordievski was actually a spy.
Speaker 7 (14:17):
You know where had this Russian served before? They were
a cultural latasha in Mexico and then they suddenly appeared
in How Sinki is a trade atasha?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
You know?
Speaker 7 (14:28):
Does that seem a bit old that you'd go from
one to the other.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
But Olegg Gordievsky's story was air tight. He was safe
for now. He hadn't been there but a few months
when he and his wife were invited out to dinner
by a local police officer. Hey, that's great for them.
It's always so hard to make friends in a new place.
But Olegg must have also gotten some spy tingles. Something
(14:53):
was up. As he left the flat, he placed a
small dab of glue between one of the bedroom doors
and the doorframe. When they came back from dinner, the
bedroom door was wide open. The glue was dislodged. That
could mean only one thing. While they were out, the
Gordievskis had visitors olegs KGB training told them that the
apartment was now bugged. Was the Danish intelligence really so
(15:16):
sloppy that they would make such an obvious mistake? Well,
documents later revealed what went wrong. When the Danish intelligence
broke into the Gordievski's apartment, they accidentally let out his
wife's black cat. They chased the damn thing all around
the neighborhood before finally corralling it back into the apartment.
In the frenzy, they left the bedroom door open. I
(15:37):
can't not picture this scene in cartoon form, but hey,
they did manage to bug the apartment, so mission accomplished.
I guess from this moment on, Danish intelligence would listen
to Gordievsky day in and day out, waiting for him
to mess up, to reveal a vulnerability that they could
exploit to make Gordievsky work for their side. Of course,
(16:00):
Gordievsky knew he was bugged, which makes it all the
more surprising that in short order he gave the Danes
exactly what they wanted. Gordievski's seed of discontent that was
planted all those years ago was about to be watered
by a fucking monsoon.
Speaker 7 (16:17):
It was the check invasion that was the big turning points.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
In July of nineteen sixty eight, Soviet tanks lined up
along the border of Czechoslovakia. The Czech leader had been
talking about a freer Czechoslovakia, freedom of speech, freedom of movement,
but the Soviets couldn't have their allies being too free.
Soviet tanks closed in iron fist, hovering. Honestly, kind of
an evil empiry move Gordievski watched the news coverage with
(16:46):
a knot in his stomach. He debated with his colleagues
at the Russian embassy. Half of them were Stalinists, hardliners.
They wanted the movement squashed. The other half, Gordievski included,
supported the checks. Maybe it was some naive hope that
a communist nation could actually provide a good quality of
life for its people. Hope so it, friends, will't press
us to change the way of our policy of the
(17:09):
last months. Gordievski was adamant. He said, surely the tanks
won't cross the border. They can't. It would be awful,
Oh Kordievski, you sweet innocent espionage agent. He made a
bet with one of the hardliners who thought the tanks
would invade. The loser has to buy the winner a
case of champagne.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Once again, the Soviet Union, demonstrating a colossal contempt for
the opinion of mankind, has resorted to brute force to
keep a satellite nation under control Russian tanks and infantry.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
It was worse than Gordievski could have ever imagined.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Tonight was one of terrors of the patient who expire
the cars, motorcycles, every moving object without warning.
Speaker 7 (17:55):
Because he was based in a foreign country, he was
able to see not just how the Russians portrayed this,
for how the West portray this. And I think this
was really a huge cristical moment in his conversion, if
you like.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
For the first time he saw the Soviet Union for
what it was, unobscured by state propaganda. It confirmed what
deep down he had already known.
Speaker 7 (18:19):
It was moments like that that he really began to think,
I need to do something about this. I need to
target the Soviet system, undermine it somehow, and try and
damage it somehow.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
At that moment, Gordievsky made a faithful decision. It would
put his life at risk, his family's lives at risk.
He went to the phone in the embassy and immediately
called his wife Yolena at home. He sobbed into the phone.
He told her they've actually invaded Czechoslovakia. How could they
do this? It's unbelievable. I don't know what to do now.
(18:53):
He knew his home line was bugged by Danish intelligence.
By making this call, he was sending a deliberate Gordievsky
was ready to flip. He hung up the phone and
bought his colleague a case of champagne. We're going to
say goodbye to Gordievski for now, because another spy in
(19:15):
a different land is traveling on a similar crash course
toward able Archer, and in order to understand this story,
we need to meet him too.
Speaker 8 (19:23):
I would just have got feeling this all this society
was rotten.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Meet rhiner Rup. This audio is from an interview he
gave in two thousand and eight for the documentary nineteen
eighty three The Brink of Apocalypse. Like Gordievski, rhiner Rup
would also become a spy, betray his homeland, and end
up in the middle of a nuclear crisis. Guys, y'all
have so much in common, you should totally be friends.
(19:52):
Only rhiner Rupp's betrayal would happen in the opposite direction.
That's right. He was born in West Germany and soon
he would be working for the East.
Speaker 8 (20:04):
The society didn't suit me in nineties. The more I
learned about it, the more I rejected.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Rhiner. Rupp is a burly sort. He just seems like
the kind of guy who could wrestle a bear into submission.
But maybe I'm just saying that because of his very
impressive beard. He wears those classic Aviator style eyeglasses, and
he fits a lot of German stereotypes, meaning let's just
say he's not very silly. Rupp was sixteen when the
Berlin Wall went up, creating an overnight barrier between two
(20:34):
very different Germanys. It became ingrained in his mind how
lucky he was to be on the Western side, the
free side. That behind the curtain they were making schnitzel
out of cardboard, or sour crowd out of used diapers
or something. But Rupp knew the West had its problems too.
Speaker 8 (20:52):
Nazis were still sitting in positions of power, and all
that reminded us too much of what happened not so
long ago in Germany.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
He and his pals were activists. They would famously be
called the sixty eight Ers, a group of students who
were trying to throw the remaining Nazis out of West
Germany in nineteen sixty eight. Not a super controversial take
in my humble opinion, but apparently the larger West German
population found these young students to be a nuisance, even dangerous.
(21:23):
They were anti establishment, and that made them attempting target
for Communist spy recruiters.
Speaker 8 (21:30):
I wasn't a Marxist at the time, so I don't
know what would have happened if I hadn't met by
Sheia Chance, one of the recruiters.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
One of the recruiters for the Stasi, East Germany's spy organization,
very much in cahoots with the KGB. By the way,
I'm sorry, Ryaner, but I have a feeling that it
was not at all by chance. One misty spring afternoon
in nineteen six and the other sixty eight ers found
themselves marching the streets of Mines, a humble little town
(22:05):
in the Rhineland that still bore the scars of World
War two bombing raids.
Speaker 8 (22:11):
The crow Bible was was hungry. We were thirsty from shouting,
and so we went to a pup.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
They ordered a round of beers and bowls of gulash.
Speaker 8 (22:23):
When we paid, we wanted to pay to be literally
a tin tin Finnick, which is nowadays Tincent. I mean nothing,
just didn't have it anymore in our pockets.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
So to the waitress reps like, look, we don't have
money for all these beers and poles of gulage. But
let me back there in the kitchen. I'll do some
washing and work off the debt.
Speaker 8 (22:44):
That's how this nice chap order man could have been
my father. Two tables further away, said oh, waitress, I'll
pick up those and bring those young men and another
round of beers. So he was very welcome in our circle.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Apparently the cost of buying a spy is roughly the
price of gulash. When it came time to leave, the
old man reveals that he, by complete chance lived right
next to Rup. What a small world.
Speaker 8 (23:14):
And so we walked back up up the hill to
the rose garden where I lived and talked more.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
They're talking politics, the state of Germany, and they discovered,
to the complete surprise of only one person in that conversation,
that they're totally ideologically aligned. What a kuaki dink, right.
Speaker 8 (23:35):
I old god, it's the first time in my experience
this is an older man could be my father order generation,
and he has same kind of feelings, the same kind
of views like me, so I wanted to know him again.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Hook Line and Singer, the nice old Gulash buying Chap
played the long game. It was an entire year before
he came back to Rupp and said, Hey, I know
you think the East is bad. You think it's an
evil dictatorship where life is dreary and monotonous, but you're
actually just brainwashed by the West.
Speaker 8 (24:12):
So he said, come and have a fabu look for yourself.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
So he did. Rupp visited East Germany and let's just
say he wasn't turned off by it, so he agreed
to help them out a little. At first, Rupp was
tasked with documenting Nazi activities within the West German government. Truly,
and I think we can all agree on this, fighting
the good fight. But slowly Rhiner Rupp began to see
(24:37):
the West in a very dark light, as greedy, exploiting
the working class and on a quest for world domination.
And that's when Rhiner Rupp fully flipped. He committed to
being a full fledged agent in the Stazi, which ironically
was itself a very dark, repressive, even torturous organization. Now
(25:01):
with a new mandate. RUP's target shifted. It was no
longer the Nazis, it was NATO.
Speaker 8 (25:08):
Ito was my enemy and I went in to destroy it.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Well, that got intense very fast. Now Rup needed an in.
But you can't just waltz into the NATO office and
apply for a job. What do you think is this
jam bajuice? And what's he going to say in the interview? Hi,
I'm Rhyner Rupp. I want to destroy you from within.
I mean, you don't hire that guy. So he started
by enrolling at a local university. He hatched a plan
(25:37):
he could make contacts and eventually infiltrate the enemy. But
then he met and Christine.
Speaker 9 (25:45):
And Christine Bowen and I met in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
This is Floria and Schimakowski. He's head of collections at
the German Spy Museum in Berlin.
Speaker 10 (25:53):
And she was actually totally unpolitical and he was very
political at that time, and she took over his opinions
bit by bit.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And Christine Bowen was British. She was a student alongside
Rhiner Rubb at the university. She was also a secretary
at NATO. You might know where this is going. The
spy who wants to get into NATO, conveniently meets a
young woman who works at NATO.
Speaker 10 (26:17):
I don't know if you're familiar with the term Romeo agent.
It's what the English call it honeypot, honeytrap, because they
frequently sent out good looking man to get in contact
with secretaries of governmental institutions in order to spy on
those people and to get these secretaries to spy for them.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
But rub swears he has always sworn this is not
that he loved Anne Christine. They ended up getting married.
In fact, they're still married. No honeypot, no manipulation. This
relationship is the real deal. And maybe to prove his affection,
or maybe because he's a reckless romantic, he does exactly
what he's not supposed to do. He tells her, hey,
(27:05):
by the way, darling, mine shots, I'm a spy.
Speaker 9 (27:11):
And the Starzi was shocked, as you can imagine.
Speaker 10 (27:14):
They were quite kind of angry with him, so to speak,
because they really really said, you shouldn't have done that.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
What do we do?
Speaker 9 (27:20):
We don't know anything about that woman, for.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
God's sake, she's English. We don't know where her loyalties lie.
She calls fries chips and chips crisps. They're like, what
are we going to do with you?
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Now?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Fire you? So Rup is pretty scared from getting his
ass handed to him by his Starzi handlers. And he
goes back to an Christine and he says, can I
trust you?
Speaker 9 (27:38):
And she assured him she's not gonna tell anyone.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Not only is Anne Christine not going to tell anyone,
she's so smitten with Rupp that she even agrees to
help him.
Speaker 10 (27:50):
So he actually convinced her. You're a secretary at NATO headquarters.
That means you've got position to documents and you can
do something good costs. So she starts at smuggling out
documents in a handback.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Come on, that is so romantic. If only Hallmark made
cards for spy lovers. You smuggled my heart out. There
are so many treasons why I love you. I got
a million of these, Hallmark, give me a call for
the Stazzi. Having an agent inside NATO was a gold mine.
It was a clear look inside the minds of the West.
(28:26):
If NATO attacks, and they were convinced NATO would attack
this Dozzi would see it coming from a mile away.
But and Christine's access was limited. They wanted to be deeper,
and that's when a job vacancy opened up in the
Economics department of NATO. They were looking for a candidate
with language skills, someone who spoke French, German and Spanish.
(28:48):
Ryan heer Upp was the perfect candidate. So I guess
in the end he did just walton to NATO and
apply for a job. My apologies to Jombajuice. All right,
let's go check back in with our other pal, Oleg Gordievski,
(29:10):
the Soviet spy who has just made the faithful decision
to become a double agent and help destroy the Soviet system.
You'll recall he had just given a dramatic performance on
a bugged line when he called his wife after the
Czech invasion. So now Gordievski expected a visit from Danish intelligence,
but they never came. They didn't hear his signal. Not
(29:34):
that the phone wasn't bugged, it was I don't know.
The dude listening must have taken a break to eat
some chemader bread. That's an open faced Danish sandwich. You
should really try one sometime. Regardless, the Danes didn't get
the message, so, not realizing that he was fully prepared
to be flipped. They fleshed out their own plan to
flip him, and they believed they had some leverage. Here's
(29:56):
nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
Here the Danish bookstore story about Gordievski.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
A boy do I Jeffrey, and it's a doozy. One day,
shortly after his arrival in Copenhagen, oled Gordievski was drolling
through the red light district, as one does when you're
getting to know your new home.
Speaker 6 (30:15):
And Gordievski, who is just a weird dude, walks by
a gay bookstore, or maybe it was just a pornographic bookstore.
It was a sex shop, and he just can't believe
that the West is so open and free that such
a thing can exist. So he goes in and he
buys two pornographic magazines that are gay themed, right, and
(30:36):
take some home to show his wife to be like,
can you believe how free this country is? Here's some
hardcore gay pornography. And I don't know what her reaction
to this is, but you know it's probably like, that's great, Oleg.
But the Danish intelligence services immediately decide Gordievski must be
a closeted gay man in the nineteen.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Sixties, a gay KGB agent that was definitely something to exploit.
Speaker 6 (31:01):
And they see this as like a way that they
could recruit him, right, they could blackmail him and recruit him.
And so they try to set up a honeypot where
they get, you know, an attractive young man to kind
of flirt with him at a cocktail party. But Gordievski,
being straight, doesn't realize that that's what's happening at all,
and it doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Ohlegg probably went home and told his wife all about
that nice guy he met at the party and how
people in the West are so interested in his stamp collection.
Speaker 6 (31:26):
But like, that's Olegg Gordievski for you, right, like the
kind of guy who would do something like that.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
In the end, Treason finally found Gordievski on the badminton court,
as it's found so many of us. It was nineteen
seventy three. A tall English diplomat walked onto the court,
interrupting what I can only imagine was a riveting match.
Gordievski was, in all likelihood donned in sweatbands, short shorts
and tube socks. The Englishman invited him to lunch. He
(31:54):
said somewhere we won't be overheard. You can kind of
fill in the blanks on that conversation, Gordievski agreed to flip,
and thank Christ he did.
Speaker 7 (32:05):
It's kind of for chewed says, and it was also
source of.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Calculated Gordievsky was now a double agent for six, which
is basically the CIA of the United Kingdom. Now. I
six wanted to help Gordievsky climb the ranks and the KGB.
The higher up he was on the Soviet side, the
better intelligence he'd be able to feed them, and they
wanted him close where they could be in touch with
(32:29):
him more freely. So I six set a plan in
motion to get Gordievsky a new job in London. The
opportunity would finally come in nineteen eighty one, some eight
years after Gordievsky was first approached on that Badminton court.
Speaker 7 (32:44):
I six, as we now know, helped ensure that someone
in the embassy was sent back to Moscow to record
sort of slightly in disgrace, and so that an opening
came up.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
All of a sudden, The Soviets had a diplomatic opening
to fill in London. Back here, BACKO, you're going to
London Town.
Speaker 7 (33:03):
And it was at that point that really he began
to provide the best sort of intelligence.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
There was just a recap. Gordievski was in London on
official business as a Russian diplomat, but he was sent
by the KGB as an undercover agent. But he was
actually set up by six to be placed there by
the KGB to pose as a diplomat. Are you following me?
Because I'm barely hanging on and I'm like the host here. Listen.
(33:28):
The point is, being a double agent is a dangerous
and confusing job. If being a regular secret agent is
like juggling knives, then being a double agent is like
juggling knives while double dutching through jump ropes made of
knives in front of a crowd who is also throwing
knives at you. It's a lot of knives.
Speaker 7 (33:47):
Even had Gordievski known something, he couldn't necessarily pass it
across straight away. Of course, even if he could pass
across intelligence straight away, how the West dealt with it
had to also be very cleverly and carefully handled, because
if you all suddenly told something which you have no
other means of knowing, and you somehow revealed that then,
of course, to the other side. It will then post questions,
(34:07):
well how did they know that? This whole world of
casts and mouse becomes absolutely fascinating because you had to
try and conceal how do you know?
Speaker 2 (34:15):
You know that the KGB kept detailed records of which
agents knew which pieces of information, so when secrets inevitably
leaked to the other side, they could trace the breadcrumbs
of treachery back to the source. And once they did,
can you guess what happened? Execution? But that wasn't the
only danger in Gordievsky's capacity as a double agent. He
(34:36):
may also feed completely false information back to the KGB,
and if they found out he was lying, he could
be executed. And even if Gordievsky was extremely careful, there
was always the possibility that his new employers had a
mole of their own. He could be rated out and
then he'd be say it with me, execute it, see
(35:01):
knives everywhere. I'm bringing all this up not just because
it's fascinating fun spy tradecraft. I bring it up because
it's utterly terrifying, arguably completely unacceptable that this intelligence that
was at best convoluted and at worst completely fucking false
could sway the decisions of world leaders to I don't know,
(35:22):
maybe you launched some nukes during a NATO military exercise.
I mean, the lives of the entire human race depended
on analysts accurately detangling this muddy espionage web, knowing what
was legitimate and what was not. Meanwhile, moles, traders and
defectors were deliberately just trying to confuse everyone. When you
(35:43):
really think about it, it's kind of insane. We didn't
have a nuclear war like every other month, and the
problem was about to get a lot worse.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
They started to panic, and they developed a concept of
how the Americans will prepare to a sudden nuclear attack.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
This is Kordievsky again from an interview he gave in
two thousand and eight. He's talking about Operation Ryan.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
They needed to know the time of the preparation to
the attack in order probably to carry out a preventive attack,
so we will remain, the Winders will prevail.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
The beginnings of Operation Ryan date back to nineteen eighty one,
but according to Kordievsky, things got a bit more urgent
in nineteen eighty three. That's when it became clear that
the euro missiles were in fact going to be deployed
in Europe. Oh yeah, and it's also when Ronald Reagan
publicly called the Soviet Union the source of all evil
in the world. Every two weeks agents were to go
(36:55):
look for these indicators, no matter how ridiculous they seemed,
and write a report to be sent back to Moscow.
But here's the thing. The West wasn't planning an attack,
so there were no actual signs.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
What should we do to write? There was no signs.
You will get such a blow? Do you heather you
write such thing?
Speaker 2 (37:16):
The message was clear, don't come back empty handed, find
some signs, and if they're not there, find them anyway.
Speaker 5 (37:25):
No agent is going to stand up and say, well, look,
I'm in London or I'm in Washington, there's absolutely no
sign here for preparations for a nuclear war.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Your daft.
Speaker 5 (37:33):
Don't be silly. You know that way would lie the
end of a career. The way to advance your career
was to find signs and send them into the center.
It became totally self fulfilling. A series of paranoid leaders
ask agents around the world to report if they see
anything suspicious happening. As soon as they reported it, makes
(37:55):
the kg BE centered even more paranoid, even more anxious,
even more nervous about what's going on.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
If you look up lose Lose in the dictionary, there
should be a really big picture of Operation Ryan right
next to it. If the Soviet agents reported what they saw,
which was nothing, they could be risking their lives, and
if they reported back fake intel, they could effectively accelerate
a nuclear war, leaving us all dead. See Lose Lose.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
My boss was head of the station. It was a
beak fat, pompous and also stupid man.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Damn, Gordy, tell us how you really feel.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
But still he was not stupid enough to understand that
this requirement was just not But he was a boss,
so he pretended that it was serious. America. He's preparing
a sudden new class talk.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
And while Gordievsky's boss may have been stupid, he wasn't
stupid enough to defy the KGB.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
And we that he didn't believe it. Nobody believed it.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Like ts Eliot said, this is how the world ends,
not with a bang, but with the Soviet middle manager
brow beating his department to reach its monthly quota and
then pure with a bang after that and if any
was left then a whimper.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Were you surprised when you were told to look out
for the NATO plans for a surprise attack?
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yes? And no, this is Ryan a rup again.
Speaker 8 (39:36):
I mean, I can't understand why they were scared, because
from the outside it really must have looked bad.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Last we saw Rupp, he had just accepted a job
at NATO. He would now have access to NATO's precious
war plans. He was a major asset for the Stasi
and by extension, the KGB, and so of course he'd
get a dope code name. He'd be called Agent Topaz.
Speaker 7 (40:02):
Does the word Topaz mean anything to you?
Speaker 9 (40:04):
What is Topaz?
Speaker 3 (40:05):
The story of espionage in high Places?
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Now turns out there's a nineteen sixty nine Hitchcock film
by the same name. In the movie, there's a NATO
official who is working for the East. And believe me
when I tell you that, I have no idea if
ryner Up aka Agent Topaz picked his code name based
on that movie. But let's just say the similarities are
a little uncanny. Apparently the Topaz film was an utter failure.
(40:31):
Critics were like, Hitchcock, time to retire Buddy kind of harsh.
Presumably Rupp and his comrades disagreed, they loved the film,
or they just figured nobody saw it, but still it
seems like kind of a risky move to hang a
lantern on yourself like that. Ryner Rupp went to work
each day in the Economics department in NATO. He had
(40:53):
a teeny tiny little camera that he would sneak into
the office stashed in the handle of his umbrella or
squash racket, and then he would photo secret NATO documents
to send back East. I did it.
Speaker 8 (41:03):
Was it all open, pretty bold, and I was sitting
not then at my desk, but I had an additional
work disc in a corner, and I was sitting there
over the documents, and I was taking the pictures.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
With the door slightly ajar and a file cupboard rolled
just in front of it, so when a colleague walked in,
the door would hit the file cabinet.
Speaker 8 (41:23):
And if the bang came, I'll just put the camera
down here.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Well, sorry about that, francois what can.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
I do for you?
Speaker 8 (41:32):
So that happened quite occasionally.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
So Rupp was now one of the most valuable agents
the East had. He was in the NATO inner Sanctum
photographing classified documents for the Stazi, who would then pass
them on to the KGB. Meanwhile, Gordievski is passing Soviet
intel to the West. Both sides are using this intelligence
to gain the upper hand in an arms race that
(41:58):
is spiraling out of control? What could go wrong next time?
Speaker 11 (42:07):
On STAFFO, one story dominates the free world news media
tonights the killing of two hundred and sixty nine innocent
people I board a Koreem jumbo jip that drifted into
Soviet territory.
Speaker 12 (42:17):
The United States reacts with revulsion to this attack. Loss
of life appears to be heavy. We can see no
excuse whatsoever for this appalling act, Sylvia.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Saying now they were only trying to help the plane
out of their airspace. Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film,
Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with
Gilded Audio. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino.
(42:51):
Our producer is Carl Nellis, Associate producer Tory Smith. It's
executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo,
Andy Chug and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by
Sarah Joyner, with additional writing from Me, Elliott Kalen, and
Whitney Donaldson. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis, who is
just a weird dude. Olivia Kenny is our production assistant.
(43:14):
Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Additional research and fact
checking by Charles Richter, Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley.
Original music and sound designed by Dan Rosatto. Some archival
audio from this episode originally appeared in Taylor Downing's fantastic
film nineteen eighty three, The Brink of Apocalypse. Thank you,
mister Downing for permission to use it. Special thanks to
(43:35):
Alison Cohen and Matt Aisenstadt
And I already have one cut in sight, which I
got as a suspicious This.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Is Olegg Gordievsky, a Soviet spy.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
There's a blue.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
I'm not very good at some models, but I sees
a shape and this is a color, and it is
behind us.
Speaker 4 (00:24):
Again.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
It's nineteen ninety. He's filming a British TV show called
World in Action, where he's demonstrating how the KGB trained
him how to tell if he was being followed.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
The philosophy is not to shake off the surveillance. Maybe
curtius to the surveillance, don't irritate them.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
In this video clip, he's wearing a faux goo tea
and a wig as a disguise his short athletic build.
His sport coat and pants are slightly oversized. In other words,
he looks like every other middle aged man in the
nineteen nineties. He blends in like a spy should.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Now I do absolutely unexpected. I turned right to stay
with me. They have to make the choke, and they
are making the joke. I set a trap for them.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I bet you were expecting something a little more dramatic,
James Bond style car chase that turns into a motorcycle
chase that turns into a fistfight on a blimp or something.
But no, this is what International Super spiderm really looks like.
An average looking man in a wig and a fake
go te, hands placed at ten and two, driving just
(01:34):
under the speed limit.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
You know, a bunch of ex operations, admitting that the
agents will not take place, but tomorrow we will try again.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
But the movies do get one thing right. Spies like
Oleg Gordievski, sometimes the fate of the world does depend
on them. There's one more thing I should tell you
about him. He's one of the two spies who would
be forced to intervene during an international nuclear crisis in
nineteen eighty three. Listeners, pour yourself up vodka martini, shaken,
(02:09):
not stirred, because today it's all about the spies situation.
(02:31):
Norman Fucko. I'm at Helms and this is Snafu, a
podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On season one, we're
telling you the story of a snaffo that is gigantic, absurd, terrifying.
It's able Archer eighty three, the nineteen eighty three NATO
military exercise that almost led to a real nuclear war.
(02:58):
All right, here's where we're at. The Cold War was
heating up or was it cooling down? I don't know,
whatever's worse thanks to Reagan and a drop off and
their teeny tiny inferiority complexes. Well, what did you think
I was going to say? Come on, get your mind
out of the gutter. Anyway, after a year of name calling,
aggressive impulses of an evil empire, the announcement of a
(03:19):
very mysterious space project and destroy strategic ballistic missiles, and
the scheduled deployment of super speedy missiles discouraging two can
fly up to one thousand miles in under ten minutes,
let's just say the Soviets weren't feeling particularly trusting.
Speaker 5 (03:35):
The West were wicked. The capitalists were unreliable. They would
trick into sie View as soon as they would look
you in the eye. You know, this was an evil
sort of Western system that these paranoid KGB officials saw
in the West.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
This is Taylor Downing. He's an historian and a documentarian,
and boy does he have the voice for it. He
says that a drop Off didn't believe Thatagan's antics were
standard political performance. He thought Reagan was building up to
something far more sinister.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
The fear was that the Americans had some sort of secret,
cunning plan to launch a preemptive strike. Obviously, in the
nuclear era, a surprise attack could be completely overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Overwhelming is putting it lightly. With the new euro missiles
in play, the Soviet Union would need to detect an attack,
get word to the leaders, notify the public, scurry into bunkers,
and launch a retaliation, all within seven minutes. And drop
Off was like seventy years old. You're not exactly sprinting
to bunkers at that age. I mean, your knees are
(04:44):
just not what they once were.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
They were determined that they must not ful prey to
a surprise attack from the West.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
And drop Off realized the only chance for Soviet survival
was to see an attack coming before it even happened.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
So Andrewpov had started this KGB program for its international
residences called Operation Rhyan.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
So Rhon is an acronym, and it actually is spelled
like the name Ryan. You're gonna hear a variety of
pronunciations for this acronym. I'm just gonna go with Ryan.
So what this acronym means is nuclear missile attack. It
was and Dropoff's crystal ball his chance at seeing the
incoming missiles before a button was ever pushed. Nope, and
(05:34):
drop Off could not see the future. This isn't that
kind of show. But what he lacked in psychic ability
he made up for in espionage.
Speaker 5 (05:43):
So Operation Rhiann was telling its agents abroad to look
for signs of the preparation for a nuclear attack.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
And this is where spies like ol Ed Gordievski come in.
Under Operation Ryan, a global network of Soviet spies began
to search for clue that might indicate that an attack
from the West was eminent.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
Many of these signs were very sensible. You know, our
hospitals being emptied in anticipation of mass casualties.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Were the missiles getting moved around, were blood banks increasing
their supplies. You get the idea. Signs that could rationally
point to the fact that the enemy is preparing for war.
But agents were told to look for other signs as well,
signs that were not so sensible.
Speaker 5 (06:26):
We're go and count the number of lights on in
the Pentagon at night or in the Ministry of Defense
in London at night, because if you knew that regularly
there were had one hundred lights on and suddenly there
are two hundred lights on. My god, they must be
planning for a war. So the whole operation that got
crazier and crazier as the leadership became more and more anxious.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Every two weeks, spies would report back to KGB headquarters
with a list of all the different indicators they saw.
Officials would accumulate a tally, and that taally would be
used to calculate when the attack was coming.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
I was told that there was this extraordinary perspect screen
in the KGB sentern that dul Bianca.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
According to Taylor, the KGB analysts had a giant screen
with a grid on which they would put x's for
each indicator.
Speaker 5 (07:18):
The KGB leaders could judge the overall leftl of tension
simply by looking at the number of crosses on the
big board in the main room.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Once the board was full of axes, that meant the
West was going to attack naturally, then the Soviets could
prepare accordingly, sound the alarms, or worse, they could strike first.
It was like a tic tac toe game of death.
Speaker 5 (07:45):
I mean, this is just so utterly crazy. Stanley Kubrick
could not invent this elderly savie gentlemen, you know, looking
at a big board with crosses on it, and it's
from this that decisions to launch nuclear weapons might be based.
Seems the craziest of satires that you could ever imagine,
But I was certainly told that that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Kind of sounds like the world's most fucked up game show. Okay,
you're for the center square. How many lights are on?
It's the pentagon right now? Oh, I'm sorry, it's two hundred.
That puts an X in the center square.
Speaker 6 (08:22):
And you know what that means.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
That's right, Well, that's our game. I'd say, join us
tomorrow night, But by then all of human civilization will
be buried under a ton of radioactive ash. Good night, folks. Now,
even after a lot of digging, we can't verify exactly
what Ryan actually looked like a Tic Tacto board of death,
(08:47):
or more likely, an algorithm in a supercomputer in a
basement somewhere. After all, the Soviets did have a habit
of using technology to soothe their nuclear anxiety. But what
we do know is that as spies our the West
for these insane indicators, that data would be input into
Ryan which would then output a measure of the balance
(09:08):
of military power. Some sources say the Soviets believed once
that power balance hit sixty forty in favor of NATO,
that meant an attack from the West was imminent and
the Soviets needed to strike first. Does this feel crazy
to you? It should, because it is. This is not
(09:30):
a system, this is not science or math. It's just
some made up arbitrary threshold. I mean, I am truly
at a loss for words.
Speaker 5 (09:39):
Here, completely mad, completely bizarre, completely crazy.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Thank you Taylor. That about sums it up crazy or not.
Operation Ryan would put spies at center stage in our
little Cold War story, more specifically two spies from different
lands who would be put on a crash course with
able archer a where they would be forced to act
to save us all.
Speaker 7 (10:09):
Gordievsky was born in the late nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
This is Michael Goodman. He's the head of the War
Studies department at King's College, London. He's talking about Oleg Gordievsky,
our fake goateed spy driving instructor.
Speaker 7 (10:23):
He had been the son of an officer of one
of the KGB's precursors. Something called the NKVD, but fundamentally
it was the same thing. But in other words, he
was born into the sort of world of secret policing.
I suppose you know, espionage or something which came in
the blood.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
You could argue Oleg Gordievski's brother was also a KGB agent,
so for him, becoming a spy was just like joining
the family business. Come on down to Gordievski and brothers,
your friendly neighborhood spies.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Now, to be honest, his career in the KGB might
have been pretty straightforward if it wasn't.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
For this.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
B Diomaggio Ripartash Katoribus jell and Zajind's mercy Stay.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
It's nineteen fifty three, ole At Gordievski is fifteen, the
perfect age to get into a little geopolitical tomfoolery. He
had learned that he could pick up several transmissions from
west of the Iron Curtain. The KGB, of course, monitored
the radio waves closely, and if they caught a transmission
from the west, they jammed the signal jab seneskot iq
(11:28):
roling by nation Viktata, making the contraband broadcasts barely intelligible.
Western broadcasters would try to dodge the jammers. Eager to
get their clear message to Soviet citizens, they'd ease off
one frequency and jump to another. The KGB would chase
them down. The result was inevitably a game of free
speech squashing whack.
Speaker 7 (11:49):
Them on abrakis busham.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
But on this day, with his ear hovering next to
his short wave Baltika radio, the KGB's jamming signal wasn't
strong enough. This mole would go unwhacked. Gordievski was able
to make out a life changing broadcast from Radio Liberty
out of.
Speaker 4 (12:09):
Munich boch krofiat krovi.
Speaker 7 (12:14):
We're Sardetsky.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
I'll translate for you. He was the worst tyrant in
the history of mankind, the greatest criminal and executioner of
the world has ever known. His victims numbered millions. It's
March fifth, nineteen fifty three, the day that Stalin died.
I mean, how's that for a eulogy. In his memoir,
only Gordievski recalls listening completely spellbound. He had never heard
(12:40):
the Soviet Union disparaged before. At some level, hearing those words,
he knew them to be true. But despite the nagging
feeling that the Soviet system might be a broken one.
Only Gordievski would go on to join the KGB. You see,
an ordinary Soviet life seemed a little boring to him.
(13:00):
As a KGB man, he could travel, experience different cultures,
and have adventures. He said it himself, he wanted to
live a magnificent life.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
It was exciting, it was thrilling, it was romantic.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Though I didn't expect it would be as exciting in
my case as it jugged out to be.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
That's because all like Gordievski would become a double agent.
Kordievski was twenty eight when he got his first KGB
assignment abroad in Copenhagen.
Speaker 7 (13:44):
Kordievsky would have traveled under some form of cover. He
would not have been declared KGB officer.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
As he passed through customs, he told the agent he
was a Russian diplomat. Of course he was not. That
was only his cover. In reality, he was a Russian
Internet national superspy. Of course, Danish intelligence was always suspicious
of a new Russian diplomat.
Speaker 7 (14:05):
Is he what he says he is or is he
something else?
Speaker 2 (14:08):
So the Danish intelligence service would scrutinize his backstory, looking
for anything that seemed inconsistent. Anything that may reveal Oleg
Gordievski was actually a spy.
Speaker 7 (14:17):
You know where had this Russian served before? They were
a cultural latasha in Mexico and then they suddenly appeared
in How Sinki is a trade atasha?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
You know?
Speaker 7 (14:28):
Does that seem a bit old that you'd go from
one to the other.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
But Olegg Gordievsky's story was air tight. He was safe
for now. He hadn't been there but a few months
when he and his wife were invited out to dinner
by a local police officer. Hey, that's great for them.
It's always so hard to make friends in a new place.
But Olegg must have also gotten some spy tingles. Something
(14:53):
was up. As he left the flat, he placed a
small dab of glue between one of the bedroom doors
and the doorframe. When they came back from dinner, the
bedroom door was wide open. The glue was dislodged. That
could mean only one thing. While they were out, the
Gordievskis had visitors olegs KGB training told them that the
apartment was now bugged. Was the Danish intelligence really so
(15:16):
sloppy that they would make such an obvious mistake? Well,
documents later revealed what went wrong. When the Danish intelligence
broke into the Gordievski's apartment, they accidentally let out his
wife's black cat. They chased the damn thing all around
the neighborhood before finally corralling it back into the apartment.
In the frenzy, they left the bedroom door open. I
(15:37):
can't not picture this scene in cartoon form, but hey,
they did manage to bug the apartment, so mission accomplished.
I guess from this moment on, Danish intelligence would listen
to Gordievsky day in and day out, waiting for him
to mess up, to reveal a vulnerability that they could
exploit to make Gordievsky work for their side. Of course,
(16:00):
Gordievsky knew he was bugged, which makes it all the
more surprising that in short order he gave the Danes
exactly what they wanted. Gordievski's seed of discontent that was
planted all those years ago was about to be watered
by a fucking monsoon.
Speaker 7 (16:17):
It was the check invasion that was the big turning points.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
In July of nineteen sixty eight, Soviet tanks lined up
along the border of Czechoslovakia. The Czech leader had been
talking about a freer Czechoslovakia, freedom of speech, freedom of movement,
but the Soviets couldn't have their allies being too free.
Soviet tanks closed in iron fist, hovering. Honestly, kind of
an evil empiry move Gordievski watched the news coverage with
(16:46):
a knot in his stomach. He debated with his colleagues
at the Russian embassy. Half of them were Stalinists, hardliners.
They wanted the movement squashed. The other half, Gordievski included,
supported the checks. Maybe it was some naive hope that
a communist nation could actually provide a good quality of
life for its people. Hope so it, friends, will't press
us to change the way of our policy of the
(17:09):
last months. Gordievski was adamant. He said, surely the tanks
won't cross the border. They can't. It would be awful,
Oh Kordievski, you sweet innocent espionage agent. He made a
bet with one of the hardliners who thought the tanks
would invade. The loser has to buy the winner a
case of champagne.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Once again, the Soviet Union, demonstrating a colossal contempt for
the opinion of mankind, has resorted to brute force to
keep a satellite nation under control Russian tanks and infantry.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
It was worse than Gordievski could have ever imagined.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Tonight was one of terrors of the patient who expire
the cars, motorcycles, every moving object without warning.
Speaker 7 (17:55):
Because he was based in a foreign country, he was
able to see not just how the Russians portrayed this,
for how the West portray this. And I think this
was really a huge cristical moment in his conversion, if
you like.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
For the first time he saw the Soviet Union for
what it was, unobscured by state propaganda. It confirmed what
deep down he had already known.
Speaker 7 (18:19):
It was moments like that that he really began to think,
I need to do something about this. I need to
target the Soviet system, undermine it somehow, and try and
damage it somehow.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
At that moment, Gordievsky made a faithful decision. It would
put his life at risk, his family's lives at risk.
He went to the phone in the embassy and immediately
called his wife Yolena at home. He sobbed into the phone.
He told her they've actually invaded Czechoslovakia. How could they
do this? It's unbelievable. I don't know what to do now.
(18:53):
He knew his home line was bugged by Danish intelligence.
By making this call, he was sending a deliberate Gordievsky
was ready to flip. He hung up the phone and
bought his colleague a case of champagne. We're going to
say goodbye to Gordievski for now, because another spy in
(19:15):
a different land is traveling on a similar crash course
toward able Archer, and in order to understand this story,
we need to meet him too.
Speaker 8 (19:23):
I would just have got feeling this all this society
was rotten.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Meet rhiner Rup. This audio is from an interview he
gave in two thousand and eight for the documentary nineteen
eighty three The Brink of Apocalypse. Like Gordievski, rhiner Rup
would also become a spy, betray his homeland, and end
up in the middle of a nuclear crisis. Guys, y'all
have so much in common, you should totally be friends.
(19:52):
Only rhiner Rupp's betrayal would happen in the opposite direction.
That's right. He was born in West Germany and soon
he would be working for the East.
Speaker 8 (20:04):
The society didn't suit me in nineties. The more I
learned about it, the more I rejected.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Rhiner. Rupp is a burly sort. He just seems like
the kind of guy who could wrestle a bear into submission.
But maybe I'm just saying that because of his very
impressive beard. He wears those classic Aviator style eyeglasses, and
he fits a lot of German stereotypes, meaning let's just
say he's not very silly. Rupp was sixteen when the
Berlin Wall went up, creating an overnight barrier between two
(20:34):
very different Germanys. It became ingrained in his mind how
lucky he was to be on the Western side, the
free side. That behind the curtain they were making schnitzel
out of cardboard, or sour crowd out of used diapers
or something. But Rupp knew the West had its problems too.
Speaker 8 (20:52):
Nazis were still sitting in positions of power, and all
that reminded us too much of what happened not so
long ago in Germany.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
He and his pals were activists. They would famously be
called the sixty eight Ers, a group of students who
were trying to throw the remaining Nazis out of West
Germany in nineteen sixty eight. Not a super controversial take
in my humble opinion, but apparently the larger West German
population found these young students to be a nuisance, even dangerous.
(21:23):
They were anti establishment, and that made them attempting target
for Communist spy recruiters.
Speaker 8 (21:30):
I wasn't a Marxist at the time, so I don't
know what would have happened if I hadn't met by
Sheia Chance, one of the recruiters.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
One of the recruiters for the Stasi, East Germany's spy organization,
very much in cahoots with the KGB. By the way,
I'm sorry, Ryaner, but I have a feeling that it
was not at all by chance. One misty spring afternoon
in nineteen six and the other sixty eight ers found
themselves marching the streets of Mines, a humble little town
(22:05):
in the Rhineland that still bore the scars of World
War two bombing raids.
Speaker 8 (22:11):
The crow Bible was was hungry. We were thirsty from shouting,
and so we went to a pup.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
They ordered a round of beers and bowls of gulash.
Speaker 8 (22:23):
When we paid, we wanted to pay to be literally
a tin tin Finnick, which is nowadays Tincent. I mean nothing,
just didn't have it anymore in our pockets.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
So to the waitress reps like, look, we don't have
money for all these beers and poles of gulage. But
let me back there in the kitchen. I'll do some
washing and work off the debt.
Speaker 8 (22:44):
That's how this nice chap order man could have been
my father. Two tables further away, said oh, waitress, I'll
pick up those and bring those young men and another
round of beers. So he was very welcome in our circle.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Apparently the cost of buying a spy is roughly the
price of gulash. When it came time to leave, the
old man reveals that he, by complete chance lived right
next to Rup. What a small world.
Speaker 8 (23:14):
And so we walked back up up the hill to
the rose garden where I lived and talked more.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
They're talking politics, the state of Germany, and they discovered,
to the complete surprise of only one person in that conversation,
that they're totally ideologically aligned. What a kuaki dink, right.
Speaker 8 (23:35):
I old god, it's the first time in my experience
this is an older man could be my father order generation,
and he has same kind of feelings, the same kind
of views like me, so I wanted to know him again.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Hook Line and Singer, the nice old Gulash buying Chap
played the long game. It was an entire year before
he came back to Rupp and said, Hey, I know
you think the East is bad. You think it's an
evil dictatorship where life is dreary and monotonous, but you're
actually just brainwashed by the West.
Speaker 8 (24:12):
So he said, come and have a fabu look for yourself.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
So he did. Rupp visited East Germany and let's just
say he wasn't turned off by it, so he agreed
to help them out a little. At first, Rupp was
tasked with documenting Nazi activities within the West German government. Truly,
and I think we can all agree on this, fighting
the good fight. But slowly Rhiner Rupp began to see
(24:37):
the West in a very dark light, as greedy, exploiting
the working class and on a quest for world domination.
And that's when Rhiner Rupp fully flipped. He committed to
being a full fledged agent in the Stazi, which ironically
was itself a very dark, repressive, even torturous organization. Now
(25:01):
with a new mandate. RUP's target shifted. It was no
longer the Nazis, it was NATO.
Speaker 8 (25:08):
Ito was my enemy and I went in to destroy it.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Well, that got intense very fast. Now Rup needed an in.
But you can't just waltz into the NATO office and
apply for a job. What do you think is this
jam bajuice? And what's he going to say in the interview? Hi,
I'm Rhyner Rupp. I want to destroy you from within.
I mean, you don't hire that guy. So he started
by enrolling at a local university. He hatched a plan
(25:37):
he could make contacts and eventually infiltrate the enemy. But
then he met and Christine.
Speaker 9 (25:45):
And Christine Bowen and I met in nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
This is Floria and Schimakowski. He's head of collections at
the German Spy Museum in Berlin.
Speaker 10 (25:53):
And she was actually totally unpolitical and he was very
political at that time, and she took over his opinions
bit by bit.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And Christine Bowen was British. She was a student alongside
Rhiner Rubb at the university. She was also a secretary
at NATO. You might know where this is going. The
spy who wants to get into NATO, conveniently meets a
young woman who works at NATO.
Speaker 10 (26:17):
I don't know if you're familiar with the term Romeo agent.
It's what the English call it honeypot, honeytrap, because they
frequently sent out good looking man to get in contact
with secretaries of governmental institutions in order to spy on
those people and to get these secretaries to spy for them.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
But rub swears he has always sworn this is not
that he loved Anne Christine. They ended up getting married.
In fact, they're still married. No honeypot, no manipulation. This
relationship is the real deal. And maybe to prove his affection,
or maybe because he's a reckless romantic, he does exactly
what he's not supposed to do. He tells her, hey,
(27:05):
by the way, darling, mine shots, I'm a spy.
Speaker 9 (27:11):
And the Starzi was shocked, as you can imagine.
Speaker 10 (27:14):
They were quite kind of angry with him, so to speak,
because they really really said, you shouldn't have done that.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
What do we do?
Speaker 9 (27:20):
We don't know anything about that woman, for.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
God's sake, she's English. We don't know where her loyalties lie.
She calls fries chips and chips crisps. They're like, what
are we going to do with you?
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Now?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Fire you? So Rup is pretty scared from getting his
ass handed to him by his Starzi handlers. And he
goes back to an Christine and he says, can I
trust you?
Speaker 9 (27:38):
And she assured him she's not gonna tell anyone.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Not only is Anne Christine not going to tell anyone,
she's so smitten with Rupp that she even agrees to
help him.
Speaker 10 (27:50):
So he actually convinced her. You're a secretary at NATO headquarters.
That means you've got position to documents and you can
do something good costs. So she starts at smuggling out
documents in a handback.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Come on, that is so romantic. If only Hallmark made
cards for spy lovers. You smuggled my heart out. There
are so many treasons why I love you. I got
a million of these, Hallmark, give me a call for
the Stazzi. Having an agent inside NATO was a gold mine.
It was a clear look inside the minds of the West.
(28:26):
If NATO attacks, and they were convinced NATO would attack
this Dozzi would see it coming from a mile away.
But and Christine's access was limited. They wanted to be deeper,
and that's when a job vacancy opened up in the
Economics department of NATO. They were looking for a candidate
with language skills, someone who spoke French, German and Spanish.
(28:48):
Ryan heer Upp was the perfect candidate. So I guess
in the end he did just walton to NATO and
apply for a job. My apologies to Jombajuice. All right,
let's go check back in with our other pal, Oleg Gordievski,
(29:10):
the Soviet spy who has just made the faithful decision
to become a double agent and help destroy the Soviet system.
You'll recall he had just given a dramatic performance on
a bugged line when he called his wife after the
Czech invasion. So now Gordievski expected a visit from Danish intelligence,
but they never came. They didn't hear his signal. Not
(29:34):
that the phone wasn't bugged, it was I don't know.
The dude listening must have taken a break to eat
some chemader bread. That's an open faced Danish sandwich. You
should really try one sometime. Regardless, the Danes didn't get
the message, so, not realizing that he was fully prepared
to be flipped. They fleshed out their own plan to
flip him, and they believed they had some leverage. Here's
(29:56):
nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis.
Speaker 6 (29:59):
Here the Danish bookstore story about Gordievski.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
A boy do I Jeffrey, and it's a doozy. One day,
shortly after his arrival in Copenhagen, oled Gordievski was drolling
through the red light district, as one does when you're
getting to know your new home.
Speaker 6 (30:15):
And Gordievski, who is just a weird dude, walks by
a gay bookstore, or maybe it was just a pornographic bookstore.
It was a sex shop, and he just can't believe
that the West is so open and free that such
a thing can exist. So he goes in and he
buys two pornographic magazines that are gay themed, right, and
(30:36):
take some home to show his wife to be like,
can you believe how free this country is? Here's some
hardcore gay pornography. And I don't know what her reaction
to this is, but you know it's probably like, that's great, Oleg.
But the Danish intelligence services immediately decide Gordievski must be
a closeted gay man in the nineteen.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Sixties, a gay KGB agent that was definitely something to exploit.
Speaker 6 (31:01):
And they see this as like a way that they
could recruit him, right, they could blackmail him and recruit him.
And so they try to set up a honeypot where
they get, you know, an attractive young man to kind
of flirt with him at a cocktail party. But Gordievski,
being straight, doesn't realize that that's what's happening at all,
and it doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Ohlegg probably went home and told his wife all about
that nice guy he met at the party and how
people in the West are so interested in his stamp collection.
Speaker 6 (31:26):
But like, that's Olegg Gordievski for you, right, like the
kind of guy who would do something like that.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
In the end, Treason finally found Gordievski on the badminton court,
as it's found so many of us. It was nineteen
seventy three. A tall English diplomat walked onto the court,
interrupting what I can only imagine was a riveting match.
Gordievski was, in all likelihood donned in sweatbands, short shorts
and tube socks. The Englishman invited him to lunch. He
(31:54):
said somewhere we won't be overheard. You can kind of
fill in the blanks on that conversation, Gordievski agreed to flip,
and thank Christ he did.
Speaker 7 (32:05):
It's kind of for chewed says, and it was also
source of.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Calculated Gordievsky was now a double agent for six, which
is basically the CIA of the United Kingdom. Now. I
six wanted to help Gordievsky climb the ranks and the KGB.
The higher up he was on the Soviet side, the
better intelligence he'd be able to feed them, and they
wanted him close where they could be in touch with
(32:29):
him more freely. So I six set a plan in
motion to get Gordievsky a new job in London. The
opportunity would finally come in nineteen eighty one, some eight
years after Gordievsky was first approached on that Badminton court.
Speaker 7 (32:44):
I six, as we now know, helped ensure that someone
in the embassy was sent back to Moscow to record
sort of slightly in disgrace, and so that an opening
came up.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
All of a sudden, The Soviets had a diplomatic opening
to fill in London. Back here, BACKO, you're going to
London Town.
Speaker 7 (33:03):
And it was at that point that really he began
to provide the best sort of intelligence.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
There was just a recap. Gordievski was in London on
official business as a Russian diplomat, but he was sent
by the KGB as an undercover agent. But he was
actually set up by six to be placed there by
the KGB to pose as a diplomat. Are you following me?
Because I'm barely hanging on and I'm like the host here. Listen.
(33:28):
The point is, being a double agent is a dangerous
and confusing job. If being a regular secret agent is
like juggling knives, then being a double agent is like
juggling knives while double dutching through jump ropes made of
knives in front of a crowd who is also throwing
knives at you. It's a lot of knives.
Speaker 7 (33:47):
Even had Gordievski known something, he couldn't necessarily pass it
across straight away. Of course, even if he could pass
across intelligence straight away, how the West dealt with it
had to also be very cleverly and carefully handled, because
if you all suddenly told something which you have no
other means of knowing, and you somehow revealed that then,
of course, to the other side. It will then post questions,
(34:07):
well how did they know that? This whole world of
casts and mouse becomes absolutely fascinating because you had to
try and conceal how do you know?
Speaker 2 (34:15):
You know that the KGB kept detailed records of which
agents knew which pieces of information, so when secrets inevitably
leaked to the other side, they could trace the breadcrumbs
of treachery back to the source. And once they did,
can you guess what happened? Execution? But that wasn't the
only danger in Gordievsky's capacity as a double agent. He
(34:36):
may also feed completely false information back to the KGB,
and if they found out he was lying, he could
be executed. And even if Gordievsky was extremely careful, there
was always the possibility that his new employers had a
mole of their own. He could be rated out and
then he'd be say it with me, execute it, see
(35:01):
knives everywhere. I'm bringing all this up not just because
it's fascinating fun spy tradecraft. I bring it up because
it's utterly terrifying, arguably completely unacceptable that this intelligence that
was at best convoluted and at worst completely fucking false
could sway the decisions of world leaders to I don't know,
(35:22):
maybe you launched some nukes during a NATO military exercise.
I mean, the lives of the entire human race depended
on analysts accurately detangling this muddy espionage web, knowing what
was legitimate and what was not. Meanwhile, moles, traders and
defectors were deliberately just trying to confuse everyone. When you
(35:43):
really think about it, it's kind of insane. We didn't
have a nuclear war like every other month, and the
problem was about to get a lot worse.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
They started to panic, and they developed a concept of
how the Americans will prepare to a sudden nuclear attack.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
This is Kordievsky again from an interview he gave in
two thousand and eight. He's talking about Operation Ryan.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
They needed to know the time of the preparation to
the attack in order probably to carry out a preventive attack,
so we will remain, the Winders will prevail.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
The beginnings of Operation Ryan date back to nineteen eighty one,
but according to Kordievsky, things got a bit more urgent
in nineteen eighty three. That's when it became clear that
the euro missiles were in fact going to be deployed
in Europe. Oh yeah, and it's also when Ronald Reagan
publicly called the Soviet Union the source of all evil
in the world. Every two weeks agents were to go
(36:55):
look for these indicators, no matter how ridiculous they seemed,
and write a report to be sent back to Moscow.
But here's the thing. The West wasn't planning an attack,
so there were no actual signs.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
What should we do to write? There was no signs.
You will get such a blow? Do you heather you
write such thing?
Speaker 2 (37:16):
The message was clear, don't come back empty handed, find
some signs, and if they're not there, find them anyway.
Speaker 5 (37:25):
No agent is going to stand up and say, well, look,
I'm in London or I'm in Washington, there's absolutely no
sign here for preparations for a nuclear war.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Your daft.
Speaker 5 (37:33):
Don't be silly. You know that way would lie the
end of a career. The way to advance your career
was to find signs and send them into the center.
It became totally self fulfilling. A series of paranoid leaders
ask agents around the world to report if they see
anything suspicious happening. As soon as they reported it, makes
(37:55):
the kg BE centered even more paranoid, even more anxious,
even more nervous about what's going on.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
If you look up lose Lose in the dictionary, there
should be a really big picture of Operation Ryan right
next to it. If the Soviet agents reported what they saw,
which was nothing, they could be risking their lives, and
if they reported back fake intel, they could effectively accelerate
a nuclear war, leaving us all dead. See Lose Lose.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
My boss was head of the station. It was a
beak fat, pompous and also stupid man.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Damn, Gordy, tell us how you really feel.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
But still he was not stupid enough to understand that
this requirement was just not But he was a boss,
so he pretended that it was serious. America. He's preparing
a sudden new class talk.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
And while Gordievsky's boss may have been stupid, he wasn't
stupid enough to defy the KGB.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
And we that he didn't believe it. Nobody believed it.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Like ts Eliot said, this is how the world ends,
not with a bang, but with the Soviet middle manager
brow beating his department to reach its monthly quota and
then pure with a bang after that and if any
was left then a whimper.
Speaker 1 (39:25):
Were you surprised when you were told to look out
for the NATO plans for a surprise attack?
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yes? And no, this is Ryan a rup again.
Speaker 8 (39:36):
I mean, I can't understand why they were scared, because
from the outside it really must have looked bad.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Last we saw Rupp, he had just accepted a job
at NATO. He would now have access to NATO's precious
war plans. He was a major asset for the Stasi
and by extension, the KGB, and so of course he'd
get a dope code name. He'd be called Agent Topaz.
Speaker 7 (40:02):
Does the word Topaz mean anything to you?
Speaker 9 (40:04):
What is Topaz?
Speaker 3 (40:05):
The story of espionage in high Places?
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Now turns out there's a nineteen sixty nine Hitchcock film
by the same name. In the movie, there's a NATO
official who is working for the East. And believe me
when I tell you that, I have no idea if
ryner Up aka Agent Topaz picked his code name based
on that movie. But let's just say the similarities are
a little uncanny. Apparently the Topaz film was an utter failure.
(40:31):
Critics were like, Hitchcock, time to retire Buddy kind of harsh.
Presumably Rupp and his comrades disagreed, they loved the film,
or they just figured nobody saw it, but still it
seems like kind of a risky move to hang a
lantern on yourself like that. Ryner Rupp went to work
each day in the Economics department in NATO. He had
(40:53):
a teeny tiny little camera that he would sneak into
the office stashed in the handle of his umbrella or
squash racket, and then he would photo secret NATO documents
to send back East. I did it.
Speaker 8 (41:03):
Was it all open, pretty bold, and I was sitting
not then at my desk, but I had an additional
work disc in a corner, and I was sitting there
over the documents, and I was taking the pictures.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
With the door slightly ajar and a file cupboard rolled
just in front of it, so when a colleague walked in,
the door would hit the file cabinet.
Speaker 8 (41:23):
And if the bang came, I'll just put the camera
down here.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Well, sorry about that, francois what can.
Speaker 4 (41:31):
I do for you?
Speaker 8 (41:32):
So that happened quite occasionally.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
So Rupp was now one of the most valuable agents
the East had. He was in the NATO inner Sanctum
photographing classified documents for the Stazi, who would then pass
them on to the KGB. Meanwhile, Gordievski is passing Soviet
intel to the West. Both sides are using this intelligence
to gain the upper hand in an arms race that
(41:58):
is spiraling out of control? What could go wrong next time?
Speaker 11 (42:07):
On STAFFO, one story dominates the free world news media
tonights the killing of two hundred and sixty nine innocent
people I board a Koreem jumbo jip that drifted into
Soviet territory.
Speaker 12 (42:17):
The United States reacts with revulsion to this attack. Loss
of life appears to be heavy. We can see no
excuse whatsoever for this appalling act, Sylvia.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Saying now they were only trying to help the plane
out of their airspace. Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film,
Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with
Gilded Audio. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino.
(42:51):
Our producer is Carl Nellis, Associate producer Tory Smith. It's
executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo,
Andy Chug and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by
Sarah Joyner, with additional writing from Me, Elliott Kalen, and
Whitney Donaldson. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis, who is
just a weird dude. Olivia Kenny is our production assistant.
(43:14):
Our creative executive is Brett Harris. Additional research and fact
checking by Charles Richter, Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley.
Original music and sound designed by Dan Rosatto. Some archival
audio from this episode originally appeared in Taylor Downing's fantastic
film nineteen eighty three, The Brink of Apocalypse. Thank you,
mister Downing for permission to use it. Special thanks to
(43:35):
Alison Cohen and Matt Aisenstadt
Host
Ed Helms
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