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