The KGB defector who saved MI5 and changed the Cold War (425)

29:34And anything, it appears as though, based on the declassified documents, that he's pretty much got his way on everything to do with cancer intelligence. Everyone deferred to him on a regular basis. And then of course, he would himself defer to Anatoly Gillitson, this man who had defected to the UK and who'd warned about the master plan. And so between them, they shared this great deal of paranoia and it really was paranoia. I suppose you'll see it through the storytelling in the book, but also I could see it through the declassified archives because there were so many opportunities to pull back and reflect on what was actually happening, but they were very much guided by their paranoia.

30:18They're very much guided by what they accepted as the picture, rather than what the reality was on the ground. They almost wanted to fit their contaminated thinking. They wanted to fit the reality into their contaminated thinking. They were desperate to find moles within the CIA. And so they went after the first suspected mole that didn't result in anything, but it ruined the guy's career. They went after the second one and the third one and the fourth one and the fifth one. And eventually between 40 to 50 CIA officials or contractors had their careers ruined, their reputations ruined. They could no longer find jobs.

30:59And later on, some would go on to successfully sue the agency.

31:05Richard Kerbaj:And you can sort of understand Angleton's paranoia to some degree because he was good friends with Kim Philby, not realizing that he was a Soviet asset. So his judgment was questionable. Yes. And in fact, he was good friends with Kim Philby because he was in charge of liaison affairs at the CIA at one point. And essentially liaison affairs is quite a fun job. You're essentially there to take out and entertain members of the allied agencies. So you'd sort of go out and have drinks and dinner with them and have chats and chat about what's happening in that space, right? And there's evidence that Philby had visited the CIA on numerous occasions.

31:50He was in on a regular basis to see him. And yes, so they became quite close. And in fact, Angleton looked up to Philby. he seemed to turn to him for guidance and advice of course not knowing that kim philby was a spy himself and and then after burges and mclean defected philby became a suspect himself and so he left he was kicked out of mi6 at some point but then he was exonerated by the British foreign secretary at the time in the mid-50s who came out in parliament and said, you know, he's an upstanding citizen. He shouldn't be suspected. He's a good man. And that kind of rehabilitated his image.

32:38And he went on to then work as a foreign correspondent for a number of newspapers. And eventually he defected in 1963. So yes, after he defected in 63... all of the suspicions that Angleton had had, but he had been hoping were not true, was suddenly realized. And he felt so betrayed. So that intensified his paranoia. And he sort of started doubling down on this concept that there were mauls within and we have to find them. And we have to go to any extent that we have to in order to track them down. And then he suspected the leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, who became leader of the opposition in the early 1960s, of potentially being a Soviet spy.

33:33But he didn't inform MI5 about that until he became prime minister in 64. And so he rushed over to MI5 to inform them that he believes that the British prime minister, I mean, imagine that as the head of the counterintelligence at the CIA. rushing over to speak to MI5 and saying, hey, by the way, your prime minister is a spy, and I believe he's a spy, and we have the evidence he's a spy. And so MI5 said, well, where is the evidence? And he said, well, I can't give you the evidence unless you assure me that two things. One, you don't give it to his party, and you don't share it with his people.

34:09And it was an insane thing to suggest, because if they wanted to investigate, they needed the evidence to have a look at and also they would need to interview people so that pretty much went nowhere and the suspicions that we hear about you know these historic suspicions about harold wilson very much came from anatoly galitson it was actually anatoly galitson's theory that harold wilson was a spy and that theory was then shared with angleton and angleton gave it airlift and he gave it to mi5 and that's kind of where all of those suspicions that we hear about, those historic suspicions about the British prime minister being a spy, that's where it's all come from.

34:53Contaminated thinking and complete paranoia.

34:57Richard Kerbaj:Wow. Well, because Galitzen, I think you said he defected to the US in 61. So he's been around for quite some time. So I guess he's running out of crackpot theories to give Angleton to play with. Exactly. And in fact, Angleton gave him access to personnel records. I mean, that is completely unheard of in any other setting, in any other generation. And I have the good fortune of sitting down with intelligence officials on a regular basis. And I've done that for some time because I write about these areas. And when I was researching this aspect of the story about personnel records being given, I thought I've got to run this by some of my officials, my official friends who know about this and who work in this area.

35:51I said, what is the likelihood that if you were to get a defector right now, providing you with a heap of what you thought was gold intelligence, what is the likelihood that you would give them personnel files? And they said, zero. And I said, well, let me tell you about this guy. And I just gave him sort of a sense of what was happening back then. And they were so shocked that this had actually happened. I mean, it sounds like fiction, but this actually happened. So he got given personnel files to analyze because he convinced the CIA that if he could go through these personnel files, he will be able to look for signs about who was a potential mole.

36:35And then they could launch an investigation to that person. And none of them, not a single tip that he provided about these internal spies, these internal moles resulted in anything. but the ruining of the careers of these individuals.

36:54Richard Kerbaj:Incredible. Incredible. Meanwhile, back in London with Lee Arlin, he is carrying on a number of relationships and he's carrying on relationships with British citizens. I mean, what was the KGB rules around relationships with foreign nationals? Yeah, I mean, he tried to exploit those rules because the rules indicated that if you were, if you were cultivating friendships with locals, in this case, British citizens, and you were doing so in the interest of recruiting them, then that was absolutely allowed. You could do that. And those rules seemed quite lenient and the KGB seemed quite permissive about a number of things, including dating, for instance, because he could easily say that The dating that I'm doing is just part of my extracurricular work.

37:48This is what I'm doing for my job. I'm trying to recruit these women. And that would get a pass. And that's how he got by, it seems, because his womanizing was fairly well known within his workplace. You know, he had a reputation for being a man who was out about town and who had multiple girlfriends. And although it was frowned upon in some circles, there's no indication that he wasn't allowed to do it. There's no indication that he was prohibited or that he was ever warned about it up until a certain point. But that was very much the case. And so, yeah, they were quite permissive. And even going out and drinking was allowed, providing that you don't get too rowdy and start smashing bottles.

38:36That's one of the things that appears in the declassified documents. I thought that was quite funny because I don't really know many people who get super drunk and just start smashing bottles for fun, but apparently that wasn't allowed. So that's kind of where they drew the line. Everything else, yeah, we could sort of tolerate this.

38:51Richard Kerbaj:Wow, wow. And you've managed to track down a great eyewitness, a woman who was chatted up by Lee Arlin, and she was a receptionist at the knitwear office that he was working out of. Yeah. So the Soviet trade mission created a commercial front called Rasno. And this Rasno was essentially an export import company that was located in the heart of London. This is back in the late 1960s, quite a fashion. I mean, London was the fashion capital at the time. And so they wanted to create a front office and they did so on region street in central london and this woman susan woodthorpe was working there as a receptionist and so she met him in that context he would come into the office on a regular basis because nearby the office is where he would meet his agents on a regular basis we know that now based on the declassified material And so it's a nice point for him to kind of go through, to pass through Central London.

40:03And he took a real liking and a real shining to Susan Woodthorpe. She was 19 at the time. And he would come in there and try to charm her. And he would bring in caviar and cream sandwiches. And he'd bring her some vodka as well and try to take her out for drinks. And her story is quite fascinating in itself. But to go back to your point about how I tracked her down. So when I saw her name appear in the records, it took me a while to track her down because she was quite young at the time. And I presumed that she's probably gone on to get married and therefore her name would have changed. So when I looked at Wooddorp, Susan Wooddorp, there were just hundreds in the phone directory.

40:44It was impossible to track down this one woman. and eventually I tracked, you know, with the help of a friend who's brilliant on social media, we tracked down a Facebook page and it appeared as though it was her Facebook page. So I wrote to her on Facebook and got nothing for a couple of months. And then eventually I managed to sort of find a way to get through to her and got in touch with her. And I told her about who I am and, and she was willing to speak. And that was a wonderful thing because up until then I was going on primary sources that were made of paper and ink. And then suddenly I had this brilliant source who was able to help me corroborate some of the stories about Leal and just bring him to life, humanize him for me.

41:31So I would go to her on a regular basis to ask her questions about him, to corroborate information about his eye color, for instance, about his accent, his mannerisms, the kind of person that he was. And at the time she was 19, so she wasn't savvy enough or even suspicious enough to think that someone like him could be a KGB officer, but she just found him to be this man who was full of life and loved the United Kingdom. And he was just generally fun to be around. And so that's the memory that she has of him. And when she discovered that he was a spy after the information came out in the press, she was quite shocked by this.

42:16And that's where she approached the press at the time, back in September 1971. And she had a number of interviews. And that's how her name got out of the press and how I sort of tracked back to find her, et cetera.

42:32Richard Kerbaj:She really does bring him to life there. Now, we talked about relationships with British citizens. Now, what the KGB did have a dim view of was extramarital affairs, which doesn't deter Oleg from having an affair with Irina. Yes, his colleague at the Soviet embassy, who was also married with a child. And she was also a translator, so she was fairly fluent in English. So she would help the officials there translate English to Russian. and it's very obvious that they fell for each other in that context. There's no evidence that he had met her in Moscow. There's no evidence that their relationship had blossomed or that they'd even come across each other before he came to the UK in early 1969.

43:27But when he did, at some point, they started working with each other. And I think their interactions were intensified when she also started coming in to do some work at Rasno, so in central London. And then, you know, the relationship blossomed and they became lovers. And this is, it's very relevant because I think she had what appears to have been a fairly well-functioning marriage. She was a devoted mother herself. And in mid-1971, she actually traveled to Moscow to see her mother and her father, with whom her child was living at the time. And we've now learned, based on the declassified material, that she didn't really want to come back to the UK.

44:22She wanted to stay out there with her son. And so she begrudgingly returned to the UK. And when she did, there was a huge turning point in her life that came. and we can get to that in a second and i'll talk you through it so why why does oleg decide to contact mi5 so his life becomes so chaotic so going back to the points i made about his life earlier it's you know this is a guy who's come from a broken home he's had a number of setbacks in his career that were very much self-authored. These happened because of his own inclinations and his own inability to withhold from partying and drinking and having a great deal of fun.

45:11And so in early 1971, I think everything just caught up to him. He had four girlfriends, at least four girlfriends, as I was saying earlier, that he was juggling and He had a wife who was highly suspicious of his behavior, unwilling to put up with it any longer. And so he thought one way around this could be just returning to Moscow, getting a divorce through the courts, and then spending time with my girlfriend. Now, we don't know which girlfriend he was thinking of at the time because he had several. But that was just this sort of crackpot idea that he had in his head. And so he decided to approach MI5 in early 1971.

45:56In fact, on the 21st of April, 1971. And he approached MI5 through a police station in North London. He essentially said, I'm a trade official, but my real job is a KGB officer. I want to speak to MI5. And very quickly, he was taken to a safe house for a debriefing. And so we started to divulge secrets, telling MI5, I'm here as a KGB officer. Of course, MI5 is very suspicious of him at the time because its thinking had been largely shaped by events of the previous decade in regards to this so-called master plan that Anatoly Galitzen had warned about. He had already warned them that at some point, the Kremlin and the KGB is going to send out people who are going to pretend to want to defect.

46:46They're going to pretend to give you secrets, but you should not trust them because everything they've given you is misinformation or disinformation. And they're there to really contaminate your analysis and evidence. So they interviewed him. They debriefed him with that in mind through that sort of understanding. and then what they did is they started running some some checks on what he was saying so it's it's a very basic thing verification is a very basic part of the equation in in intelligence sometimes it's done better than other times but in this case they did a good job and they thought okay we want to check out whether or not this guy is telling the truth but also the one thing that struck them as being rather weird was that he didn't want defection.

47:35He didn't want money. What he wanted was to be kicked out of the country. Now that's something new. That's something that they hadn't seen before. And for someone who's researched national security stories and intelligence, I've never heard of a case ever in the hundred years that I've looked at, that an officer approaches someone and says, hey, can you kick me out of this country? And that's essentially what he's saying. He's saying, kick me out of this country and I'll give you all my secrets. And the reason he wanted to be kicked out of the country, going back to the point, is because he wanted to divorce his wife.

48:06And he also felt that if he was kicked out of the country, his standing within the KGB, his stature, will be essentially improved because he thought they will see me as this sort of hero. I'll get a hero's welcome for being kicked out of the country. And then I can start providing intelligence to MI5 from there. Of course, MI5 did not want anything to do with that. So they did what any clever agent handler would do. And what you want to do is you want to keep them in their job, keep them providing information, but keep them within range. You want to keep them under control because if they're on the other side, they're much more difficult to control.

48:46And also you could potentially compromise their own safety or your safety or the safety of the overall operation. And so they kept him in the country and they started debriefing him. And over the period of four months, he revealed a number of secrets, including those that I went into earlier about the plots that the KGB had been putting together, including the contamination of seawater, including the plans to assassinate British politicians, plans to go after military communication, plans to go after military sites to blow up government buildings. So these were big sabotage plans, huge ambitions that the KGB had at the time that he had oversight of and that he was also helping develop.

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50:31And then came a massive turning point. And that turning point came in late August. And again, it goes back to that point that I keep returning to, that his behavior always got him into trouble. And that came back to bite him and undo everything that he had because he was driving drunk along Tottenham Court Road in central London. His car was wobbly. A couple of police officers saw this early hours in the morning, pulled him over. He had a woman with him at the time. She left the car. She left the scene. And he resisted initially providing a breath test. So he was taken into the police station.

51:11He resisted initially giving his name. Eventually, he relented. And he was locked up in a cell overnight. And the next morning, he was bailed out by a Soviet official. when the Soviet official bailed him out, the KGB realized it's time to bring this guy home. He's lost his way. He's open to potential compromise. Of course, they had no idea that by then he'd been working for MI5 for four months. And so they said, right, pack your bags and come home. And instead of following him home and to the office to make sure that he did pack his bags and that he didn't steal anything. They just let him go to do that.

51:51And so what he did is he got all these belongings, got in touch with MI5 and said, I want to defect. But he only did that after making a number of phone calls. And those phone calls were to his girlfriends. So he contacted his first girlfriend, who was a British woman, not the British woman I spoke about earlier because she wasn't his girlfriend. But he rang a British woman and he said, will you defect with me? Will you run away with me? she was married herself and she said no no i'm not going to do this so he hung up and called the next woman and i won't go into the because that's a surprise element so i want to leave that i want to leave that to people who are going to go out there and buy the book and read it so that's the story on his front and then he defected but his defection was a huge a huge bonus for mi5 because it proved two things.

52:43One, the information that he'd supplied was absolutely accurate. And it also proved that the CIA had been wrong about so many things in regards to the Soviet threat. And so MI5 elected to withhold information about Lee Allen's case and about the planned expulsion of Soviet spies from the CIA and from the US administration at large. And that's the first time that that ever happened, that I ever know that it happened during the Cold War. Because up until then, there'd been some kind of disagreement, some sense of disagreements about how to deal with the Soviet threat, how to deal with defectors or potential defectors or potential moles or moles.

53:33But that was a point where MI5 realized we no longer trust the CIA's judgment. And we also, we're very worried about providing the Nixon administration with information about our proposed expulsion of spies because President Nixon wanted to preserve detente. And he would have naturally feared, the British believed, and they believed correctly, that Nixon would prioritize that over Britain's national security, which would have been improved in the event of spies being expelled. So they withheld the information from the American partners. And on the 24th of September, 1971, the permanent secretary at the foreign office, so for your international audience, think of the most senior person in this civil service job within the foreign office, called in the charge d 'affaires and said, right, we're expelling 105 Soviet diplomats because we believe that they're involved in espionage and that information was very much helped by by Oleg Leon because Oleg Leon had been able to provide the names of KGB officers and GRU officers operating in the UK so MI5 very much had the list of all the people There weren't any suspicions about who they were.

54:59It had very detailed information about the individuals that it was expelling. And also they had a lot more people to kick out in the event that Moscow was to retaliate harshly. because at that point up until the expulsion the uk had 550 soviet officials in the country 200 of whom were soviet spies so that's about a third and if you look at those numbers the 550 officials as a whole that is more soviet officials in the uk per capita than in any other western country including the united states so it was huge so the threat was huge yeah wow and from what

55:49Richard Kerbaj:lialin is is handing over as as far as information there were a couple of interesting ones particularly this this kgb plan to infiltrate whitehall using delivery drivers and lay down some poison pellets? Yes, that people would step on and get killed. I mean, the MI5 didn't take that very seriously. These were kind of their ambitions. And as I said earlier, a lot of their ambitions weren't realized. And they weren't realized for a reason because I don't think the KGB was as good as the Western intelligence agencies thought it was. So of course it had ambitions to steal military and technological ideas and hardware.

56:38And of course, it had ambitions to undermine the special relationship and to drive a wedge between the Americans and the Brits and to undermine democracy and to go about operations as we see it doing now. Because not much has changed between what was happening during the Cold War and what's happening now. just the you know the decades are different the individuals are different but the ambitions are still the same and not everything not all their ambitions were realized so yeah they had multiple plans for us but thankfully those plans were crushed because of Lee Allen's information and subsequent defection and those two things need to be split up because the information of course came long before he defected.

57:24It came during the sort of four months of debriefings before he defected. And then after he defected, he continued to help MI5. And I think the biggest hit to the KGB was against this Department V, the Sabotage and Assassinations Department, which was a very prestigious department. It was also known as Department of Liquid Affairs because they would go out there and liquidate people. That's how nasty this department was. But because Oleg Leal exposed its operations and its operatives, including those who were based overseas, not just in the UK, but also in the US and other countries, within a few years it shut down.

58:06And its operations were not revived until Putin rose to power. And then in the early 2000s, They carried out operations against defectors. And of course, the first known Western-based defector that Putin went after was Alexander Lipinenko in 2006. Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia. And I support Cold War conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can. So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast and I look forward to it every week.

58:57Richard Kerbaj:To be like Rhonda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the Cold War. as a monthly or annual supporter. You'll be able to listen ad-free, you'll become one of our community, get the sought-after Cold War Conversations drinks coaster as a thank you, and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve Cold War history. Just go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate to find out more. And still echoes of that even now in terms of assassination. So, how long does Lee Arling continue working for MI5 and what happens to him in the end? Right. So, he defects in 1971 in September 71.

59:45And he's taken away to a safe house and he's given a new identity, which is a very commonplace thing that usually happens when someone defects. You give them a new identity because you want to ensure that their identity is not compromised, that they're not targeted and killed. he's then sentenced to death in absentia in the in the soviet union i think that was in 1972 and he continued being debriefed by mi5 and he continued to provide insights about what he knew about the soviet threat and what they were able to do is to give him information about new targets that they had identified. And he was able to, for instance, provide them with insights about the departments that they were a part of, or provide them with insights about where those individuals had been earlier deployed or dispatched, if he knew them.

1:00:44He also provided information to the FBI through MI5. So the FBI would send lists of questions to MI5, which then would take them to Lial and put the questions to him and give the FBI information. That information helped also identify KGB officers in New York. And he continued working right up until his death in 1995. And the KGB never got to him. nor did the KGB's successor really, the FSB, because in 1995, of course, the KGB had split because the Soviet Union had collapsed and the KGB split to become the FSB and the SVR.

1:01:33Richard Kerbaj:Yeah, we love an acronym. We love an acronym. Richard, that's an incredible story you've shared there. And obviously, we've only scratched the surface there. So there is loads more in the book. The book is called The Defector, the untold story of the KGB agent who saved MI5 and changed the Cold War. There'll be links in the episode information for you to buy the book and support the podcast. The episode extras such as videos, photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information. The podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters and I'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road.

1:02:17Richard Kerbaj:The Cold War conversation continues in our Facebook discussion group. Just search for Cold War Conversations in Facebook. Thanks very much for listening and look forward to seeing you next week.

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