The KGB Spy Who Exposed Russia’s Secret Plan to Attack The West - Richard Kerbaj

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1:57in their countries. That's because they've got repressive regimes, the result of revolutions. Whether you're talking about Russia or China, it's very difficult to penetrate their systems in the ground. You're having to sort of do it in most cases through a third country. For us, the majority of the defections that we've had during the Cold War, even the Second World War, up until today, have been voluntary walk-ins. These are people who realize that there is a sense of freedom in the West that they cannot possibly dream about having in Russia or in China or Iran or North Korea. And they feel that this is a great opportunity to begin a new life.

2:32But also there is the issue of validation. How do they validate these people who are walking in? So from a US perspective and British perspective, if someone's approaching you, first question you have to ask is, what's the motive? Second question is, are they genuine or are they deep covers coming to penetrate our system. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today is Richard Corbash. He's a writer, investigative journalist, a BAFTA-winning filmmaker. But man, what a book. Okay, The Defector is the title. The Untold Story of the KGB agent who saved MI5 and changed the Cold War.

3:14So this was like John le Carré stuff. but it was real. I mean, it was nonfiction. And I mean, it's obviously got to be turned into a movie. I mean, this is an unbelievable book, Richard. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And thanks for, I'm thrilled that you've enjoyed this. I'm not sure how to pronounce this guy's name, but I'm from New York, so you have to bear with me. But you're going to have to tell us who Oleg? Oleg Leallon. Leallon is, okay. So Oleg Leallon is essentially, he was a KGB officer. who was deployed to London in 1969 to recruit British spies, essentially.

3:57That was his job description. He sort of veered away from his job description because he got caught up in the London nightlife. And also he had these sort of proclivities towards womanizing and drinking. And so instead of doing his job, he was out partying most of the time. And that really upset his wife. So he was suffering from this premature midlife crisis, as it were. And he decided that one way to go about this was to potentially seek a divorce that might resolve his issues, because his bigger issues were he had about four girlfriends. He didn't know which one to elope with. His girlfriend, his wife was becoming difficult in his mind.

4:38And so what he did is approach MI5 to provide secrets, hoping that somehow by providing secrets mi5 would help deal with his marriage problems he could have of course sought marriage counseling which would have been much easier for him but it wouldn't have been as fun for our story okay so this just so we set the scene for everybody this takes place in spring of 1971 so we're in the full-blown era of the cold war um he's officially if i remember correctly from the book he's a soviet trade delegation official but he's actually kgb we do that all over the world. And what's so interesting about the book is that it's womenizing and it's sort of the stuff that the KGB does to Western officials in terms of compromise to catch them.

5:32That's the irony. He catches himself with his own compromise, right? I mean, that's more or less what happens here, right? Essentially. That's essentially what happens. And I think it's important to frame in the context of what was taking place during the 1960s in the lead up to this moment. So in the early 1970s, when he defected, there were about 550 Soviet officials operating in the UK, more than 200 of whom were Soviet spies. And we know this because of the information he would ultimately provide MIFL about this. No, he was the Benedict Arnold of the Soviet Union. There's no question about that.

6:08He's a, he's a patriot to us and a traitor to them. And that's how the world works. But I want to, I want to go into him for a second because reading this, I'm saying to myself, this guy does not fit the image of the James Bond of the KGB, right? He is a drinker, a partier. He's a polymorous. He's having lots of affairs. How did somebody like this end up inside one of the most dangerous parts of the KGB. How was he screened out prior to his arrival in London? So what got him in was the language skills that he developed. And he developed those language skills. He spoke English. And so in the 1950s, he joined a college in Odessa.

6:50And he was talent spotted by a colleague of his in class who essentially co-opted him to join the KGB, initially as a surveillance informant and then from there he essentially was they figured he's got the set of skills we require we could build this guy up and that set of skills was his ability to learn languages specifically english because initially they had earmarked him for deployment in the united states and so in the early 1960s in 61 62 they started training him in multiple methods from photography to surveillance to how to spot a tail and his first marriage at this point was already on the rocks and because of his behavior they figured he's probably not a reliable person we should we should we should cut this deployment which they did and then they sent him off to uh clypeda to um to do very basic information gathering and so that was a huge setback professionally for him and it wasn't until the late 1960s that he would get his final break and i think by then he had demonstrated that he's got the talent and the abilities and the commitment, at least based on what they were seeing.

8:18They were also worried about a double agent setup though, right? You write about this whole, you know, when someone comes to see you and says, I'm ready to defect, you're like, okay, this could be a double agent. We got to be careful on that side as well, right? That's right. So that was the backdrop. So the backdrop there and the contamination of that process and the intelligence process actually came through the US from the CIA in particular. In the early 1960s, the CIA had received a defector. His name is Anatoly Galitsyn. And Anatoly Galitsyn warned the CIA in late 1961 that the KGB had been creating a program to train diplomats and Soviet officials in how to defect.

9:03So essentially what he was saying is anyone who comes after me is one of these sent agents. And that worked well for the CIA because the CIA's head of counterespionage, a man called James Jesus Angleton, who was highly paranoid at a baseline, realized that perhaps what this guy is saying is absolutely true because he feared that given what had taken place across the pond in the UK with all the defections there, that we would come to know as the Cambridge Five. So Burgess and McLean and ultimately Philby. He thought, well, what this man is telling us has to be true. And that was one of the tips that Jim Angleton received.

9:52The other tip that he received was that the KGB had compromised the CIA. And so they set off on this mole hunt. And ultimately, this mole hunt would look into more than 40 officers and consultants working for the CIA, essentially destabilizing the entire organization and its thinking and its analysis. And they imposed that thinking, that contaminated thinking onto their partners in the UK. So by the time Oleg LeAlan approached MI5 in early 1971, he approached him against the backdrop of all of this contaminated thinking about, well, what if this person who's approaching us is actually a sent agent?

10:32they debriefed him and they debriefed him over several months and they ultimately discovered that what he's saying is true what was really fascinating about this is unlike all of the other approaches that they had had previously and all of the other thinking that had been going on within MI5 in this instance MI5 realized that perhaps they shouldn't share the information with the Americans. And this is the first known case where MI5 had done this by virtue of tactically blocking out the American agency. So the CIA and the FBI, in this instance, they were able to gather their thoughts, properly assess it and realize that what this guy was saying was actually true.

11:21And he He provided some secrets regarding the number of spies in Britain and the agencies that they were working for. The majority of them were working for the KGB and the GRU. And they were using certain covers, including press officers. Some were press officers, some were businessmen, some were sort of other sorts of entrepreneurs. And he himself, as you pointed out earlier, was this textile specialist who was supposed to be here selling socks and, you know, buying socks actually rather for the Soviet Union. And the other secrets that he provided gave a very clear insight into Soviet plotting against the UK in the event of a war with the UK.

12:09And those included contaminating British seawater with radioactive waste, bombing government departments in Whitehall, central London. They included assassinating ministers, members of parliament, and a host of other things. So they had a very clear indication of what was going on. And that was a clear indication that they didn't share with the CIA at this point or the FBI. And they needed to figure out, well, how do we use this information to expel a huge number of spies? And so that became a political decision, not just a national security decision, which is why they sat down with the prime minister of the day.

12:53So the heads of the respective agencies sat with the prime minister of the day, Ted Heath. And they decided that not only will they not share the intelligence with the US at this point, but also they were going to withhold information about the planned expulsion. Because from the prime minister's perspective, he was concerned that Nixon, the Nixon administration would put an end to their ambition to expel these spies because Nixon would have feared that this would upset the detente between the United States and the Soviet Union. and he would have prioritized that over Britain's own national security.

13:35So this is an instance where Britain puts his national security first ahead of the so-called special relationship with the US. Listen, I mean, I love that angle of the story as well as many other angles of the story. But I guess, you know, when you talk to my friends that the rest is classified and you think about spycraft for a second, This is really an unusual story because this is an improbable guy entering the space. It turns out he has valuable information that helps MI5, but also because we are not trusting. We probably missed 22 different opportunities to bring more people in that were likely defectors.

14:24right so this is uh that leading the u.s that did happen in the u.s this is a shadow game basically right richard i mean this is uh people need to understand like when i was in the white house and again there was a brief ill-fated time but when i read that security briefing when i read it read the presidential daily brief what struck me about it was the uncertainty what struck me about it is the you know here's a 50 chance of this there's a 60 chance of that there's a 40 chance of this this is based on human intelligence where the person may be one of us or he may not be. I mean, you're reading this and you're like, it's not a Hollywood script.

15:02There's just so much lack of information, frankly. There's so much opacity to this whole thing. I think you did a brilliant job of describing that. But what did the newly classified materials give you that previous accounts on this period couldn't have divulged? Well, Lee Allen's file at MI5 has never been disclosed. So they've not declassified it. And what I discovered during my research for my first book. So I wrote a book about the Five Eyes, which is the spy network created by the US and UK that brought together those two countries along with New Zealand, Canada, and Australia back in 1956.

15:52and through that spy network it was actually essentially set up as a it was set up to confront the Soviet threat that's essentially what it was and through the research that I was doing for that I came across this Lee Allen story but I discovered there was not much on it so what I needed to do is figure out a way to get to it what the Americans tend to do very helpfully for espionage historians is that they over declassify. And that may seem counterintuitive because there is this kind of idea that's generally perpetuated in the media that there's multiple cover-ups that don't give away any information.

16:30In fact, if you were to go to any of the agency's websites, you'll see that there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of documents that have been declassified. And in so doing, in many cases, they declassify, incidentally, they declassify material associated with other countries. So what I was able to find is material declassified by the Americans, which shed light on information the CIA and the FBI was receiving from mi5 and so i was able to use that material to create the the world and create the character we get a great deal of insight into him as a person the childhood that he had the broken marriage that he had to deal with because his parents were separated the his father's death the inspiration that he received from his family through his family the fact that he had a half brother who was killed during the war and that the way that shaped his thinking he ultimately named his son after his brother he we get a sense of his idiosyncrasies his bad habits and the way that he had to very much struggle at a very young age as a young teenager at one point having to leave school to find work and look after his mom after his father's death so you get a real sense of his character through those files.

17:57And those files were shared by MI5 with the FBI, largely. And so I was able to go through them. And there were hundreds, if not thousands of pages. But with any declassified files, and you'd be familiar with that from your time at the White House, you've got bits of information. You don't have the full picture. So you're having to assemble a picture based on several bits. And then you try to get corroboration elsewhere. And thankfully, because of the context I have within, say, the British Security Services or the US or other agencies, I was able to get some confirmation about some of those things on background.

18:37And I pulled it all together to tell the story. Guys, thank you so much for listening and subscribing to Open Book. You know, we've got 200 authors on this show. It's been a lot of fun for me, but I'm also an author now too. And I've got all the wrong moves available. Go to scaramucci.net backslash all the wrong moves. You can buy your copy today. It's a lot of fun and lots of commentary about what's gone on in the U.S. over the last three decades. You know, it's one of the reasons why you'll never see the Kennedy assassination file. I mean, it's just it's never going to happen. So people can pretend it is.

19:13And if they throw it at you, it'll be in a Rubik's cube in this structure. You'll have no idea what's going on. I want to talk about James Jesus Angleton. And just for everybody's benefit here, he was a CIA counterintelligence. He was there for 20 years. But I feel like paranoia, which is one of the byproducts of being in intelligence and one of the byproducts of spycraft, did him in. I think it destroyed him. Tell us a little bit about this man, what he was doing for the Americans and how he was interacting with MI5 and the British Asians at the time. Yeah, I think you could argue that Jim Angleton, he was known as Jim Angleton by his friends.

19:57He was and probably remains as one of the most mysterious and fascinating figures in Western intelligence. So in the early 1940s, during the Second World War, he was a part of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which is the predecessor to the CIA. And he was deployed to Britain to work alongside MI5. And he got to understand and learn about the Double Cross Program. And the double cross program was essentially a program set up by MI5 to capture Nazi spies and turn them back on their masters. Hence why it was called the double cross. And through that, he learned this concept of penetrations and then countering them in the other direction.

20:51And he took that with him all the way to the CIA until he became the head of counter espionage in 1954. And as head of espionage, he was the chief mole hunter. And he took that job very seriously. But also, he took it so seriously to the point that he felt that he knew better than anyone else at the agency, including the director of the agency. And he had this incredible level of access and ability to impose his will on the situations within the agency. Through the 1950s, he encountered several problems at the CIA. So for instance, the CIA's first officer who was deployed undercover to Russia was exposed.

21:39cia's first agent who was recruited from within the soviet union was captured and killed a double agent who was working for the an agent who was working for the cia and mi6 a man called oleg penkovsky who was part of the soviet intelligence apparatus he was captured and ultimately killed in 1962 in 1964 angleton's very very close friend and one-time mentor a man called kim philby would ultimately defect from the uk to the soviet union so all of that coalesced to in his mind corroborate his suspicion and reinforce his paranoia and so you come to 1964 he's got all of this going on in his head in addition to the defector who'd come in in 1961 as i mentioned earlier a man called anatoly galitsyn so he's got one person in his ear saying this is what the kgb is able to do and this is what they're doing to you and on another from another perspective he's thinking well this is the outcome of all of the kgb's operations so of course they're able to penetrate and damage the cia and other agencies he got so paranoid that he He thought that the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was a Soviet spy to the point that when Harold Wilson came into power, Jim Angleton flew out to the UK and sought an urgent meeting with the heads of MI5 and MI6 to inform them that your new Prime Minister is a spy.

23:17He provided no evidence to corroborate his allegations. And the evidence that we know he had, which was hardly evidence, was actually hearsay and conjecture from Anatoly Galitzen. And all of that fed through the system. In addition to that, he oversaw an operation in collusion with the White House back in 1965, where they deployed a couple of people under the cover of CIA officers to London to ingratiate themselves with the British intelligence community. and in so doing gathered dirt on MI5 and its leadership so they could take it back and use it to discredit the head of MI5, a man called Roger Hollis, who himself would ultimately become a Soviet spy suspect and who would be investigated as well.

24:10So MI5 investigated its own deputy, director general and director general, and there were questions about Harold Wilson, all because of what the CIA was feeding into MI5. So come 1971, they decided to withhold the information tactically and successfully. That results in a huge victory where MI5 was able to expel 105 Soviet spies from Britain. And they had the ability to expel more, but they just said, this is what we're doing for the time being. We've got a second hit if we need to go for it. And also what they did is they were able to say that you cannot reallocate another 105 to fill those spots.

24:51You've lost this quota. So it was a huge thing. What was really fascinating is all of the predictions that MI5 had made prior to that about what the Soviet counterattack would be. Turned out to be false because, in fact, the Soviet Union did very little to counter that. They just got rid of four officials who were there and I think 18 others who had previously been there, but they told him you cannot return. So taking that sort of sledgehammer to the Soviet intelligence apparatus was hugely successful. And then within a couple of years after that, Jim Angleton would be driven out from the CIA because of the coverups.

25:34And among those cover-ups were information he'd received from the Brits after the expulsion of Soviet spies, which he did not share with his agency leaders. And there's a great scene in there about all of that. I think, you know, it's my last question before I go to the five words at the end of our show, but do you think that we have a material advantage over the Russians in the following sense? And I actually mean the word material. Our materialism is such where these Russian agents show up in Washington or they show up in London and they're like, OK, wait a minute. The propaganda doesn't fit the lifestyle going on here.

26:19And I want to taste this. And it's a little bit easier for us to recruit people than it is for them to recruit people. Am I wrong in thinking that? Sure. As host countries, it's easier to recruit. It's very difficult for the British and Americans and other members of the Five Eyes to recruit in their countries. And that's because they've got repressive regimes that are the result of revolutions. Whether you're talking about Russia or China, it's very difficult to penetrate their systems in the ground. You're having to sort of do it in most cases through a third country. And you're right. For us, the majority of the defections that we've had during the Cold War, even the Second World War up until today, have been voluntary walk-ins.

27:05These are people who realize that there is a sense of freedom in the West that they cannot possibly dream about having in Russia or in China or Iran or North Korea or any other, you know, name all of the other repressive regimes. And they feel that this is a great opportunity to begin a new life. Of course, there are many setbacks that come with that potential threats they might have to face, but also there is the issue of validation. How do they validate these people who are walking in? So from a US perspective and British perspective, if someone's approaching you, first question you have to ask is what's the motive?

27:43Second question is, are they genuine or are they sort of deep covers coming to penetrate our system? And that system, I think, has improved remarkably. But still to this day, I mean, there have been multiple cases. There was a case recently in the US regarding Chinese interference in the US and recruitment of local Chinese people in New York to run those police stations. And that forms part of something else that I'm doing. My next book that I'm researching at the moment is actually about the history of Chinese espionage against the West, dating back to the Qing dynasty in the late 1800s. And what's really fascinating is the other parallels between what was happening in the late 1800s, you know, 1800s, and what's happening now in regards to their repression campaigns.

28:36You know, listen, it's an amazing book. You capture it well. Well, it's very timely given everything that's going on in the world now. My producer and I put five words out of your book. I want a sentence from you. I'm going to say the word or the phrase. You give me one sentence. Okay, ready? I say the two words, cold war. You say what? Hysteria. Paranoia. No question. Well, you do a great job of describing that. I say the words which don't exist in Russia anymore, but the three letters, KGB, you say what? Impressively capable. Yeah. Really good at what they do. Yeah. No question. They've done a lot.

29:15They've built a lot of seeds of distrust. And of course they had their failures, but they were impressively capable to recruit so many high grade intelligence officials within the US and UK, particularly the UK. Russia. I say the word Russia. From an intelligence perspective, it has proven to be remarkably impenetrable and continues to play an enormous role, even as Russia, not the Soviet Union, in influencing global events. Okay. MI5. tainted with failures during the 1940s 50s and 60s but i think as a result of its director general martin fernville jones who approached the problems as a lawyer because that's his former profession he saw a way to distance himself from the cia to which he was so closely associated and was constantly deferring to.

30:18And as a result, that made an enormous difference for British intelligence at large. Last one. Ready? Oleg Leon, the most fascinating human being I've researched to date in the context of spy stories. Well, listen, this book is amazing. Thank you. I got a big tribute to you. I hope you write another one that I'll be interested in reading. I took this book on the Disney cruise and my wife was like, what the hell are you doing now? And I'm like, I can't stop reading this book because it's a brilliant synthesis of a lot of things that are real. And having had, even though it was a short stay in the government and talked to many people in the agency, you really subtly described a lot of things that are going on that people should be made aware of.

31:12And so I give you a lot of credit for that. Richard Kerbosh, the title of the book, The Defector, The Untold Story of the KGB Agent Who Saved MI5 and Changed the Cold War. Congratulations on this. Thank you. I'm grateful. Hope I get a chance to see you soon. Thank you. Thank you so much. I look forward to it.