164. Did the CIA Poison England's World Cup Goalkeeper? (Ep 1)

0:03For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. Did the CIA sabotage England's chance of winning the Football World Cup? And could devious American spies really have poisoned England legend Gordon Banks in 1970? Andy. Welcome to The Rush is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. Serious allegations, David. I read those lines under extreme duress. So send help if you're listening. We are, of course, on the cusp of the World Cup about to start in the United States of America.

0:48The ticketing process, Gordon, has been fair and just. Tickets are reasonably priced. It's easy to get to games if you want to go. And this time we are looking at a spy story that raises some very, very dark questions. Gordon, it may be the darkest spy story we've done on the podcast, right?

1:09David:No, I think that's right. Yeah. I think to me, this is like raises the possibility, which it could break the transatlantic alliance, if true. Big if true. And we are going to look today at a story that examines what the CIA is really capable of. Could the CIA, the beloved CIA, have once sabotaged the dreams of one of its closest allies? Could it have done something, Gorda, that if brought to light, could wreck the entire special relationship? Or is this just a conspiracy theory?

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4:25David:didn't go together we are going to look at that specific story but we're also going to look at some broader questions about espionage spying taking place in football tournaments and things like Olympics. And there's a really interesting context and history to this. So it's the idea of spies being involved in sport is not as extraordinary as it may first seem to people. Here in Britain, David, we've just had a massive story in the last few weeks. I'm not sure if you've heard about it, but it's crossed us over on The Rest is Classified to our stable mates, The Rest is Football, because of Spygate.

5:03David:Have you heard of Spygate, David? It might surprise you, Gordon, that I have not heard about Spygate. So I think I am going to need you to to enlighten me on what it is. It is not quite Watergate, but it involves Southampton Football Club being expelled from a playoff to get into the Premier League because one of their staff was allegedly caught filming a training session for the team they were going to play, Middlesbrough. But it was total amateur hour, David. I mean, the picture is the guy who was an intern, and you know about being an intern, but this intern was sent to stand behind a tree with his phone and snap pictures of the training session for the rival team, and of course got caught in it.

5:45David:You can't do that? No, you're not supposed to do that. Why can you do that in American football? I don't see why not. Did he break into their facility? No, well, it's against the sense of fair play and decency in the rules. It's frowned upon. Yeah, it's frowned upon. They broke the rules. And so they got kicked out of a game which was worth hundreds of millions because they could have got promoted to the Premier League where the riches are enormous. But it was not high-level spycraft. The CIA would have done it better, I think it's fair to say. But I think over these next two episodes, we're going to look at a much more serious and I think intriguing allegation which goes back to the World Cup of 1970 in Mexico, when England's legendary goalkeeper, Gordon Banks, we'll come back to him, fell ill.

6:33David:Now, there's a new podcast series called Foul Play from Audible, which explores this very question. And we have, as a special guest, its presenter, a veteran journalist, and I have to say a friend of mine, Gabriel Gatehouse with us to explore this murky tale. Gabriel, welcome. Hello, Gordon. Hello, David. Thank you very much for having me are. Gabriel is an old friend. Well, in fact, when I first started looking into this some three years ago, I came to you, Gordon, for help, because I was like veteran journalist, very kind of you to say, but you know, the world of spies and ex-CIA agents is really your domain, at least as far as I understand it.

7:12And so, yeah, I sought you out in a little cafe in London where you spilled precisely no beans.

7:20David:So I remember this very clearly. I think it was a Thai cafe and we had lunch there. Yes, I think it was. It was a Thai cafe in Clerkenwell. In Clerkenwell. And I remember you posited this theory with me. I was wearing a blue trench coat and carrying a copy of the Financial Times. Gordon also had a trench coat on. It was two guys, normal, normal lunch, two guys in trench coats. I do remember you positing this theory with me, which we're going to explore. I remember going like, that's very interesting, Gabriel. Yeah, whatever. Good luck with that. But yet, here we are three years later, and you have made a fascinating podcast series about it.

7:57David:Thank you. Which I've listened to, and I'd heartily recommend. And I mean, you've done a lot of work on conspiracy theories as well. A big Radio 4 series, a podcast series, and a book called The Coming Storm, which looked at QAnon and all these things. But I guess this is something different for you as well, isn't it? It's a bit of a departure. I mean, look, should I tell you what the story is, first of all? I mean, so basically, the facts, the proven facts of the situation of this. 1970, the World Cup was held in Mexico. England were the defending champions, having won in 66. They were kind of joint favourites to win alongside Brazil, who had an amazing team in 1970 with Pelé and Jairzinho and various other people.

8:40And it was kind of England versus Brazil was a big rivalry. Everyone thought they would meet in the final. That's the way it was going to pan out. And England's goalkeeper, Gordon Banks, was considered, even by Pelé, to be the best goalkeeper in the world at the time. But just before the quarterfinal, Gordon Banks falls ill. He gets food poisoning, as you do in Mexico, right? I've been to Mexico. I don't know if you guys have been to Mexico, but you get ill there. It happens. He gets food poisoning. He can't play. It's the quarterfinal against West Germany. They put on a reserve goalie, Peter Bonetti.

9:11He squanders a 2-0 lead. The game ends 3-2. England crash out. And it's kind of the start of 60 Years of Hurt, this kind of dysfunctional relationship that England have with their national team, where we always think we ought to win, but we're always rubbish.

9:30David:David, does the phrase 60 Years of Hurt mean anything to you? Is 66 the last time that we won it? Okay. Yeah. And it's been a long, torturous, difficult journey as an England football fan since. So that's why this is a big deal. But, you know, that's the facts. Tell us the theory, the claim that led you to this story and how it came about. OK, so first off, I now know a little bit about football, but really I'm not much of a football fan. So I'm a fair weather, like I watch a World Cup because I like a World Cup. but I don't support a league team or whatever. I'm very much a kind of second tier football supporter.

10:15So, but three years ago, I was at an event and a guy comes up to me, total stranger, and he says, oh, you're Gabriel Gatehouse, aren't you? You did that great podcast about conspiracy theories in America. I was like, thanks, that's nice of you. Who are you? He said, oh, my name's Ed and I've got a story for you. And I was like, oh God, here we go. This happens to me from time to time. so it's like all right then what is it um and he said well are you into football at all i said no now i'll stop you right there i don't like don't know anything about football and he said well have you heard of gordon banks and i was like yeah goalkeeper right even i've heard of gordon banks 1966 he goes yeah gordon banks with my granddad uh so i'm like oh well you know congratulations well done your granddad's a hero i even i've heard of him 1966 you know and he's like never mind about 1966 do you know about what happened in 1970 so i'm like no i did not know about what happened in 1970 so he tells me the whole story about favorites to win brazil the rivals granddad getting ill crashing out and he says well you know granddad always used to say he thought something fishy went on i was nubbled you know he'd say um but ed is like wow we never really took it that seriously um gordon banks died in 2019 uh but a few years later ed meets a guy who says to him oh do you want to know the real story of what happened to your granddad at the 1970 world cup and it's like well what and the guy says well the real story is your granddad was poisoned by the cia in order to help brazil win so i was like i mean i i basically had two simultaneous thoughts i was my first thought was okay classic conspiracy theory territory right it's got the cia in it some kind of slightly dubious motive my second thought was if this is even just plausible enough to investigate we might uncover some really interesting stuff about sports and spying so i say to ed look send me an email uh write down everything you know about this story and i'll have a look into it thinking basically this will go nowhere three years later gordon here i am i have been down a series of incredibly deep rabbit holes.

12:44And yeah, I mean, suffice it to say, when I started, I thought this is nonsense. Now I think, bloody hell, this could have happened. All right, so I think before we get any deeper into the sourcing chain for this and why the CIA might have poisoned England's goalkeeper in the 1970 World Cup, We'll go down that rabbit hole. But I think first we should set up the victim here, Gordon Banks, who I think is, it's safe to say, is not a household name in the United States of America, but is on your fair islands. But who is Gordon Banks? I mean, do you want me to go? Because I literally didn't know anything about Gordon Banks, except that he was the goalkeeper for the 1966 England team that won the World Cup, the one and only time we did win the World Cup.

13:34And that was literally all I knew about him. But Gordon, you're more into this stuff.

13:39David:Well, I am. Because I've got a tiny personal connection, right, which I can reveal now on air, which is I am named after Gordon Banks. Are you serious? Yes. Oh, my God. So that is my first. That's why I feel quite strongly about this allegation. The CIA might have poisoned the man I'm named after. Because the story is my parents both came to Britain in the 60s and they wanted to give their son a typically English name. and so Gordon Banks was playing in golf for England and had been. I was born in the 70s but was still a famous figure. So they called me Gordon, not realising that Gordon is actually a Scottish name.

14:21David:Gordon Banks, born in Sheffield, working class community. The mad story is his father moves to a village where he sets up some kind of illegal betting shop. I was reading about this is all off the deep registry that we use in the rest is classified otherwise known as Wikipedia. I think there's some disagreement among the family as to whether it was illegal, strictly speaking, or just not quite legal. A betting shop. Not quite legal. OK, but there's a betting shop involved. And then his poor, you know, Gordon Banks' brother gets mugged one day and dies. You know, it's like a kind of family. It's a complicated family tragedy.

15:01David:Gordon Banks himself leaves school age 15. He becomes something which I'd never heard of, which is a bagger with a local coal merchant, age 15, which I assume means you load coal into bags, but I think supposedly help build up his upper body strength. Then he's spotted as a youth player and it works his way through teams like Chesterfield, fine team, Leicester and Stoke. And he starts the 1964 season, paid a massive£40 a week as his wage, which for a footballer's wage, I mean, it shows you how little they were paid back then and how different I think football was in those days. But anyway, he then ends up being part of the famous England 1966 World Cup winning side.

15:43David:And then, as we said, he's still there for 1970. Famous for this save against Brazil in the World Cup in the earlier stages. The greatest save in the world. I did watch that extensively in preparation for this. And it was very good. It was incredible. It made me think that I don't know how he got up after he made that save. Because it looked like his body had come and torn into several pieces as he was diving for that ball. It was incredible. And I think Pele, who provided the header, also didn't know how he kept it out. I mean, you can see he's just like, he's about to go, oh, he's like, what the?

16:17David:So, yeah. So we've set up Gordon Banks as a working class hero. and he's on his way to the 1970 World Cup. But Gabriel, something else happens on the way to the World Cup in 1970, involving a different player, Bobby Moore, another one of the kind of England legends, which is another crazy story. Do you want to just explain to us what happens? So this is a story that I knew nothing about, but is quite famous in sort of footballing circles. And it's known as the Bogota Bracelet Incident. So, which I, when I first heard about this story, it had something to do with a Colombian necktie where a Colombian player got murdered after he scored an own goal.

17:00Believe it or not, in our Escobar series, we did go into detail on what a Colombian necktie is. Well, there we go. I knew it. I knew it. It's a friend of the pod, friend of the show, a Colombian necktie. Colombian necktie is, yes, obligatory attire on this show. Okay, so Bobby Moore is the captain of the England team. He is, I think, probably the first, certainly the first English footballing celebrity. Like Bobby and Tina Moore were like the Posh and Becks of the swinging 60s. I don't know if Posh and Becks means anything to you, David. It does. I actually, that actually, those references have made it across the Atlantic to me.

17:38Yeah, I'm following you. Okay, so they, and so Bobby Moore, he's a defender. he's the captain and the tournament is being held in Mexico which is at altitude I mean Mexico City is at like I think seven and a half thousand feet or something like that which of course is a problem for sports people because you know the air is thinner basically you need to acclimatize so Alf Ramsey who is the manager of the England team decides what he's going to do is before the World Cup in Mexico he's going to take the team to a place that's even higher than Mexico and get them to play a few friendlies there so that they can get used to the altitude and the place he chooses is colombia so the players all uh go out there and uh they get to their hotel waiting for their rooms um to be made ready and bobby moore and another player go into this hotel boutique a jewelry shop um they have it specializes in emeralds um it's called fuego verde green fire they go in there they have a look around they may be thinking about getting something for their wives back home um but they don't see anything they like uh and they leave and so they're back out in the lobby um sitting around waiting for their rooms to get ready when suddenly the shop assistant from the from the boutique runs out and starts shouting in spanish about a missing bracelet and she runs up to the england players and she points her finger at bobby moore and the police are called and the players are made to turn out their pockets they kind of look under the sofas nobody ever nobody finds a bracelet there's no bracelet um and the the accusation just sort of goes away uh england play their friendly against colombia they win they then go on to ecuador to play another friendly at an even higher altitude and then they're supposed to go on to mexico to start the world cup but there's no direct flight and so their flight takes them back via Bogota they've got a couple of hours layover and Alf Ramsey thinks well we're just going to hang out in that same hotel for a bit just to keep the players occupied and it's when they're there that the police come to arrest Bobby Moore because mysteriously a new witness has come forward to say that he stole this bracelet and so Bobby Moore was arrested The rest of the squad have to go on to Mexico without their captain to start England's football campaign.

20:11And Bobby Moore spends four days in Bogota under house arrest. I mean, what do you think, David?

20:19David:I mean, that feels to me like a set up job. Is there any suggestion that the CIA was involved in this piece of sabotaging the team? Or was this more? Well, who was responsible? Okay, so well, it's a mystery that has never been solved. So Bobby Moore always denied that he'd taken a bracelet. No bracelet was ever found. I actually did a deep dive at the National Archives in queue about this, because it turns out that the British government was very, very exercised when Bobby Moore got arrested. And there's a fat folder there, marked secret, not to be released until the year 2000. So, you know, for some reason, the government thought that these communiques and documents that were fluttering backwards and forwards between London and Bogota and Mexico City were sensitive and needed to be kept secret.

21:12And I think part of the reason was politics, because what had happened was that Harold Wilson, who was the prime minister of the day at the time, had called an early general election in 1970 to coincide with the World Cup. basically he'd he'd timed it to take place after the semi-finals and before the finals kind of counting on a feel-good bounce in the polls right um and so when bobby moore the captain is arrested and it looks like england's gonna have to play without him you can see all these frantic cables going backwards and forwards between downing street embassies um in mexico city in Bogota.

21:53Now, Bobby Moore is eventually released through some kind of skullduggery to do with contacts with the local Colombian intelligence chief. And he goes to Mexico and he does join the team just in time to start the World Cup. But in these government documents, I found references to a possible, quote, Latin American plot against British football. They say British football for some reason rather than English I interviewed the diplomat the British diplomat who was the chargé d 'affaires in Bogota at the time so basically his boss the ambassador had left and he was left in charge his name Gordon was Keith Morris I don't know if you've ever come across a Keith Morris when you were at the BBC yeah cameraman it's Keith's dad yes right so Gordon and i used to work at the bbc we used to work with this cameraman called keith morris i was with keith in uh crimea when putin annexed it um and when i found out about this diplomat who the 90 year old diplomat who was involved in this story i was like this name is really familiar and can you believe it it's keith's dad anyway um so he said that even though at the time he thought this was far-fetched he said that what people were talking about was as he called it a put-up job by brazil that's what people suspected that brazil was somehow involved in trying to destabilize the england team and i think this really is the point that we probably ought to talk about motive i mean maybe one of you two want to pick up on this because that that for me was one of the But one of the most implausible aspects of this is like, why the hell would the Americans care who wins the World Cup?

23:47I mean, 1970, are they into soccer? I don't think they're into soccer, really. No, no, not. Exactly. Do they even know about like, you know, so so for me, this was one of the big kind of stumbling blocks initially. Like, why?

24:00David:Well, the Americans may not be into soccer or football, but the CIA is into Latin American dictatorships at this time. I think that's fair to say. Big into Latin American dictatorships. That, I guess, is the link, isn't it? I mean, I do think even if you look at the Bobby Moore saga, what it tells you, the fact that the prime minister in Britain had called an election timed with the World Cup and was worried about the impact of the football and Bobby Moore's arrest on it, tells you football and politics and public opinion go together. You know, politicians can see the benefits of success in sporting tournaments, but particularly, I think, in some countries, the World Cup.

24:39David:That's the point, isn't it? Yeah. And a little sidebar on that. So Harold Wilson was leading in the polls by about, he was seven points ahead in the Gallup poll when England kicked off in their quarterfinal against West Germany. And then England lost, they crash out. The election is held four days later. And guess what? harold wilson lost so politics and football um so so basically the the suggestion was that um brazil somehow uh was interested in a world cup win uh politically right not just in sporting terms and that somehow there was some kind of brazilian involvement in trying to destabilize the england in this kind of this Bogotá bracelet incident.

25:27Now, it is true that the Brazilian military dictatorship, which came to power in 1964, with a little help from you guys, David, just a little bit of help. No, no, never do such things in Latin America. Offended by the insinuation. It's an amazing recording. If you go to the website of the National Security Archive, which is in Washington, D.C., they've got a great tape of Lyndon Johnson telling his CIA director and various other people to basically use their imaginations and do whatever it takes to help these military guys in what they need to do. So look, 1964, the Brazilian dictatorship comes to power with a little bit of help from the Americans.

26:12By 1970, they're becoming pretty repressive, right? So they're dissidents, left-wingers are being disappeared, tortured in some cases, killed. But they're big football fans. Oh my God, are they big football fans? If you thought the English - A junta loves football. A junta loves football, but all of Brazil loves football. As one guy put it to me in the podcast, in Brazil, football is literally a religion. It is absolutely massive. And if you think about the timeline, so Brazil won the World Cup in 1958 under democracy. In 1962, again, they won under democracy. Then the dictatorship comes to power in 1964.

27:03Two years later, in 1966, they do terribly. They're knocked out after the first round. And of course, England win. so by 1970 opposition to the dictatorship is growing and there's this kind of narrative from the opposition that brazil only wins under democracy uh right in the same it's such it's amazing because it's a mirror image of harold wilson he he said um you know england only win under labor so like everyone is using politics i mean is using football for their political ends And it is a documented fact that General Medici, who was in 1970 the dictator, was obsessed with winning the World Cup.

27:43He personally intervened to have the national team coach replaced. He's on the phone to the dressing room after every match. He's meddling in tactics. He's basically given up running the country. He's just running the football team. so again like when when you're dealing with these stories and you're kind of trying to sift truth from fiction fantasy conspiracy theory you've got to hold on to what's true it is true that the brazilian dictatorship was absolutely obsessed with winning this so then my question was okay well it's a bit of a leap from there to go well the cia then help them do it it is it is it is a Right, exactly.

28:21So I thought, well, I've got to find some documentary evidence that proves that at least the CIA was cognizant of the power of football and that they were, you know, A, was the CIA worried about the popularity of the Brazilian dictatorship? And B, were they sort of thinking about football as a way of potentially ameliorating it? you know so obviously david i wrote to the cia i said dear cia please would you provide me i didn't i didn't go dear cia did you poison gordon banks in 1970 because i thought they might just go uh no they might laugh they might laugh at me so i so i wrote to them and i said um please provide me with any and all uh documents um that you have relating to the 1970 world cup and you will be pleased to hear, David, that they wrote back to me pretty promptly.