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Three Potential Russian Spies (What the Conspiracy!)
25 Plays2 years ago
Josh tells M about three potential Russian spies in this episode of "What the Conspiracy!"
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Unusually Direct Patron Memo
00:00:00
Speaker
So we have a new memo in from our latest patron overlord. Hmm, it's more direct than usual. Our patrons come conspirat- It's a decent bit of philosophical terminology there. Our patrons come conspirators are usually more circumspect about getting attached with us. Well that's because our latest member of the Grand Conspiracy is none other than...
00:00:25
Speaker
Drew. I thought he was already a patron. He just thought he was because he bought me a lot of beer. As he should, as all people should. Well precisely, I have a thirst which needs serving, if you know what I mean.
00:00:40
Speaker
I choose not to know what you mean. But enough about that, what does Drew want?
Drew's Conspiracy Wishlist
00:00:45
Speaker
Well, he wants more sports-based conspiracy theories and less derogatory talk about sports in general. Okay. He wants a weekly update on Alex Jones, more dog-based content, less 90s grunge references. Hold on, you put that
00:01:00
Speaker
Maybe. Anyway, you also want episodes out on time and a special Drew's View segment each fortnight where he can have a little rant or whatever pissed him off in the last 15 minutes. That's quite the list. I have to ask, has he met The Threshold? Ah yes, The Threshold. No,
The Threshold of Patron Demands
00:01:20
Speaker
only three of our patrons have ever met The Threshold, and one of them even wishes we do not associate their name with The Threshold.
00:01:30
Speaker
Well, unless Drew hits the threshold, he can get one and only one of his demands. Then we are agreed? We are. Good, no more 90s grunge references. Yeah, well, hang on, wait a minute. Josh, might I remind you that you have also not reached the threshold? Yeah, I mean... Yeah, you got me. Good. So whilst Josh goes and throws out all of his flannel shirts, let's get this party started.
00:02:09
Speaker
The podcaster's
Meet the Hosts
00:02:10
Speaker
guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:02:18
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand, and with us in Zhuhai, China, it's associate professor of philosophy and notorious three-toed ungulate, Dr. M. R.X. Denton. I thought we weren't going to talk about my feet. There's a wiki for feet content, and we don't want to be adding any data to it. I just thought we'd amuse our audience with a bit of foot stuff. Everybody likes a bit of foot stuff, don't they? That's true. It's part of the thirst that needs serving.
00:02:45
Speaker
So patrons, as far as the eye can see, that's always nice. Yes, although
Podbean Commenting Woes
00:02:50
Speaker
I do want to point out the Podbean commenting system doesn't really work in that there is a comment system on Podbean. But the problem with the comment system on Podbean is that we can really only access the comments
00:03:06
Speaker
if we download the Podbean app because you can see the comments on the website but you can't do anything with the comments on the website. Now I've been in contact with Podbean.com and said can we at least manage content on the website and they go no we want you to use the app and the problem is Josh and I do not want to download an additional app
00:03:27
Speaker
just deal with comments on the podcast. And we can't turn the comments off. There's no way to turn the comments off. It's a useless system. Podbean knows about it, but they're trying to drive traffic to an app that nobody wants to use. We really should look at changing our hosts, I suppose. It's been coming close to eight years.
00:03:45
Speaker
on the same thing, there must be newer and better solutions out there. But anyway, that's a discussion for another time. Yeah, I think we, so we're kind of locked in for the next year, but maybe next year, maybe next year we should look at finding ourselves a new host, a better host, a host which doesn't even allow commenting on podcasts.
00:04:04
Speaker
I see we did get a couple of comments on the good old Uncle Sam's Snuff Factory thing. Yes, put it on your YouTube page and on my YouTube page. So there you go. Nice bit of anti-Semitism to ruin the day.
00:04:20
Speaker
So, have we anything else? Or do we forge ahead?
Conspiracy Theory Game
00:04:25
Speaker
Well, I mean, you forge ahead, I get to sit back and write, because this is a what? The conspiracy episode. And I am the victim. And Josh is the conspirator. It's basically a conspiracy master. But I mean, that term is just... You're the grand conspirator. Sure, I'll take that.
00:04:43
Speaker
Play me a tune, tone, chime, sting! Play me a sting and I'll see what I can cook up for you. Insert sting reference here. It's time to play Want the Conspiracy.
00:05:08
Speaker
What's his name? Gordon Sumner. Doesn't matter. So, I have... Do I have a conspiracy theory for you? No. I have three conspiracy theories for you. Well, hold on, hold on. I mean, surely we should be doing the three questions. Well, no, no, no. This is leading into that.
00:05:24
Speaker
Well, that's just it. So I said I have three conspiracy theories which didn't seem to be enough for an episode on their own, but all go together with a common theme. So when it comes to you guessing the where, the when and the what, the what is basically the same for all three of them.
00:05:41
Speaker
but there's a bit of variation in the win in the weirs and the wins so it's up to you whether you want to try and guess all three or just sort of make make a guess and and know that you have three times the chance of it being right up to you i mean i could i could i could try the cheat
00:05:57
Speaker
and go with the we're being the planet earth assuming you're dealing with earth based conspiracy theories at which point I had to kind of get the point but no I'm going to go for all three although I'll only go for one watt I'll go for three times three places one watt
00:06:14
Speaker
So, ask me the questions three if you please. Right, so which three places do you think these conspiracies occurred in? Alright, the Gold Coast of Australia, the Gold Coast of the United States, so California, San Bernardino and the like, and Portugal.
00:06:40
Speaker
Right, I should start, I should keep notes about your scoring here so I can give you a proper one. Okay, right, that's the way. So the win, give me, give me three possible times when these conspiracy theories could have occurred. 1816, 1932, and 34 BC. Right, right, okay. And finally, what do you think all three of these conspiracy theories are about? Mercury poisoning. Right.
00:07:10
Speaker
Well, out of a possible seven points, I've chosen to give you one and a half. Ooh. California. Yeah. I think California was certainly the US.
00:07:23
Speaker
is one of them. And when in the 30s did you say? 1932. 1932. I mean, it's kind of in between two of them. So on average, you're a little bit on the money there. I'll take a little bit on the money. Yeah. So no, what I want to talk to you today about is Soviet spies.
Was Harold Wilson a KGB Spy?
00:07:49
Speaker
And people who may or may not have been them.
00:07:56
Speaker
So, who do we know who might have been a KGB spy? I mean, do you mean who do we know personally? I mean, I've always been a bit suspicious about Nick, especially when he had that beard. It was a very, very rusky beard.
00:08:11
Speaker
quite a Russian beard. No, no. Larger, slightly larger figures than our good friend Nick, who despite being a Titan among us hasn't had that much of an effect on global politics. No, no, no, Josh, Josh, Josh, Josh, I will, I will, I will remind you.
00:08:26
Speaker
One of the critics of this podcast is Nick on September 11, 2001, New Zealand Standard Time, complaining that nothing interesting ever happens on his birthday. And what happened the next morning, September 12, September 11th, US Standard Time?
00:08:45
Speaker
There is a US standard time, but whatever the standard time in New York is. 9-11 occurred. So don't say that Nick has not had an effect on world politics. Nick might be responsible for the political situation we find ourselves in today. Okay. Well, I'm still not talking about him anyway. I want to talk about British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Harold Wilson?!
00:09:11
Speaker
So we haven't been using the surprise button enough recently. No, we should get our money's worth out of it. Fair enough. So Harold Wilson became the leader of the Labour Party, the British Labour Party in 1963. When Labour won the election in 1964, he therefore became Prime Minister. It was PM from 1964 to 1970, and then again from 1974 to 1976.
00:09:36
Speaker
Now, as the leader of the Labour Party in the 70s, as you can probably imagine, he was a big old lefty. Lots of left-wing policies instituted under his rule, which also meant he was possibly not too popular with the intelligence agencies. We've seen a bit of that.
00:09:54
Speaker
in recent other episodes. I mean, famously MI5 doesn't really like anyone who isn't right-wing. As it turns out, a lot of intelligence agencies don't like, which is, I think, one of the classic issues that the Republicans had under President Trump
00:10:12
Speaker
that normally, actually I say normally, post the 1970s, the US intelligence apparatus has been largely right-wing or at least right-wing adjacent, and so has been more sympathetic towards Republican presidents and towards Democratic ones.
00:10:28
Speaker
I mean, given that, you know, people like George H.W. Bush were, you know, running elements of the security state before his political career. And then you get someone like Trump and you're going really would normally support a person like Trump. But I think he's actually doing some really bad stuff. Anyway, let's go.
MI5 vs. Harold Wilson
00:10:47
Speaker
Let's go back to the UK, because the CIA and the FBI
00:10:51
Speaker
They may have had their liberal periods in the middle of the 20th century. No one ever talks about there being a liberal period in British intelligence.
00:11:00
Speaker
No, and this will be no exception. So there have been rumors that Harold Wilson was in fact a spy for the KGB. In the 1940s, he was president of the Board of Trade. He'd been on trade missions to Russia. He was apparently buddies with Anastas Mikoyan, who was apparently the only Soviet politician to last through sort of numerous
00:11:27
Speaker
areas of purges and restructurings and all that. And also Vyacheslav Molotov, the guy that Molotov cocktails are named after, who from what I gather was not like, that wasn't a compliment. They called them Molotov cocktails because they were throwing them at him, not that he was behind them. But anyway, so in 1960... He was in his bedroom one day, you know, making impromptu bombs going, hmm, vodka, rag, vodka rag.
00:11:56
Speaker
Well, in the case of Noah, we're throwing our vodka rags at you. Yes. Yes, no, there's our big, long story behind the origin of that term. But anyway, in 1963, a KGB defector called Anatoly Galitsyn had claimed that Wilson was a KGB informer and a, quote, agent of influence. So someone who was sort of, who had been put there
00:12:19
Speaker
in order to drive a country in a certain direction. Fun fact, do you remember the very first, the very first Mission Impossible movie, the first Tom Cruise one, and it was all about... The one that really, really annoyed the fanbase when they made the hero of the original. The hero, the villain, yes. Yep.
00:12:38
Speaker
And it was all about the knock list, the... Oh yeah, yeah. ...the list of agents, yeah. So at the beginning, the rogue IMF agent had stolen the knock list, who they were after at the start, was named Alexander Glitzen, specifically as a reference to an utterly Glitzen, the KGB defector. Did you know that they actually asked the original actor who played Jim Phelps to replace his role in the first Mission Impossible film, but he didn't want to play a villain?
00:13:06
Speaker
Yeah, no, tell them to bugger off. Is that you're doing what to my character? Well, I, anyway... I mean, I'm not that actor, and that actor is now dead, so I'm quite glad I'm not that actor. But I kind of would have relished doing the, oh, role reversal. This sounds great. But no.
00:13:22
Speaker
So first of all, he claimed that Wilson was a KGB spy or was passing information onto the KGB. But he went even further than that. Now, I said Wilson became the leader of the Labour Party in 1963. His predecessor, a man called Hugh Gatskill, died suddenly. And that was that was how that was when Wilson became the leader of the Labour Party. And so Glitzen claimed that Gaskell's death
00:13:50
Speaker
was an assassination, essentially had been orchestrated specifically so that the man Wilson would be thrust into the leadership role where they wanted him to be. So Josh, could you say that in a slightly more portentous way so I can put the surprise sound in? Okay. They claimed that Gatskill's death was no death, it was an assassination.
00:14:14
Speaker
Now can you say it in a seductive way? I already talked about him being thrust into power. I don't think he'd get much more raunchy, or we might all steam things up a little bit in here. I'll fuck up my glasses.
00:14:28
Speaker
Um, but yes, so officially, I'm just saying that it's just a neat serving, uh, Hugh got school shortly before he died. He died in January of 1963 in December of 1962. Um, he had had a flu.
00:14:44
Speaker
prior to travelling to Russia to talk to good old Khrushchev. So he'd been unwell, declared well enough to travel, went over to Russia, came back to England, died a month later, officially due to a sudden flare-up of lupus.
00:15:02
Speaker
So I think two things about that should make you suspicious, going to Russia and then coming home and dying, and then the fact that it was Lupus, when as we all know... It's never Lupus. Never, no. What would Doctor House say? But, um... Well, I mean, actually... Doctor House should say nothing, because he should be sued for malpractice. Well, yes, he was a horrible, horrible person and a bad doctor.
00:15:22
Speaker
So, I mean, I guess the question here now in the case of Harold Wilson, does this hold water? And the answer is no, not really. There is no evidence apart from the word of Anatoly Golitsyn that Harold Wilson was ever a KGB spy. Now the MI5
00:15:42
Speaker
investigated Galitzin's claims, and they largely concluded that, you know, there's nothing to them. We've got no evidence that he's a KGB agent. But, as we say, MI5 right-leaning didn't like their left-wing politicians, so there was apparently still a faction within MI5 who believed, well, okay, we couldn't turn anything up in the investigation, but we still reckon he's a commie.
00:16:06
Speaker
to the extent that there are now a bunch of other conspiracy theories around Harold Wilson and the plots against him. Supposedly a bunch of business leaders went to Lord Mountbatten in the 1960s to try and get him kicked out of office. There was talk of a military coup in 1974
00:16:31
Speaker
And then supposedly, also in 1974, MI5 was maneuvering against him. And I believe some of this was actually dramatised in The Crown. A show I've never watched. I haven't seen The Crown at all. Is that true?
00:16:47
Speaker
Or are you just adding a bit of flavour? No, no, there is. Yeah, there is. No, no, no. I believe that because they actually because they because there was intrigue in the royal family about whether they were going to support a plot against Harold Wilson at the time. I do know a little bit about this particular claim of communist complicity.
Royal Family Coup Theories
00:17:06
Speaker
And so there is there was discussion. I mean, if you're going to have a coup in the Westminster system,
00:17:12
Speaker
You kind of need the Queen to be behind it because she still has to, you know, open Parliament and the like. So there were there were entreaties to the palace to see, you know, if we had a coup, would members of the royal family be willing to endorse it? And that was one of the reasons why it kind of got shut down, according to the official narrative.
00:17:37
Speaker
and that the Queen wasn't particularly keen to be seen to be interfering with parliamentary politics in that way, which is kind of shades of the Governor General Crisis in Australia, but we've talked about that previously. We have. Yeah, so those were these two supposed coup attempts, but there was MI5 taking it upon themselves to try and get rid of him. Do you remember the book Spycatcher? I do indeed. My parents had a copy of that. I'd never read it.
00:18:04
Speaker
yeah it's 1987 it was the the sort of the memoirs of Peter Wright who was a former assistant director of MI5 co-written with Paul Greengrass who's probably best known to us these days as the director of the Jason Bourne films but an author
00:18:21
Speaker
in his own right. So in Spycatcher, Peter Wright claimed that 30 MI5 agents collaborated on this attempt to undermine Howard Wilson. Supposedly the plan was that MI5 was going to leak
00:18:36
Speaker
information about Wilson and other MPs to sympathetic journalists, encouraging the idea that Wilson was a security risk to try and novel his chances in the 1974 election. Later, Peter Wright retracted this claim saying there was only one person.
00:18:53
Speaker
working on this. That's a significant downgrade in personnel. That really is. There was apparently a plot at the time called Clockwork Orange after the book, which was MI5 plotting against various left-wing politicians trying to
00:19:13
Speaker
sort of circulate damaging information about them. So the story of Harold Wilson is not short on conspiracy theories, but perhaps I'm getting a little bit far away from the topic that I've chosen for this episode, which is people who may or may not have been KGB spies.
00:19:36
Speaker
Indeed. So, I mean, yeah, there doesn't appear to be any good evidence that British PM Harold Wilson was a KGB spy. So shall we move along? We shall.
Was Hemingway a KGB Agent?
00:19:46
Speaker
Person number two, who may or may not have been a KGB spy, another one you might have heard of, Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway?
00:19:57
Speaker
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but he wasn't a politician, he was an acclaimed American novelist. Acclaimed American novelist is right, yes. I believe I even read some Hemingway in my time. I'm not sure that I have, but I know the names of some Hemingway books. Right, name me three Hemingway books.
00:20:14
Speaker
He did a few old ones. He did The Old Man and the Sea. I was looking at a list of his books literally this afternoon when I was brushing up on my notes. He did some other ones. I read The Old Man and the Sea in fifth form and the thing I remember most about it was our teacher going on and on and on about the famous story that Hemingway spent two months
00:20:39
Speaker
trying to write the first line of The Old Man and the Sea. I think the first line is about five words. It's a lot of time, five words. Well, in 2009 there was a book called Spies. Hold on, hold on. Emily was dead in 2009. I know that much. He was dead in 2009, yes. If he was a communist spy in 2009, heads off to you, sir. Heads off.
00:21:01
Speaker
No, he committed suicide in the 1960s and apparently leading up to his death he had been talking about how, who was president then, Roosevelt, one of them, was spying on him and tapping his phone lines and something. He was very paranoid about that and possibly not without cause.
00:21:17
Speaker
Because yes, so 2009 there was a book. The book is called Spies The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. And one of the things this book says is that Ernest Hemingway was one of the KGB's agents in America. He had the codename Agent Argo. And so this is based on notes by one of the book's authors called Alexander Vasilyev.
00:21:39
Speaker
He is a former KGB officer who in the 90s was given access to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow. So according to the book, Hemingway basically approached the Soviets in the early 1940s, quite eager to help them.
00:21:54
Speaker
He had covered the Spanish Civil War, he'd spent a bunch of time in Cuba and in China, and his experiences seemed to have made him fairly pro-communist. And he is known for another situation, sort of being very much wanting to help out any way he could and sort of throw himself
00:22:16
Speaker
into the mix he supposedly went patrolling for submarines around Cuba or something during World War II. So it's not unthinkable that you could have decided these communists are decent fellows who I should be helping out and going to them, and so apparently they took a matter's word.
00:22:37
Speaker
But basically nothing ever really came from it. Supposedly these notes about him said that he basically was never able to give the KGB anything, any interesting information, and so by the end of the 1940s they just kind of stopped talking to him.
00:22:55
Speaker
I bet. I bet you just kept going on. Look, I've got some intel, but I need to help you. I need you to help me break a story. Probably just spend hours and hours and hours describing plot developments in his most recent novel. His handle was going, I mean, the intelligence just isn't worth the time I'm spending on this, Ernest. I mean, really, please just go away. Just go away, Ernest. Go away. I don't want to hear about your whale, Ernest.
00:23:21
Speaker
So, yeah, so he being wise, from what I can tell, like this evidence the evidence put forward in this book is more compelling than, than in the case of Harold Wilson where it was just sort of one guy's word and nobody could back it up this does seem to
00:23:37
Speaker
be a lot more plausible. So you might be able to put a tick in the WASA KGB agent next to Ernest Hemingway. But that's really all there is to say about it in this case. So I'll move on to my third and final case of potential Soviet agents. I think you're hovering over the button for this. Do you know someone else who might have been an undercover Soviet agent? Was it? Joseph Stalin.
00:24:07
Speaker
Are we talking about the Joseph Stalin or another Joseph Stalin? We are talking about the Joseph Stalin. So Joseph Stalin might have been an undercover agent for the government that he was leading, or are we talking about free in control of the USSR, Joseph Stalin? Yes, yes, we are. So in the early 1900s and probably a long time before that, I'm not sure the
00:24:35
Speaker
The Russian Empire under the Tsar had a secret police called the Okhrana, and there were allegations that from 1906 until 1912 Stalin was an Okhrana mole in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which would be the workers party in Russia at the time, pre-communism I suppose.
00:25:01
Speaker
And so supposedly he was a mole, feeding information about what the Social Democratic Labour Party was up to, back to the SARS secret police. And then
Stalin: Tsarist Spy Allegations
00:25:16
Speaker
the story goes that he basically sort of went rogue.
00:25:19
Speaker
I'd say he went very rogue. Went rogue in quite a big way and ended up... He's going rogue in a movie hero way. The character who suddenly realises the government he's working for has been evil the entire time and brings down the system. This is narrative gold. Someone should be writing a hero story for Joseph Stalin. He should become the next major figure in Phase 5 of the MCU.
00:25:47
Speaker
Well, who can say? Yeah, so supposedly once he was elected to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, he basically completely stopped cooperating with the Akranas, stopped being a mould for them, and started actually just being the leftist leader he was possibly pretending to be, or at least was... Well, yeah, I mean, therein lies the difficulty about talking about Stalin and his approach to the Cultural Revolution.
00:26:18
Speaker
So this claim that Stalin was actually was a mole, was a traitor to the cause in his early years, has apparently been made a few times, but there's only one bit of documentation that directly supports it, the so-called Eremin letter. Is this a letter by someone by the name of Eremin?
00:26:50
Speaker
Yes, it is. Anyway, yes, so one Colonel Alexander Eremen, who was head of the special section of the Tsarist Department of Police, which I assume is another name for the Ocarina. I sort of read these things in two slightly different places. But so this is a letter from Colonel Eremen to a captain in the town of Yeniseisk,
00:27:20
Speaker
in Siberia, basically letting him know that a bunch of revolutionaries had just been deported to his jurisdiction and letting him know that one of these revolutionaries who's been reported there is actually a former police collaborator, so just look out for him.
00:27:39
Speaker
And the name of this police agent is Joseph Vissarionovich Jugashvili, which is the original name of Joseph Stalin. He changed his name later on. That was when he started his music career, right? Something like that, yeah. Had to get a bit of stage name.
00:27:59
Speaker
So yeah, the letter has been referenced by various books. I've had in place thanks to one of the only decent episodes of Friends where Chandler persuades Joey to go with the stage name of Joseph Starlin. Oh yes, people would remember that name! There's already someone called Joseph Starlin! Oh, who would have figured?
00:28:23
Speaker
Yes, a bunch of people have relied upon this letter as evidence to claim that Stalin was, in the early days, a traitor to the cause. But it first popped up in 1956 in an article for Life magazine called The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin. Now 1956, Stalin's just died, right?
00:28:47
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, fairly soon after. So this was a Soviet defector by the name of Alexander Orlov. So he claimed that Stalin was basically a traitor to the Bolshevik movement. He claimed in this article that Stalin had purged a
00:29:07
Speaker
Marshall Tukhachevsky and other members in the Soviet Ministry, because they found out they had discovered documents that showed he had been a member of the Okhrana and had infiltrated the Bolshevik movement. So this particular article was quite sort of damning of Stalin. But again, as with the case of Harold Wilson and as with the case of Ernest Hemingway, you do have to kind of ask
00:29:33
Speaker
Does the evidence actually support these claims? Well I mean especially any claim in 1956 where people are separating themselves from Stalin's legacy potentially in an effort to get themselves on side with the people who are now in control of the USSR and there was a lot of effort
00:29:54
Speaker
to distance themselves from Stalin's legacy, of which the great comic film The Death of Stalin goes into quite some detail. And for a comedic film, it's very much on point for all the political shenanigans that went on just after Stalin's death.
00:30:13
Speaker
It was. Yes, I really should see that film. But as for the letter itself, apparently most academics think that the letter is not genuine. There are some who do, I believe, but the balance of opinion seems to be that no, this letter is not genuine, which means the only evidence that Stalin was an undercover agent
00:30:33
Speaker
um uh doesn't uh goes away basically but it does it does bring in an interesting idea um of a sort of a sort of a counter information sort of disinformation if you will um now i know you'll be surprised to hear that the russians uh did sometimes like to sort of peddle in what you might might call a kind of disinformation
00:30:56
Speaker
or even dissent lunch here? Well, I mean, if you want to be exotic about it, yes. But so apparently people say this is probably what this is. This is the sort of thing they would like to do. They would the the O'Hara would claim that people who were genuine revolutionaries
00:31:13
Speaker
Did you hear that noise? That was something very loud. It was actually quite impressive. Very loud and rumbling just past my window. I have no idea what the hell that was. I don't live next to train tracks. I'm starting to wonder. Transporter transporting from Transporter?
00:31:29
Speaker
No, Transformer Transforming from a Michael Bay film, or a Transporter Transporting from the Asylum Mockbusters, although I think they were called Transformers in the Asylum world. Transmorphers? Anyway. Yeah, Transmorphers.
00:31:45
Speaker
Yes, so apparently this is a thing that the Ocarina would do. They would say that this person who was a genuine revolutionary, they'd start spreading rumours that he secretly works for us, specifically to sow distrust and discord amongst the revolutionaries, which I'm assuming is the sort of thing that probably still goes on today.
00:32:05
Speaker
Well, actually, I mean, there's a nice example of this from my beloved Romania. So after the revolution of 1989 that saw the dictator Ceausescu removed from power, the Securitate, the secret police, we've talked about this on a previous episode. In theory, they were shut down.
00:32:24
Speaker
But the problem is the archives were not dealt with properly. The archives kind of just disappeared. And in some cases went into private hands, being private hands being former securitate officers. And so what you got in the political system, and apparently this is still going on to some extent today, is that sometimes when people run for central or local government positions,
00:32:51
Speaker
a rumor will go round going oh there's there was something in the security archives about this person being a collaborator during the communist regime and the worry is that because the archives were never dealt with publicly
00:33:06
Speaker
Even if documents turned up that looked like they came from the security archives back in 1989, you have no idea about the chain of custody and whether someone slipped documentation in. So you can just make the threat of all there's something about them in the archives and often the threat does enough to derail a person's political career.
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah, so a fairly common tactic, I guess, and that certainly seems to be the case with the Eremen letter.
Disinformation Tactics Explored
00:33:41
Speaker
That's kind of all I have to say about people who may or may not have been KGB spies. Something did occur to me though while I was looking up all this stuff. I think we do need to do another episode of conspiracy theories and pop culture so we can talk about things like No Way Out, which there's your KGB agents for you.
00:34:06
Speaker
and pop culture fictional conspiracy theories. And we did that episode a long time ago. Long, long time ago. It's probably five years ago. Yeah, at least. I think we do a review. And we do love talking about our pop culture. And frankly, so much pop culture actually rests upon claims of conspiracy. I was discussing this with a colleague the other day.
00:34:32
Speaker
an awful lot of TV and film narratives, this is also true for books as well, is the hero
00:34:42
Speaker
to be heroic has to uncover some secret dastardly deed going on in the background. And what's interesting in fiction is that often conspiracies turn out to be warranted conspiracy theories. So narratives work on the notion of they uncover the truth. And so there's a kind of weird disconnect between the way that people talk about conspiracy theories in the real world and the way that we treat conspiracy theories in fiction.
00:35:11
Speaker
Yes, interesting. I think definitely a topic that's worth revisiting. I was also thinking about it because last weekend we took our kids to a showing in the movie theatres of Who Framed Roger Abbott, which of course kind of obliquely ties into the old streetcar conspiracy buying up the cable cars to shut them down thing. I mean, Who Framed Roger Abbott, obviously it's Evil Christopher Lloyd doing it, not real people.
00:35:41
Speaker
Anyway, save that for another time. Maybe next time. Maybe. Maybe. We do a regular episode, although I believe we're due a conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre for next week? I think we are. Is that correct? I think we are. Let me. Oh, I need to go check the notes.
00:35:56
Speaker
Well, sometime soon. I think I'm going to state it right here and now. We should do that as an episode. We can do what we did last time. Just each bring a list of our favourite bits of conspiracy in popular culture. I'm going to make it a personal guarantee. There's going to be a lot of pop culture talk coming up in an episode very soon. Well, I think that goes without saying. Well, precisely.
00:36:20
Speaker
We're young and h- So, that's it, basically. That's all I have for you this week. Well, that was very interesting. I mean, I kind of knew about the Harold Wilson stuff because British parliamentary politics is just very, very conspiratorial. I think I might have obliquely heard something
00:36:42
Speaker
about Ernest Hemingway and his left-leaning tendencies. But Joseph Stalin, being a potential member of the Zara's secret police, is an intriguing little tale. Yes, that one definitely caught my attention. I can't even remember how I heard about it now.
Bonus Content for Patrons
00:37:00
Speaker
So that's the end of this episode, but we of course have a bonus episode for our beloved patrons to go off and record. What are we going to be talking about this week? So our beloved patrons are going to record the bonus episode this week. This is going to make it a lot easier on us.
00:37:13
Speaker
Record for them. Oh So so we so we still have to record the bonus episode then I'm afraid I'm afraid we do. Yes Well, I suppose if we're going to record a bonus episode we're going to have some updates We have an update on our discussion about the Trojan horse affair or the Trojan horse letter affair We're also gonna have an update about that derailed train. That was QAnon adjacent back in 2020. That was a weird one
00:37:40
Speaker
I'm also going to talk about a weird story that appeared in the Listener and New Zealand Herald about a whistleblower which has the weirdest admission at the beginning of the story that makes you go, so why are you reporting on this? And of course we probably should talk to some extent about Alex Jones and his Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Yes, kind of can't let that one go by.
00:38:04
Speaker
So if you would like to hear about any of those things you can become a patron and you'll just use a little habit. I'm not sure how it happens but it just does. You become a patron and you get all this bonus content and possibly a shout out at the start of the episode like this episode. If you want that and you're not currently a patron just go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy but if you don't want to be a patron well then you do miss out on the bonus content. I can
00:38:31
Speaker
I can't sugarcoat that, but you still get to listen to the regular episodes, and we thank you for it, because you're our audience, and that's just what more do we need, apart from patrons, obviously. And luxury yachts.
00:38:45
Speaker
Not a big yacht person, to be honest. Oh, but you would be if you owned a luxury yacht. If you owned a super yacht, you would find yourself to be a very big yacht person. I mean, literally, you'd be a big yacht person because you'd own a big yacht. I would be a big yacht person. But also, I think you'd go, I've got this big yacht. I've got to kind of use this big yacht. You'd probably sail around the Tasman Sea with your priceless Leonardo to think Jesus being exposed to sea here the entire time.
Dreaming of Superyachts
00:39:13
Speaker
I mean,
00:39:13
Speaker
Just imagine your life on a big yacht, Josh. It would be like my life right now, only constantly moving. And I'm not sure that's a step up. Well, I mean, don't stop moving to that funky, funky beat. Or at least don't start moving to that funky, funky beat. I'm getting my S Club 7 references completely wrong here.
00:39:34
Speaker
Well, it is don't stop moving to that funky funky beat. Yes, it must be because why would they not want you to start moving to the funky funky? S Club 7 were all about the funky funky beat. How many of them are left now? I recall seeing something about like S Club 3. Yeah, I think the last time they heard it was S Club 3. So I think four of them have managed to get a career of some kind either in music or as radio crying or radio DJs and the other three
00:40:03
Speaker
are touring with Bewitched. Sounded like I booted.
00:40:06
Speaker
No, honestly, I remember reading it and thinking I've never read a more depressing series of words than S Club 3. I mean, that's just... The story that tells you is... Oh, I can barely stand it. Anyway, that'll do. There's no party like an S Club party. Well, no, there isn't, because you're into an S Club. There's only an S Club 3 now. They don't party, they just sit around and stare at the wall, I expect, wondering where it all went wrong.
00:40:35
Speaker
Anyway, OK, enough. Enough, I'm going to say. Save up, save up that pop culture energy and we'll use it in a forthcoming episode. But it's not this episode because this episode is over, which I will signify in the method of saying goodbye. Durango. You've been listening to a podcast guide to the conspiracy hosted by Josh Addison and Em Denter.
00:40:58
Speaker
If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.