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To Catch a Spy!
495 Plays10 months ago
We're back and in the same physical location for ONE WEEK ONLY, so the only sensible thing to do is talk about a spy book from the 1980s. What was "Spycatcher"? What secrets did it contain? How did it manage to leave Margaret Thatcher "shattered"? Was that a typo and she meant "sharted"? Sorry, we didn't get enough juvenile humour into the episode and it has to go somewhere.
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Mix-up
00:00:00
Speaker
This week we're talking Gay Frogs. Are we? Hold on, that's not my notes. Well, it's a bit of a tortuous journey to get there, but as with most things in life, it all ends up at Gay Frogs. I mean, with Alex Jones it does, but we're not talking about him. Or are we talking about Alex Jones this week? That would be hard to talk about a book without mentioning its author, so yes, of course we will. No, I'm lost again. I knew we were going to be discussing a book, but...
00:00:30
Speaker
What book? Yeah, no, yeah. Soycatcher by Alex Jones, his searing exposé on the ensoyification of the modern world that's leeching our testosterone and producing a species of foppish weaklings, gayer than the gayest of frogs, which are also gay. Ah, I think I see what's happened here. So we're supposed to be talking about Spycatcher by Peter Wright. I think you've become the victim of an amusing typographic error. Hmm.
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah, you're probably right. Well, that's three weeks of research out the window. So no gay frogs. I'm sure we can work one or two into the narrative, but no. It'll mostly be spies. Fine.
00:01:25
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denteth.
Host Updates and Paper Challenges
00:01:37
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, it is both me, Josh Addison and Dr. Em R. X. Denteth, steering one another in the eye. Who will blink first?
00:01:52
Speaker
That'll be me. Yeah, sure. So it's been a few weeks. M has been on a quite frankly, well deserved holiday in and about the North Island of New Zealand. I mean, mostly at the bottom of the North Island and a little bit at the top, but nowhere in the middle. No, no, you wouldn't. Excluded middle. Excluded. That's yeah, that's a terrible philosophy joke.
00:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's a philosophy joke, so it probably goes without saying. That is true. But anyway, we're back. We have an episode. It'll be all good. We did say, though, that I need to start asking you what you've been up to so that you can overcome your aversion to self-promotion and actually get your ideas out there. So apart from being on a well-deserved bit of R&R, what have you been up to since our last episode?
00:02:41
Speaker
So a sign from Course Prep, because basically I'm teaching two courses this semester and I'm trying to redesign them so that LLMs can't be used to cheat in the assessment. I've been doing a whole bunch of paper reviews and I finally got round to starting to do the touch-up or revision work on the I Know It When I See It motivating examples in social psychology paper, which is now a kind of
00:03:08
Speaker
interesting state. So at the end of last year I had three reviews, two of which were approved with reservations, so both Steve Clark and Brian Alkely wanted to see some changes, they weren't mandatory but I was encouraged to make some changes, and one not approved by Robbie Sutton who really didn't like the paper at all.
00:03:31
Speaker
As of this week, the paper now has four reviews, one of which is approved, two of which are approved with reservations, and one is not approved. So Joe Ucinski has reviewed the paper. And because it now has an approved and a approved with reservations, it is now approved. And I don't technically have to make any changes now. It can be published as is. So I've gone from how am I going to best
00:04:00
Speaker
mollify the concerns of Steve Clark and Brian Alkely to, well, they can just take what I'm going to give them. Which sounds rather hard on my part. Both Steve and Brian made some really interesting points that I do want to address. It's just interesting now to go, I don't have to address if I don't want to. And had actually opened up the interesting philosophical problem of what if I make the paper worse
00:04:30
Speaker
Because it's approved now, it's going to be published no matter what changes I make. I could make the paper worse and they would still publish it. See, I assume this is all leading up to the fact that you're going to have to have Roger Sutton assassinated and thereby give yourself a clean record and free rein to do whatever you want. That's going to be awkward. Show us what little I know about the workings of the philosophy world. I'll be seen. So Robbie Sutton is the partner of Karen... Robbie, I said Roger didn't I?
00:04:58
Speaker
and I'll be seeing them in June. And it would be very awkward, especially if it was a failed assassination attempt, to then have to stare Robbie Sutton in the face and go, I almost had you killed. And yet my assassins failed at the last moment. Oh, I'll be best for all concerned then, I guess. So.
00:05:15
Speaker
That's
Spycatcher Background and Controversies
00:05:16
Speaker
that out of the way. We have an episode. We have one of those, hey, we should do an episode about this episodes. And we haven't actually waited like three years this time. We're going to talk about a thing we said we should talk about last episode, this episode. Indeed, we're going to talk about pie catcher. Pie catcher, soy catcher. Sly Thatcher. Something like that. Well, we'll come clear after the chime.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yes, no, I have it on a note in front of me. The book is Spy Catcher. Spy Catcher, the candid autobiography of a senior intelligence officer. I like that it's a candid autobiography. How does that work? I mean, in theories.
00:05:59
Speaker
warts and all so a candid autobiography means they don't know they're being filmed but a candid autobiography thing is you're not meant to keep anything back you admit to both your heroic acts and also your flaws because of course one of the problems of autobiographies is that they are often hagiographies written by the person who really wants to be hagiographic about their own lives a candid autobiography should be something that goes yep
00:06:28
Speaker
I did some bad things. I killed a person.
00:06:31
Speaker
Well, we're not far off that, I think. So this book, it was published in 1987. I was 11 years old in 1987, but I do remember, I remember Spycatcher being a thing. I didn't know anything about it, didn't understand what was in it, but I remember this being a book that was kind of a big deal. Yeah, I think my parents, at least, if they didn't own a copy, borrowed a copy, I know the Devonport Public Library had it as a book on tape,
00:07:00
Speaker
So they really did push spy characters so that everybody could enjoy it. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a children's illustrated version out there somewhere. If there isn't, there should be.
00:07:12
Speaker
So it was written by a man called Peter Wright, who was a former assistant director of MI5, with Paul Greengrass as a co-writer. That's Paul Greengrass, who these days is known best for being the director of the Jason Bourne movies, but back then he was a writer and a journalist and someone who was qualified to be co-writing a book about intelligence and
00:07:34
Speaker
candid autobiographies thereof. So he wrote it in his retirement. He moved to Australia after he retired, wrote his book there. Apparently, something that I just found and mentioned in passing when I was looking about this, while a big deal, as we will see, was made about the book Spycatcher, there had been a book published six years earlier in 1981 called Their Trade as Treachery,
00:07:58
Speaker
by a man called Harry Chapman Pincher, which made many of the same allegations that Spycatcher makes, and indeed turns out Peter Wright was the main source for that book, although he was anonymous at the time.
00:08:09
Speaker
But apparently he got stiffed on his pension a little bit. There was some deal about the fact that he worked for MI5. He'd also worked for GCHQ. Is that the right one? The other government, obviously. Worked for GCHQ and there was something about, they decided that his other work he'd done didn't count towards his work at MI, his whole career. And so they said, no, you don't get a full pension because you haven't worked for us for long enough, even though he had worked in a similar thing, in a similar capacity.
00:08:39
Speaker
front branches. That was the thing. So he reckons that's why he was motivated to write this book for money, basically. He didn't get the pension. He felt he was owed. So he thought, well, he'll make some money by publishing a book, a tell-all book about life at MI5. Apparently it worked for him. Apparently he died a millionaire. He died in 1995, age 78. So good for him, I guess. Yeah.
00:09:04
Speaker
Dying the Millionaire is going to turn out to be very interesting because the royalties he got excluded one particular part of the English-speaking world, the part of the English-speaking world where English originated.
00:09:18
Speaker
It did, yes. We'll get into that before too long. So yes, we mentioned it last episode. We had a news article last episode where some documents had come out regarding one of the cases. The Harold Wilson spying affair. The Harold Wilson affair, which is mentioned prominently in the book. And then I mentioned it
00:09:38
Speaker
Back in episode 359, we did a What the Conspiracy episode, and I was talking about people who had been claimed were Russian agents. So Harold Wilson is someone who people had said might have been a Russian agent, as well as, as I recall, it was Ernest Hemingway who I think had said to Russia, do you want me to be a spy for you, but wasn't a very good one.
00:09:59
Speaker
And Joseph Stalin, who there was what looks to have been a bit of disinformation suggesting that he was actually working for the Russian secret police before he went NATO. So they're called the Ocarina? The Ocarina. Ocarina. As opposed to the Macarena. Quite a different thing. What about Stalin doing the Macarena?
00:10:19
Speaker
I don't approve of AIs, but if someone does want to make an AI animation of Stalin doing the Macarena, I'm not going to stop you. In fact, I almost encourage you. I won't go that far. It was a very notable book, caused quite a fuss, and caused quite a fuss for two different reasons. There was the
00:10:43
Speaker
what it actually contained, and then there were the various efforts of the British government to stop it from being published. Yes, because the Prime Minister at the time was one Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, and she was not keen on the fact this book had been published in Australia. So they weren't able to block publication
00:11:07
Speaker
in territories outside of the United Kingdom, but they really didn't want the book printed back in Old Blighty. It was banned in England in 1985, but apparently only in England. So it was available elsewhere in the UK. Oh, so Scotland and Northern Ireland to be able to go and pick up a copy. Yeah, apparently this was sort of, you know, noted at the time. It's ridiculous that
00:11:33
Speaker
we're like I can't mention it here in England and you know I could just drive up to Scotland and get a copy of it. Yeah and I mean this is a point in time we don't really have the devolved assemblies operating in Edinburgh and Stormand so that is a really weird situation to go well legally we can block it in in the counties of ink of
00:11:55
Speaker
England, but go to Wales, or go to Cornwall, or go to Northern Ireland or Scotland and pick up a copy to your huts content. Yes, I don't actually know how that came about, that particular arrangement, but it did. But yeah, again, more files that were released late last year showed documents from, there's a printed or a typed up report talking about this and you can see Thatcher's handwritten comments all on the margin talking about how this was
00:12:23
Speaker
Saying the consequences of publication would be enormous, that it was very important that they not get this stuff published.
Legal Battles and Publications
00:12:30
Speaker
Multiple articles, I assume quoting the same source, used the quote that she was apparently shattered. She was shattered by the revelations of Spy Catcher, although I'm not clear if she was shattered to find out the revelations that it contained.
00:12:45
Speaker
or if she already knew about them and was shattered by the fact that they had been made public. I mean I'm assuming the latter, in part because one of the things we discovered from the Seville affair is that because we know Jimmy Seville was given awards by the British government for his great service towards children and corpses and we now know from cabinet notes that
00:13:10
Speaker
People had kind of brought up this some unsavory rumours going on about this Jimmy Savile person and government at that time were going well the public doesn't know this so they don't need to be concerned about these rumours going around. So I'm assuming in this case Thatcher wasn't shocked by what she found in the book, she was shocked by the idea that British people would find out what she already knew.
00:13:36
Speaker
So yes, they launched all sorts of efforts to try and stop it from getting out. They also launched a court case in Australia to try and stop it from getting published in Australia. And they lost. There's this trial in the New South Wales Supreme Court.
00:13:52
Speaker
A trial which, incidentally, it's known, it's the trial that popularised the phrase being economical with the truth. It's a phrase that had existed before then, but that's what sort of brought it into the popular consciousness when the Thatcher's cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong,
00:14:08
Speaker
was being questioned by the Australian lawyer, future Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. And Turnbull was basically, you know, basically saying this guy, okay, so you lied about this, didn't you? And this guy was just twisting himself into all sorts of rhetorical knots to say, well, doesn't that actually lie? It wasn't really, it didn't lie as such and sort of, you know, what would you count as a lie? What's a lie and what isn't? And so on and so forth. And he basically, it was just more sort of being economical with the truth and that phrase stuck.
00:14:35
Speaker
Apparently, during the trial, Turnbull suggested to the British government that as a compromise measure, he said, why don't you set up some sort of system like the US has where agents like CIA agents who have retired and want to publish a book about their stuff can go and seek permission and be taught, okay, yes, you're allowed to
00:14:57
Speaker
talk about this but presumably with some conditions. So the CIA system, and I believe it also applies to books written by other agencies like the NSA and the FBI, is that you typically produce a manuscript and then it goes to say Langley, if it's the CIA, and then they go through with their black pen and go, yep, we can talk about this but not that, not that, not that, not that, not that. They
00:15:23
Speaker
And then you can go through and you can then edit your volume to get around the, can't name this particular person, can't use these particular dates, or go, well actually, most of the document came back with black marker on it, so I guess I'm not writing this book. But there is a system for going, look, some of this information has been declassified, so you can talk about that.
00:15:44
Speaker
Some of this information remains classified, but you can talk about it in kind of loose terms and some of the stuff the public never is allowed to know about under the current FOIA system. So you can write about this in 12 years time, but not just now.
00:16:01
Speaker
Yeah, so, and he sort of said, you know, you could do this, you'll look good, your sort of freedom of speech credentials will look good. Apparently he said, you know, that he would, if they went for this, Turnbull would talk about what a great guy Sir Robert Armstrong was and how good he'd been. But I think Thatcher took it back to the government and there's a whole thing where someone used the phrase
00:16:22
Speaker
but we're Greeks, especially when they're wearing gifts and suggesting that there could be issues with this that could be worse than the good press for them. Or for whatever reason, they decided not. I think from memory, the problem was the British government was going, but look, we need to be able to claw back information of need be. So we have a proactive release system, and then we go on the eve of publication. Actually, no, no, don't talk about this thing.
00:16:51
Speaker
They've actually already given permission, so it's going to go out there, and they go, no, it's just better that we just never give them permission for these things. And yes, they were very concerned that they wouldn't be able to control narratives about particular events.
00:17:08
Speaker
But at any rate, the UK government did not go for this particular compromise. They carried on with the trial and they lost. So it was published in Australia and the US in 1987. It was finally cleared for sale in England in 1988. And there was a review from the law lords. Sounds like a bunch of Doctor Who villains, but not quite.
00:17:33
Speaker
no no actually i'm trying to think the other the oh what was the comic strip that was actually a series of photos and had a doom related character not doom watch
00:17:45
Speaker
Doomlord? Was it Doomlord? I don't know. Now, it used to be in The Eagle, I believe. Great, great series of comic books. He was sent to the Earth to judge humanity. And the first Doomlord dooms humanity to death, but he gets defeated and the second Doomlord is sent and he discovers there's a reason to keep the human race alive. Ends up being a very convoluted kind of continuity.
00:18:10
Speaker
Anyway, the Law Lords sound like they are the people who rule the Doom Lord's planet. Something like that. But actually, there were people who reviewed this book and decided that it could be published now. It was sort of suggested that they said, it's okay because he hasn't revealed any secrets, but that's not quite
00:18:28
Speaker
Yeah, so their reasoning was this. The book had been published overseas, so by the time the book was cleared to be published in the United Kingdom, there were copies in Australasia, there were copies in North America, there were copies in the EU, there were copies in part of the United Kingdom, that didn't happen to be England, and the law lords were going, well look,
00:18:53
Speaker
nothing in the book is secret anymore because it's been revealed. It's public information now. So technically there are no secrets in the book which are going to be revealed by publication in England. And so some people took that as the law lords going, oh you know, everything that Wright wrote about are things that were already declassified. And their argument was, well actually they've kind of been de facto declassified by being written about.
00:19:23
Speaker
you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Now, more woes for the government. At the time, the Observer and the Guardian newspapers both published some of the allegations from Spycatcher, and the government won an injunction against them, restraining them from publishing any more material about what was in Spycatcher. The papers eventually took the government to the European Court of Human Rights, claimed their freedom of speech had been violated, and it took a while, took until 1991,
00:19:52
Speaker
But the judges eventually ruled that the government had violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is freedom of expression, and they ruled that the government should pay £100,000 to the two newspapers.
00:20:05
Speaker
Now, of course, because of Brexit now, the British government would never do such a thing. But ironically, the European Convention on Human Rights was written by the British government. So they were kind of hoist by their own patat. They were a little bit. So yeah, I mean, the only win the government had, if you could even call it that, was simply, as you said before, that right couldn't receive any royalties for sales of his book in the UK.
00:20:28
Speaker
So they stiffed him on his pension, and they stiffed him on the royalties. But as we say, he died a millionaire, so he made plenty of money out of it overseas. So it was all a bit of a cock up, almost a bit of a Streisand factor, long before the Streisand effect had been coined.
00:20:49
Speaker
And so there was obviously a lot of conspiratorial activity around talking about this and trying to get it squashed to begin with. We've talked a lot about the book, about the efforts to stop the book from getting out and failing and so on, but we should probably talk about what was actually in the book.
MI5 Revelations and Public Reactions
00:21:06
Speaker
Yes, and here's a kind of interesting aspect of why the British government were wrong
00:21:12
Speaker
not to have a disclosure mechanism. Because as we're going to say, some of the claims in Spycatcher either aren't true
00:21:23
Speaker
or could never be verified. And if the British government had engaged in a system where they'd asked right to please submit the manuscript to us, we will verify and tell you what you can and can't say, some of the more salacious claims that turn out to be not verifiable at all may never have actually ever made print.
00:21:43
Speaker
But because the British government went, no, no, no, no, no, no, Wright got to publish and basically say whatever he liked. And because of the British government's reaction to Spy Catcher, people thought that every claim in Spy Catcher was going to be true, because otherwise, why would the British government spend so much effort to keep it from the people?
00:22:06
Speaker
Yes, and I mean, it almost seems a little bit quaint in this day and age, perhaps, reading about the shocking allegations in here. I don't know that if you were to publish a book like this today and say this is the sort of thing an intelligence agency people got up to, people would probably go, eh, it sounds like the sort of thing they do. But back in the early 1980s, basically nothing was known about what these agencies got up to.
00:22:33
Speaker
So when he talked about how MI5, quote, bugged and burgled its way across London, eyebrows were raised. They were, monocles were part. They sure did. So yeah, they talked about, one of the big claims was that MI5, or former MI5 Director General Sir Roger Hollis,
00:22:54
Speaker
was a Russian mole. This is something that Peter Wright believed to be true. He apparently during his time at MI5 had invested, was convinced there was Russian moles there and seemed to believe that Hollis was one. Now a review in 1974 apparently found no evidence of this.
00:23:11
Speaker
But Wright continued to believe it. And admittedly, one of the things which was interesting about the history of MI5 and MI6 was that because there were Russian agents operating in the British Secret Service establishment,
00:23:27
Speaker
Moles were being hidden by other moles because those moles were in charge of the investigation into those moles because, oh, we found no evidence that X is working for the Russians. No evidence whatsoever, comrade. Did I say comrade? I meant, I meant, uh, old chum? Yes. Scons? Scons and tea? Scons and tea anyone?
00:23:51
Speaker
Yeah, so he talked about the fact that MI6 had a plot to assassinate President Nasser during the Suez Crisis. Lots of talk of bugging and eavesdropping and what have you, bugging high-level Commonwealth conferences, bugging embassies all over the place. Again, stuff that these days, if you say, oh, the British government was bugging and spying on everyone they could get their hands on in this sort of post-Snowden
00:24:16
Speaker
world, people would say, yeah, I'm sure they were, that's what these guys do, isn't it? But again, this was something that people, I guess, just assumed, all honourable men, they wouldn't be up to any rum doings, would they? No, no, even though the entire point of the intelligence agency is to, is basically by any means a necessary mantra.
00:24:41
Speaker
But he talks about how they made sure to keep everything secret, keep themselves unaccountable. He talks about how the agencies had an 11th commandment, which was, thou shalt not get caught. So no matter what you're doing, do whatever you want as long as you can get away with it.
00:24:59
Speaker
And maybe it was more this attitude, I guess, was perhaps the more shocking thing, if you thought that these were all fellows who were good, good, good British men doing good British things, and then they're up to dodgy dealings.
00:25:14
Speaker
Good British things like, say, taking over entire countries and stealing their natural resources. Yes! Good British things. Nothing more British than that, but in a dodgy, dodgy, underhanded dealings. That's not cricket. So there's an interesting book by Christopher Andrew called The Secret World. Christopher Andrew is yet another former senior MI5 member. He actually may have been director at one point. I can't quite remember his dossier.
00:25:38
Speaker
And the secret world is a history of intelligence agencies that we know of through history. So he starts with Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and then talks about how China did things, how the Italians did things up to the modern day. And he says there's a recurrent problem in almost every narrative about secret services, is that because of their devotion to being secretive, they never write anything down,
00:26:08
Speaker
they never know if the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing etc etc so they are always reinventing the wheel and that secrecy is so built into it that you might think that you're doing something really really noble not being realized that you've been manipulated into an ignoble end
00:26:31
Speaker
And then there's the Harold Wilson stuff. So this was one of the one of the key allegations that were made in Spike Hatcher. The MI5 plot against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, which we brought up last week, but was talked about in more depth back in Episode 359. Yes, as a bit of a recap, Wilson was a Labour Prime Minister and so of course was a great big lefty and not as popular with the more conservative intelligence agencies as other prime ministers might
00:27:01
Speaker
He'd been president of the Board of Trade in the late 40s. He'd been on trade missions to Russia. He was buddies with Soviet politicians, including Mr Molotov, the man whom cocktails are named after, because he was
00:27:17
Speaker
What's the Molotov cocktail thing? He was dropping bombs on Poland, which they called Molotov bread baskets. And so when the Polish started chucking petrol bombs back, they sort of called them Molotov cocktails, like we're giving Molotov the taste of his own medicine. You know, something like that.
00:27:33
Speaker
But anyway, in 1963, a KGB defector called Anatoly Golitsyn had claimed that Wilson was a KGB informer. And an agent of influence. An agent of great influence. And then Wilson, he became leader of that Labour party after the sudden death of Hugh Gatskill, his predecessor. And so Golitsyn claimed that Gatskill's death was an assassination designed to put the KGB's asset into power. Officially, his death was a sudden flare-up of lupus.
00:28:02
Speaker
What would House say? It's never lupus. It's always an assassination by a KGB agent. When it comes to the fact that was this actually true, it doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence for it, is there?
00:28:13
Speaker
No. One of the worries that people had at the time was that MI5, as you pointed out, was pretty much against anyone with a slightly left agenda. And people were going, it's quite convenient that we've got this defector who's suddenly come out and is making these outrageous claims about the sitting Prime Minister. A Prime Minister that MI5 didn't want to be in
00:28:41
Speaker
power. And then this person starts making claims that, you know, Gatskill just didn't die. He was assassinated. And people were going, this seems like maybe this is disinformation being put out by people who want to cast dispersions on a left-leaning prime minister by a right-leaning intelligence agency.
Debating Spycatcher's Credibility
00:29:04
Speaker
Yeah, so I believe an official MI5 investigation concluded that no, no, Harold Wilson was not a KGB agent, but there was still this faction within MI5 who thought that he was. And that's the faction that people thought continued to spy on the Prime Minister, despite MI5 claiming we are definitely not doing that.
00:29:26
Speaker
So apparently people plotted, this faction plotted with the CIA to try and bring him down. There had been apparently a plot by business leaders to bring him down in the late 60s. There's talk of a military coup in 1974. And supposedly in the lead up to the 1974 general election in the UK, MI5 was going to be leaking damaging information about Wilson and others to sympathetic journalists to sort of encourage the idea that Wilson was a security risk.
00:29:55
Speaker
and keep him out of power. So Peter Wright, in Spy Catcher, Peter Wright says that 30 MI5 agents were collaborating to get rid of Wilson, although he later retracted that claim, saying there was only one man. I don't know if people then asked, was that one man you, Peter? Yeah, are you the person who thought that? I'm assuming he had to kind of retract the claim because people would say, so Peter,
00:30:21
Speaker
Who are the other 29 men? Can you name some names? I mean, you seem to be very keen on revealing things. Who are the other 29 men, Peter? Yes, I mean, the actual veracity of a lot of this stuff is up for question. Actually, I saw in 1993, there was a review published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which is a CIA think tank, which said that the book included factual data, but was also filled with errors, exaggerations, bogus ideas and self inflation.
00:30:50
Speaker
which I thought was a fairly specific kind of movie. Once again, if the British government had simply had a kind of panel for assessing these claims, some of those exaggerations or self-inflations may never have made it to print. Peter Wright may not have self-inflated himself in public.
00:31:10
Speaker
Now, of course, the book came out in the 80s. The stuff it's talking about is from the 70s and earlier, going back to the 50s, I think. So the British, I believe the British policy is that after 30 years, things become declassified.
00:31:23
Speaker
Yes, although I think stuff from World War Two doesn't get declassified for about 70 years. So there are some war secrets which get classified for a really long time. So there are things that we will not know. There are things that happen at Bletchley Park we will never officially know about until at least, I think, 2028. But yeah, 30 years is the usual amount.
00:31:48
Speaker
Apparently, though, the government has been less than eager to share some of this stuff. I saw an article from 2021 talking about Tim Tate, who's a documentarian. He was trying to get access to files relating to Spycatcher, which should have been publicly available by then.
00:32:06
Speaker
and said that the officials he was dealing with just came up with all sorts of excuses about why they couldn't possibly make these available. To quote Mr Tate, it's like playing a game of whack-a-mole. One excuse pops up and you take the time and go through the process and say, no, that's not lawful, and then they change tack. It's public money that is paying for this obfuscation and delay, but it never faces any sanctions for failing to meet deadlines imposed by the law. So he was a little...
00:32:30
Speaker
he was a little put out about it but stuff has been coming out like I say last end of last year there was some of the stuff about Thatcher's reactions to things and then just just last episode we talked about how stuff had been declassified around essentially the fact that MI5 thought that Wilson was a spy probably incorrectly and Wilson thought that MI5 was spying on him probably quite correctly yeah on the OIA foyer stuff there's actually taken to be a big issue both in the UK and also in Aotearoa New Zealand
00:33:01
Speaker
in that we have official information access systems, but we don't really have a very good enforcement mechanism for when agencies fail to release information proactively or
00:33:16
Speaker
give lots of excuses as to why they're not releasing information they ought to. So in many cases the Ombudsman, both in the UK and here in Aotearoa New Zealand, will give a department or a minister a slap on the wrist and say, do better next time, but there's no kind of enforcement to
00:33:34
Speaker
force ministers or their departments to be better next time. And so it's one thing to have official information access systems, it's another thing to actually enforce them to ensure that governments have to release information
Public Trust and Future Episodes
00:33:50
Speaker
even if it is stuff which is embarrassing to them. And the thing about institutions like the government is that even if it's stuff from the 1970s, it still embarrasses the government of the day, even if it was the opposition that was in power at the time, because it's the government of the day that has to explain why the government of yesterday did the thing that they did, in such a way that they don't tarnish the reputation of former ministers.
00:34:18
Speaker
And so that is the story of Spycatcher, apart from the actual story of Spycatcher, which to know you'd have to read Spycatcher. Yeah, a bunch of interesting claims, and I guess, like we said, the main thing seemed to be just simply the revelation that these guys got up to dodgy stuff, that they did things that they really shouldn't have been allowed to do, but because they knew they could get away with it, they kept on doing it.
00:34:48
Speaker
And so even though some of the allegations turn out to actually probably not be true, the wider picture it paints of the intelligence agencies was not a flattering one.
00:35:04
Speaker
A movement that's going on in the UK in particular in the middle of the 20th century, so things like the Profomo Scandal slash affair, Spycatcher, and the realization that British people had kind of naively thought the state was looking after them and had their best interests at heart. And then things like the Profomo Scandal and Spycatcher were actually, no, sometimes they're just out for their
00:35:34
Speaker
their own good, and sometimes they're just acting on hunches. And this doesn't seem like a very good system. And so it reminds me of what actually led to the Etienne Regime in France collapsing and the French Revolution being started up, was a series of books detailing how the financial system and bribery in the French Royal Court worked, which made the bourgeoisie going, well, we were always told
00:36:04
Speaker
that the aristocracy was looking after us. And actually, the aristocracy is only looking after itself. And in France, that led to a glorious revolution. And in the UK, it's led to Brexit. Different strokes of different folks. Yes, I'm just at the moment playing through the game Steel Rising, which was a free PlayStation Plus game this month, which is a Souls-like game set in the French Revolution, only there are clockwork robots.
00:36:36
Speaker
Yeah, it didn't get well reviewed, but I'm quite enjoying it. It's not quite as hardcore as your usual Souls-like game. It was a bit tricky to begin with, but after a few upgrades, I'm finding it relatively easy, which is a nice change, quite frankly.
00:36:50
Speaker
I've played the demo of it, so I haven't bought the full game. That seems to be guessing spectacularly good reviews, to the point where I'm going, surely a Souls-like based upon Pinocchio can't work, and apparently people say no, it really works, and apparently the sequel is going to be all about Alice.
00:37:09
Speaker
Ah, I've heard what happens in the end, and it's a different theory story that's referenced there, but who knows? Maybe I'm getting my references wrong. There's apparently spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers if you have not played the game Lies of P and don't want to know about the post-credits cutscene. Stop listening for the next few seconds. Apparently it's Dorothy. You're quite right. It is the Wizard of Oz.
00:37:33
Speaker
Anyway, enough about computer games that I'm playing. I think it's time to end this episode. If for no other reason that one of us can get up and turn on the lights, because we started recording this as the sun was, we had not quite start to see it. And during the recording of this episode, it has gone down. And so where before we were, we could see each other quite clearly. Now we're lit only by the lights of our tablets held underneath our faces. So we look like we're both telling each other ghost stories.
00:38:00
Speaker
And maybe we are. Maybe we will in our bonus episode, which we're going to record as soon as we start recording this one. Well, I mean, we are going to talk about The Thing. We are. We're going to talk about an early adventure of Peter Wright's before he even joined MI5. Back when he was working in an Antarctic base and had some problem with some dogs. We have the story of Peter Wright versus The Thing. And a bit of new stuff. We'll talk about Foo Fighters and multiple senses of the word. And some other stuff.
00:38:30
Speaker
Now, including our current thoughts on the most recent season of The White Vault. Yes. We're going back to griping about narrative form podcasts. We are. So if you want to get in on any of that, listen to our bonus podcast. And if you want to be a patron of ours and therefore eligible to hear the bonus podcast, you have to now go to Betrayon.com because we're not hosted on Podbean anymore, so you can't use their patronage system. Go to Betrayon, look for the podcast as guide to the conspiracy. Sign yourself up.
00:38:59
Speaker
or don't. I mean if you want to slap yourself in the face with a fish you can do that as well but it'll be less productive than becoming a patron. I think so too. So I believe we're done with our tale of intrigue and drama and
00:39:15
Speaker
Boring legal proceedings. So until next time. Oh now I suppose with another update So you are back to China on Sunday on Sunday this week. We're recording on Monday night So right so less than a week and you're off and away. Yeah, and then it'll be back to Back to long distance record indeed so in a fortnight's time. We'll be doing our next episode and Josh I think it's time I think it's time for us to read a book in three parts
00:39:42
Speaker
I will try to read a book. I'll read the first part of the book. How about that? And then you read the second part of the book and then the third part of the book. Those are things that will happen at some point eventually. Yes, we're going to be looking at Michael Shermer's book on conspiracy theories, which I'm really quite interested to look into because of A, my personal history with Michael Shermer and B,
00:40:07
Speaker
He's quite a weird heterodox thinker, so I'm quite curious to see where he lands on conspiracy theories, given there are so many conspiracy theories about him and his ilk. Right, oh well. Something to look forward to. But until then, I think it's just down to me to say goodbye. And for me to say bye good. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself.
00:40:37
Speaker
Associate Professor, M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon.
00:41:11
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.